Globe and Mail Review
Up the Yangtze
By RICK
GROEN
Up the Yangtze Directed and written by Yung Chang
Entire cities, towns and villages will be drowned. Two million relocated persons will lose their homes, their heritage and perhaps their livelihoods. But before that, before that marvel of human engineering - China's Three Gorges Dam - completes its legacy of human upheaval, there are vanishing sights to be seen. So luxury cruise ships are taking Western tourists on "farewell tours" up the Yangtze River, the better to witness the past even as it disappears into the future. And those ships, like most, can be viewed as microcosms. Look closely above and below their decks, as Conrad and Melville once did, and you'll find there a bounty of rich stories, a chronicle of turmoil and hope.
Such is the premise of Yung Chang's always illuminating, often heart-rending, documentary. A Montreal filmmaker with ancestral ties to China, he travels back to the homeland and, among other discoveries there, his probing camera finds a teenage girl. Yu Shui lives with her peasant family in a crude shack by the river's edge, near the "ghost city" of Fengdu. The city is doomed by the dam; so, imminently, is the shack. The girl longs to go to high school, then university, but that's an impossible dream - the family barely has money for food. She must be packed off to work, a decision that dismays not just her but also her illiterate parents. On the day of departure, her stooped mother cries through the cracks of a heart that she can't harden, and says with a quiet fatalism, "If we had a choice, how could we do this to you?" Yu Shui lifts the small plastic bag that is her only suitcase, and walks off into the new China.
That's just one of the many intense moments Chang captures here. His access is impressive, from the upper layers of cheery officialdom down through the hierarchy of officialdom's victims, and he's taken full advantage. Inside China, the so-called "Sixth Generation" directors have tiptoed around the censors to make some brilliantly incisive documentaries, humanistic studies like Jiang Yue's ironically titled This Happy Life.
Clearly, Chang is aware of this emerging tradition; more surprisingly, given his outsider status, he has succeeded in duplicating it, in reaching out to the real people behind the red tape.
On to the cruise ship, then, laden with metaphoric value that the film keenly exploits. Because that's where Yu Shui ends up - deep in the galley washing dishes, the ones dirtied by tourists who, far above, are gliding upriver and bidding a naive farewell to the very shack her parents occupy. Homesick, weepy, teased by co-workers for her dark skin and rural manners, Yu Shui resigns herself to the boot-camp life of a crew member. Drill sergeants rename her Cindy and bark out English lessons, complete with stern admonitions about how to treat passengers: "Don't call anybody old, pale or fat."
Meanwhile, in the ship's lounge, the old and the pale and the fat are listening to a cocktail pianist crooning out this fetching ditty: "It's so easy/ To learn Chinesey."
The upstairs/downstairs gap yawns and, keeping his narration to a minimum, Chang lets the contrast speak poignantly for itself.
Compelling too is the tale of another teenage worker on board - a cocky kid from a more affluent family, already a capitalist smoothie eager to squeeze out of the market economy every American dollar he can. From the departing tourists, the tips flow generously to him, as does this imperialist compliment: "I congratulate you. You were less obtrusive than I thought you'd be." The boy smiles, bows, and later, with a wink, flashes his cash to the camera.
Elsewhere, Chang occasionally loses his hold on the material, only because there's so much to grasp. You sense he has chanced upon a thousand stories on the river, and his attempts to wedge in their loose-leaf pages - an elderly woman about to be evicted, an ex-coolie who made good, an angry shopkeeper railing against state corruption, a village of protesters assembled in a pointless march - sometimes makes the narrative seem simultaneously too compressed and a bit scattered.
But whenever the focus switches back to Yu Shui's saga, the film quickly regains its affecting resolve. No more so than in the long, lingering shot of her peasant father who, as the water level rises, is carting off what's left of his home, bearing the load on his back, trudging step by weary step up the steep incline of the riverbank. In mid-climb, the man pauses and, in that frozen instant, belongs both to tomorrow's uncertain world and to yesterday's harsh myth - he's modern China and he's Sisyphus.