Halfway through Yung Chang's 2007 documentary film, “Up the Yangtze”, a rural shopkeeper of Zhoa Jia, a remote village on the banks of River Yangtze in China, speaks about sacrifices: “There will always be people who need to make sacrifices. It is impossible to stop the building of the Three Gorges Dam because of my own needs. Sacrificing the little family for the big family!” Soon, when the Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest hydroelectric project - starts clogging the Yangtze, his village will be inundated and he will have to pack up and move, along with a million others who live along the Yangtze. He smiles at the camera with pride.
The camera lingers on to his face for a while, waiting for him to tell what this sacrifice personally means to him. He takes his water bottle and drinks from it as though to escape the camera's prying eyes. He shifts in his chair uneasily. His lips twists, his face cringes and finally he cracks up, “It is hard being human, but being a common man in China is even more difficult.” Roughly two million people were forced to sacrifice their livelihoods and move out of their residences for the Three Gorges project. In this powerful and poignant documentary, Chinese-Canadian Director Yung Chang explores the murky realities of development and displacement and the treacherous moral grounds under which it operates.
The movie follows the lives of two teenagers, each from a different stratum of Chinese society, who are recruited by a cruise-liner plying the Yangtze from Chongqing to the Three Gorges. Jerry Bo Yu Chen is a happy-go-lucky high school graduate from the city of Chongqing. Handsome, ambitious and a product of the strict single-child regime, he is the quintessential kid of Urban China. In sharp contrast to him is Cindy Yu Shui, a reticent homely girl from the rural town of Fengdu. Cindy has finished middle school and wants to complete her education. But she is forced to join the cruise-liner because her parents cannot afford to send her to school.
Cindy's father is a farmer living out of a small plot of unclaimed land in the bank of Yangtze. He looks scraggy and underfed; with prominent cheek bones, caved in eyes and and incommensurately big head he could be a Chinese caricature from Tin Tin comics. He plants vegetables around his thatched roof hut and sells them in the local market. He earns just enough to feed his wife and three children. And after the river floods his area, he would have to give up agriculture and take up more taxing quarry works in New Fengdu. If he were to send Cindy to high school, he would not have any money left to feed the family. Cindy doesn't hide her disappointment. She curses her parents and calls her mother selfish. We see the peace of the little family being ripped apart. The camera follows them, like in a reality show, through their little shanty as they fight, cry, huddle and eventually reconcile. The scene is so stark and so heart-rending that we wonder whether this is real or a staged drama.
Completely in odds with Cindy are Jerry and the cruise-liner. Jerry, being the only child of urban middle class parents, is too rich and self-centred to be bothered at all by the Three Gorges project. The cruise-liner on the other hand is the result of the Three Gorges dam. It arranges “Farewell Trips” to the Three Gorges for foreign tourists, specifically designed to showcase the Chinese development story. Their guides take the tourists to the posh resettlement apartments getting built for the displaced. They emphasize the facilities available in those houses. More than once the guides point out the air-conditioners and television sets waiting to alleviate the displaced. Some tourists are impressed and some others are a little disturbed for having to be some kind of a moral judge while being on a holiday.
The unpainted brick house allotted to Cindy’s father doesn't have power supply, forget air-conditioners and television sets. It is bigger than his shanty. “But here we have to buy vegetables and water,” he rues. His new job at a quarry doesn't pay much. In the Three Gorges, one of the dam officials proudly points to the hydroelectric project and remarks that those very electric lines might possibly be powering his little home in Fengdu. Cindy's father hesitantly smiles and mumbles politely, “I doubt that.” Somehow he knows that he is not a part of the government's development plan. If at all it has only made life tougher for him. But he shows no regret. He doesn't feel cheated on having to ride against the tide. Some like him are content to be in the sidelines. Not many are.
Yung Chang’s documentary leaves us with a lot of questions; questions not just about contemporary China but also about the plight of the marginalized everywhere. It doesn’t offer any answers. Instead Yung Chang leaves with images that remain as a stark remainder of lives and times of an overlooked section of people. We see the ghost town of Fengdu being slowly gnawed away by the burgeoning river. The town recognizable only by its abandoned houses and buildings will slowly be submerged along with a way of life that cannot be accommodated with the new vision of china.
Yung Chang preserves this fleeting period of history for us to reflect upon. Therein lies his movie’s significance.
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