In search of a better life…

I’ve been to Chongqing about seven times. It’s the port city in China where all the tourist boats congregate before and after they ‘do’ the Three Gorges. Chongqing is the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet. Its population is already bigger than that of Peru or Iraq, with half a million more arriving every year in search of a better life.

I’ve only been there in winter when it’s a city of dire cold and fog. Or bad smog. I think there is a bad inversion layer over the place even though it sprawls out over steep hills. It’s the first ritzy city that I encountered in China, after the rural intimacy of Yunnan province. Chongqing is full of skyscrapers and department stores, and of huge billboards flogging French cosmetics. I got a shock when I first went there. In Moijiang where I’d come from, I’d been able to buy a Chinese flag and some left over Red Army gear in modest little shops and not much other merchandise. This was in 1999 though and China has rushed ahead since then in its lurch towards modernisation.

Chinese Canadian film-maker Yung Chang has made a film about this area of the world. And this theme. Called Up The Yangste, he began with the idea of “exploring the culture of tourism and the tourism of culture” on the Yangste river tourist boats before figuring out that the story he was telling was really about contemporary China. I’ve been on one of those tourist boats in non-tourist season. One year I was there, we had an evening tour of the cold old river, mists swirling around and the lights of the city off in the distance. The city actually reminds me of a fabled Tolkein-style fantasy but maybe that’s another story. The evening river tour was pretty dismal. It was about everything that is wrong with organised tourism; artificial jokes, bad music, reality out of sync with promise. But I had no expectations that it would be good and wasn’t paying the 200 or 300 yuan fee. Cynical in the extreme.

Yung Chang’s film is not cynical. It’s a documentary made great by the real life characters in the film. While it starts with the very impersonal fortress like lochs which the Yangste boats must pass through, the bulk of the story is intimate. It tracks the experiences of two teenagers who leave school to begin work on the tourist boat. This is absolutely compelling. Yu Shui is the daughter of a very poor family who squat on the edges of the soon-to-be-flooded Yangste growing corn illegally. They are minority people; the lowest of the low in this society. Yu Shui would like to stay at school but they are too poor; she must make a sacrifice for the possibility of one of hers siblings attending high school in the future. Her grief at leaving and the unexpressed pain of her parents fills the screen; Yung Chang is discreet enough to avoid commentary at these specials moments in the film.

The other character we meet is ‘Jerry’, Chen Bo Yu, whose own words set him up for his fate in the film. “ I am successful because I am good looking and good at English,” he says gleefully at the beginning of the film. An only child, he knows he occupies centre-stage in his parent’s lives. I have not met many Jerrys in my times in China but I’ve met a lot of Yu Shui’s. Maybe it reflects where I’ve been – not in wealthy Beijing or Shanghai schools but in rural western China where circumstances are hard.

I loved the scenes of Yu Shui and her family. Her father carrying their huge wardrobe on his back up the newly made shoulder of the road. The road built with shovels, chisels and wheelbarrows, just as I have seen them building the great highway into Burma. The chiselled cheekbones of Yu Shui’s father and his gaunt worker’s body. The family visiting their daughter on the boat, her Dad still in the soiled clothes of a road worker shuffling into the tacky lounge where tourists are subjected to songs like “How Easy it is to Learn Chinese-sy.” This made me cringe, as did the scene where the mostly Western tourists are taken to inspect the new home of Chinese families whose previous homes have been submerged by the new dam. The Westerners make arch comments about the politics and the Chinese bat these away like slow-pitched balls. It’s painful for me to watch these scenes; it reminds me of many similar experiences in China and of just how hard it is to plough below the surface in another country and to really connect with the people and the issues. Even with the best will in the world.

Up the Yangste does just as the film-maker wanted – it is a real insight into many of the issues in modern China, seen through the very private lens of Yu Shui and other family and other ordinary people, some who cry with anger about what has happened to them. It’s real and raw; as opposed to the cheesy experiences that the Western tourists have as they are transported up one of the longest and most important rivers in the world. (Note that if this whets your appetite for reading about change in China, you can do no better than Peter Hessler’s River Town, an outstanding Westerner’s account of life in a town on the Yangste, or Mr China by Tim Clissold (about doing business in China or Simon Winchester’s great book about the Yangste itself, The River at the Centre of the World.