FILM
REVIEW Hard journeys toward a better
life Last Train Home by
Lixin Fan Reviewed by Benjamin A Shobert
American misperceptions about China are
almost too numerous to count. But if there is one
prevalent theme, it is China's ascent coupled to
America's descent. Most Americans never understood
the extraordinary poverty the majority of Chinese
live in even now. Americans who might have at one
time appreciated the challenges most Chinese face
on a daily basis now find their own economic pain
has led them to forget how much better they still
have it than their Chinese counterparts.
Today, the most common American
perceptions of China are those fostered by
constant reminders of its rise, panoramas of
Chinese cities with skyscrapers and construction
cranes abounding. Each picture captures the
growing unease at a future
China appears to have
that the US no longer believes it does. Similarly,
stories of China's growing military capabilities
leave Americans with the ominous feeling that
their own hegemony now might have a challenger. In
both cases, the point is not only how China is
changing, but in how each is a caricature of the
fuller and, in a very real sense, truer picture of
China.
This problem exists even for
American businesspeople who may never leave the
comfort of their Western hotels in Beijing or
Shanghai. As those who have widely traveled the
country know, once you leave China's cities, a
very different view of the country emerges. It is
less skyscrapers and more agriculture, fewer BMWs
and more horse-drawn wagons. For every
aspirational middle-class Chinese consumer
multinationals hope they can sell to are three
poor Chinese whose hope is not free Wi-Fi at
Starbucks, but a job fabricating metal in a
factory. Both are part of the real China, yet it
is only the much smaller aspirational middle
class, and the economic growth they have driven,
that American popular culture understands.
Lixin Fan's quietly powerful movie Last
Train Home challenges America's understanding
of China by eloquently capturing the once-a-year
migration of workers back to their home villages.
As the movie notes in the beginning, the 130
million migrant workers who leave every year
during the New Year holiday represent "the world's
biggest human migration". They cram their way on
to trains, their bodies straining under the heavy
loads of cheaply made plastic luggage burdened
with more than physical goods. This luggage
carries with it proof that the enormous sacrifices
they have made have been worth it.
The old
people in the documentary understand why this is
all necessary. They are under no illusions as to
why their children have left. As one woman says
about her life when she was younger, "Life was
hard then. We had holes in our clothes." The
little bit of money her daughter sends back helps
take care of her own needs, as well as those of
the son her daughter left behind. Everyone feels
the burden of this choice: The mother's hope that
her children's success will allow them one day to
be together in a house of their own is a weighty
burden Lixin Fan wordlessly captures. Similarly,
the awkwardness between mother and child,
separated for the whole year, is impossible to
turn your eyes away from.
For one couple's
teenage daughter, being left behind is not a
decision she understands. Her poverty is not acute
enough to appreciate why her parents have left her
behind; to her, the choice is not between being
poor and having her needs met. As she sees it, the
choice has something to do with them and, as a
consequence of this, something to do with her.
What she does not see now - her parents'
exhaustion working long hours in a factory doing
menial labor - is a reality that she will either
avoid because of their sacrifice, or encounter
herself if rebellion spins her out of her village
towards the very city life her parents now live
in. A friend reminds the daughter: "Your parents
left you so you can have a better life." Knowing
this as truth is one thing, feeling it is another.
Even as she tries to escape to the city,
her experience is not likely to be the same as her
parents'. Where they must find their way and send
money back to their family to take care of
children and elderly parents, initially she will
not have these same pressures. For her, the
geography of her journey may be the same, but the
excitement is not. She finds her way to the mall,
where she finds that her pay is enough to purchase
new clothes and get a Western hairstyle. She sees
the city as freedom and opportunity, not
responsibility and necessity. At least for now.
Even then, Last Train Home asks its
viewers the question, where exactly is home for
these families? Clearly, the gravitational pull
their villages still have on them, what drives
them back to their place of birth, is very real.
Most have loved ones, parents, siblings and
children, who have not yet moved to the city for
work. But can a place where you only lay your head
for a little over a week, once a year, truly be
called home? This pregnant question hangs in the
air, begging for an answer. Throughout the
documentary, the viewer is left only with a
profound and palpable dislocation these families
feel.
As the throngs of people surge
toward opening train doors, police shout through
bullhorns lest people be trampled. What exactly is
it that is driving these Chinese people into the
trains, if not the pull of home? As much as this
energy is being expended in order to get back
home, it is also being spent in an effort to
remind themselves why they do what they do, why
the sacrifice they make is worthwhile. One
passenger shares with a fellow rider that he has a
newborn son born several months ago that he has
never seen. Another chimes in immediately after
this that "it is for the children and grandparents
that we do this".
Are these migrants truly
home anywhere? Or, as Last Train Home seems
to suggest, is their sacrifice not only the long
hours and difficult conditions under which they
must work, but also that they will have to give up
calling anywhere home? Is this the price that must
be paid in order for the next generation in China
to have something and somewhere to call home?
Americans are so detached from this part
of the country's shared history that it bears
reminding that the closest experience the United
States went through was its westward expansion.
The sacrifices these pioneers made were just as
physically demanding, and in many cases subjected
them to even more potential for personal harm than
what today's Chinese migrants must endure.
Similarly, America's westward expansion many times
split up families, some never to be reunited
because of death.
As countries and
cultures go, the United States and China have many
differences. But in several important ways,
Americans should understand the extraordinary
sacrifices today's Chinese are willing to go
through to build a new life and a new place they
and their families can call home. After all, these
are the same sacrifices American families made
many, many years ago. America's pioneers then are
in a very real sense China's migrants today.
Where the West so easily finds faults in
what China does, in how its growth distorts the
global economy and challenges the tone and tenor
of globalization, the documentary Last Train
Home reminds us that China still has a long
way to go, and that its embrace of the modern day
is in many ways more challenging and full of risks
than what the United States of America had to face
as it grew.
Benjamin A Shobert
is the managing director of Rubicon Strategy
Group, a consulting firm specialized in strategy
analysis for companies looking to enter emerging
economies. He is the author of the upcoming book
Blame China and can be followed at CrossTheRubiconBlog.com.
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