The Perils of Progress

The Perils of Progress

Review: Last Train Home

IN RECENT years a number of films have dealt with the transformation of China from a rural to an urban industrial country. Lixin Fan’s brilliant and harrowing documentary, Last Train Home, is one of what we can only hope will be a wave of films by Chinese filmmakers about the human costs of China’s breakneck transition. Lixin’s film builds on the power and approach of Yung Chan’s strikingly composed 2007 documentary Up the Yangtze, which depicts how the Three Gorges Dam—the biggest hydroelectric dam in history—altered life in modern China.

Lixin Fan’s subject is the displacement wrought by the shift of population from rural China to its booming, signage-glutted, polluted, industrial cities in the South. The film achieves immediacy of feeling by focusing on a single family, which is part of the annual migration of 130 million people returning to their rural home villages for the New Year’s holiday—the largest annual migration on earth.

Last Train Home opens with Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin—an uneducated married couple that works exhaustingly long hours in an urban garment factory (their life is all work)—desperately seeking to secure highly prized train tickets to get home. The station is in chaos; the logistics of shifting so many people in a short time are near impossible. Lixin’s camera shifts from stunningly beautiful high overheads that depict a sea of people carrying brightly colored umbrellas to handheld camera ground-level shots capturing with great emotional effect people crying, shoving, and becoming enraged at the police and army who try and fail to keep order amidst the confusion.

However, the train trip back home is not the center of the film. It has been sixteen years since Zhang and Chen left their two children—a sixteen-year-old daughter Qin and her younger brother—behind with Chen’s mother. The young and the old are now the primary inhabitants of the villages, and the parents only see their children a few days a year. The parents’ goal is to make enough money to pay for the children’s education, so they may have a better alternative to the oppressive lives the mother and father have endured. The parents are self-sacrificing, but the years away have undermined their role with their children, who look to their grandmother and dead grandfather as parental figures.

It’s especially true for their lively, rebellious daughter, who feels only resentment toward them and sees her father and mother as strangers to whom she has no connection. They in turn are uneasy and unable to communicate with her, constantly badgering her about school without being able to offer her any help, getting into angry arguments, or barely speaking at all. Qin dreams of another life and sees living in the village as hell.

Lixin himself, however, does not depict village life as nearly as hellish as life in the sweatshops and impossibly crowded rooming houses of the urban manufacturing districts. Conditions in the village are not ideal, but the grandparents and the children in their care are portrayed as living rather well in comparison with the unhealthy and enormously stressful lives of the urban migrants. Remittances from the parents’ meager earnings make rural life easier no doubt, but so do policies intended to improve rural life and slow the pace of urbanization. Over the past thirty or more years, China’s agricultural and rural policy has evolved away from strict central planning and taxation of agriculture to more reliance on markets and agricultural subsidies. In response to sporadic rural protest and political unrest, the party and the government are attempting to boost lagging rural incomes and increase agricultural productivity. Unfortunately, as Lixin shows, these improvements do not address the boredom and isolation that young people in the villages experience. It’s the freedom and the glitter of the urban world that beguiles Quin and finally moves her to drop out of school.

Lixin cuts back and forth between the parents and Quin—two disparate kinds of lives adhering to different sets of values. When Quin leaves for a job in an urban jean factory, she lives in the dorms, visits a hairdresser in a mall, and begins to adjust to urban life. The most dramatic scene in the film occurs after Qin’s parents have succeeded in bringing her home for the New Year’s holiday. She gets into a heated argument with her father that leads her to utter the Chinese equivalent of “fuck.” Enraged by her disrespect, he hits her and she strikes back. In the middle of the argument, Qin breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera, declaring, “You want to film the real me? This is the real me.” The traditional Chinese notion of filial piety and family has been shattered here, and the parents give up for good trying to shape Qin’s life. She returns to work in the city, a world of discos, strippers, giant television screens, bars—modernization at its sleaziest.

There are no happy endings in Last Train Home; the mother returns to the village feeling that she must take care of her son, and the silent, depressed father, who has lost all his authority, returns to the factory alone. And though the film is filled with long shots of a serenely striking landscape of snowcapped mountains, pools of water, mist, and terraced fields, Lixin shows that living in the countryside means resignation to a life of immobility and unremitting physical labor.

Lixin Fan has put a painful human face on the consequences of migration and industrialization. More than just shooting a beautiful film, he has found a family that embodies what millions of rural Chinese are experiencing in the rush of modernization and economic growth.

Leonard Quart is in the process of co-authoring a fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945, and is a contributing editor of Cineaste. William Kornblum, a member of the Dissent editorial board, is a professor in the Doctoral Sociology Program, The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Homepage image: Beijing West Railway Station (Charlie Fong/Wikimedia Commons/2009)