After the deluge

>> Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze examines
the tumult of a China in transition

by MATTHEW HAYS

Watching Up the Yangtze is one of those experiences that reinvigorates and restores your faith in the documentary film medium. Full of stunning images of contemporary China, it shows us the unsettling pace at which the nation’s cultures are shifting, and the manner in which the country’s newfound economic super-powerhouse status is bulldozing all other concerns.

Written and directed by Concordia film school grad Yung Chang, this NFB/EyeSteelFilm co-production takes us on a feature-length journey through the personal upheaval brought to one young woman’s family. Yu Shui lives along the Yangtze River with her poor family, but this is all about to change. The Three Gorges Dam—touted by Chinese authorities as symbolic of the nation’s burgeoning growth and new prosperity—has meant that the Yangtze is rising. Over two million people will have to be relocated, and Shui’s family is among them.

Oddly enough, Chang says his inspiration to make the movie came in 2002 when the Canadian-born son of Chinese immigrants visited China and took a boat cruise up the Yangtze. There, he saw the rather surreal tourist-meets-tour-guide culture of the boat line, which included full-costume photo-taking sessions and karaoke. “I came before the flooding had begun,” Chang recalls. “It was just beautiful. The sensation of being there, of seeing the landscape, and then having this surreal boat cruise, it made me think there was a film here for sure.”

Chang learned that the boat cruises were rapidly expanding, and that the tourist industry was something the Chinese government was busy fostering as another channel for economic growth. Young Chinese were being interviewed, hired and groomed to deal with swelling numbers of Western tourists. Chang felt he had his narrative thread, choosing to sit in on some interview sessions and then following a couple of the young Chinese through their new job training.

Definitely not the love boat

Amid the shots of encroaching water, we meet Shui, a delightful young girl who is not ready to be separated from her peasant family. Her overworked parents have clearly led a very simple life in an embankment hut, but they must relocate as their daughter heads off to her new cruise-line gig. Shui’s new job washing dishes and learning to be polite to Westerners isn’t a lot of fun. We see her break down at the sheer combined emotional stress of being away from the folks and the dreariness of her new life.

Never maudlin, Up the Yangtze is a perfect balance of personal impressions, gorgeous cinematography and frank interviews about what is happening to the Chinese people. Chang intersperses the proceedings with images of the tourists and one particularly hilarious sequence where the young Chinese are told what not to say to tourists. “Whatever you do,” they’re told sternly, “don’t compare America with Canada when talking to American tourists.”

There is certainly a good deal of condemnation in Up the Yangtze, but Chang says he simply did what many Chinese filmmakers are already doing: shot it under the radar. “You don’t get permission to do a film like this. The cruise ship was an access point. If anyone asked, we tended to make it seem like we were doing a promo video for them. But so many tourists now have video cameras, it’s easier to go by unnoticed.”

Shui’s plight is contrasted with that of another cruise-ship employee, Chen Bo Yu, who hails from a much wealthier family and who serves as a strong example of Little Emperor Syndrome—that as an only child (the national standard by law) he is quite spoiled and self-absorbed. That also means that taking on a job on board a cruise ship proves too subservient for the lad.

But arguably Chang’s greatest achievement is the subtlety in the filmmaking. There are no cheap shots at the tourists (“They are easy prey,” Chang notes), no slamming of any of the characters, not even the manager who trains the cruise-line employees. Instead, Up the Yangtze is a complex portrait of a nation and its people facing epic change in a very small amount of time.

“Being of Chinese descent helped me to make this film,” says Chang. “I was able to go back and look at China through Western eyes, but I was able to be invisible. If I’d been white, I think this would have been a very different film.”

Up the Yangtze screens at
Ex-Centris on Sunday, Oct. 14,
3:15 p.m. and Monday, Oct. 15,
7:20 p.m., as part of the
Festival du Nouveau CinÉma

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