Blind Mountain

I watched a movie called Blind Mountain the other day. The movie follows a girl who recently graduated from college and is tricked and ultimately forced into a situation where she's sold to a family in the country to marry their son. The movie takes place in the 90s and apparently this practice of being sold into families isn't uncommon at all. The kidnapping thing is another dimension to the story, but I know that many of my students here know of women in their mother's generation being sold into families as wives - whether to earn money for their family or as some type of exchange between families. So their parents' generation - since my students are pretty much my age, that means my generation. Crazy to put that into perspective.

Although the movie was set in China, it was filmed with the help of foreign donors and has had its own bouts with censorship. The film was pretty critical of China - I'm surprised I even found the DVD here. What was most interesting to me was not so much the story, but the areas that the director chose to emphasize. There were certain prolonged shots for certain scenes that you wouldn't think twice about if they didn't receive the time they did in the movie. And after living in China for a little while and understanding the social dynamics a little better, I could definitely see the significance of these scenes.

A theme that comes to mind is money. There are so many times when the girl who is kidnapped, Bai, I think was her name, was constantly denied basic human rights from officials and other citizens just because she didn't have money. Everyone knows that you can't get medical attention here in China unless you have money up front. It chilled me to see a scene where the doctor watched her on waiting room table as her wrists bleed, demanding money. The scene was well crafted and everything, but what got me was basically how much that scene has been repeated to me in my conversations with Chinese people. This is how the institution is here and everyone knows that sad truth. Perhaps it would be more understandable if China had another political system, but indeed, it is supposed to be the communist, People's Republic of China. The coldness in which the family treated the kidnapped girl (even though she constantly told them she was kidnapped) was appalling as well - and we see this in Chinese society so often. It's a survivalist mentality where no one else can be trusted in what they say or do, unless they're family (and even then, not always).

And the concept of Face. It's peppered everywhere in this movie and you can see it manifest itself in the most destructive ways. The idea of saving face was what caused the girl to be kidnapped and sold in the first place, so that the son in the family wouldn't have to face a life of solitude and inability to pass on his name; the concept of face that contributed to her poor treatment in the home; and the concept of face was what pitted everyone against her and allowed for such cruelties to happen. No one wanted her to embarrass the family, so they imposed inhumane actions on her. This movie just illuminates how debilitating this social construct can be.

The critiques of this movie reminds me of something that happened when my politics professor was here. He was talking to a tour guide about the UPS course in "nationalism" and used some Chinese word for it - but apparently it was a word that people understood but no one ever heard. The tour guide corrected him and said that in China, they only use the word "patriotism." Maybe this was lost in translation somewhere, and my analysis of this may not be totally right...but I think that describing China as patriotic vs. nationalistic is right on target. I often wonder how China can boast of its country's government and its whole communal society thing when what I see is not what is preached. The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that patriotism is the notion of upholding and priding your state, government, and the country as a construct. Nationalism, however, is the notion of priding your state and its people. I've always felt that there was something so segmented and isolating about Chinese nationalism - but I think the answer is that what exists in China is not nationalism at all, but blind patriotism.

And I wouldn't say all communist states are this way. When I was in Vietnam, what I felt was much more cohesive than pure patriotism. I really think there was nationalism - there was so much more propaganda/developing policies for empowering the people instead of just the state. And I think that the policies Vietnam has been creating to reconcile the VN war diaspora groups (many of whom formerly reconciled with the French and were anti-communist), is a strong testament to that nationalism. Allowing people of Vietnamese descent to attain visas more easily and recruiting the population to come back to the country shows how much Vietnam prides its people, not only as those who share one country or one blood, but for those who share a common history. And that, is what I feel nationalism is.