Farewell China (Clara Law, 1990)
Went into this with the assumption that I was watching something akin to Jia Zhangke, Ang Lee or Edward Yang. Oh how wrong I was. Oh but how thrilled I am!
The Immigrant experience is often chronicled as one of homesickness, placelessness, navigating violence within and without due to the startling incompatibility of cultures and more importantly between memories and aspirations. No matter how eager or resistant the immigrant, they are forever embroiled within a story of compromise.
Hung and Nansen dream of a life of plenty away from the imposed austerity under communist China. One might say, as the officer at the US consulate did, even their child is but an instrument for their escape. But soon Hung and Nansen realise that there was never an escape, only choices.
Law’s depiction of America as a sexually depraved landscape sure does come as a shock. There’s the squalor and racial tensions — the latter is handled with such sensitivity — but mostly because the vehicle for this depravity is a 15 year old Chinese-American Jane (a buoyant Hayley Man performance) who is forced into a life of prostitution. And, rather than whine and wilt, Jane claims to savour the freedom! How else to parse the failures of the state, if not through delusions of free will.
Nansen’s odyssey through suburban America is a journey of temptation and of lost virtue. For this is a land where kids can no longer claim a childhood; where the only way to rise above the squalor is to grift off of your fellow immigrants. Eventually, the grift becomes an end in and of itself for there is no point saving up for a future, because there is none. Through the camp melodrama of it all Law not only heightens this schizophrenic feeling within the immigrant experience but goes further to suggest that there might no longer be any such place we can call home. Heck, there is nothing left of the soul.
The final shot of the kid toddling in an alley back home is heartbreaking. Who was it all for? What have we left behind? And chasing what? Liberalisation may have opened the economies of the world, but the borders were never porous. Our future, our dreams are landlocked in a sinking earth. Landless and peopleless, we’re all simply particles suspended in constant Brownian motion.
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(I am reminded of the second half of Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gam where Kajol is reluctant to assimilate while everyone around her is busy turning into a model minority. அ never fails to tsk-tsk me when I am swept away by the scene with the kid singing the national anthem. I’m no patriot, but is this scene not the most heightened expression of landlessness? But where Johar’s film looks back to tradition and familial approval as a resolution, Law is determined to cut off any prospect of retreat. Once through the looking glass, there’s no going back.)