Out of paddles
‘Up the Yangtze’ is a melancholy take on the personal upheavals caused by China’s massive river dam project
05/15/2008
Yung Chang’s documentary “Up the Yangtze,” which premiered at Sundance this year and screens this weekend in Pasadena, takes us on a poignant journey on one of many farewell tours for the river itself; tours staged mostly for Americans and European who wish to see the riverside landscape before it is submerged.
In 2002, Chang joined his parents and his grandfather on one of these farewell cruises. A Canadian of Chinese descent, Chang speaks Chinese and remembers hearing his grandfather talking about “old” China. Struck by the historical importance of the changes — that one of the world’s oldest cultures is now not only changing physically but also emerging as a modern society and global economic and military power — he decided to make his own farewell project about the Yangtze.
For the geographically challenged, the Yangtze is the third longest river in the world and the longest in Asia. It has, at times, served as the dividing line between North and South China and currently has two dams, including the Three Gorges Dam, with many more planned over the next several years.
The Three Gorges Dam project began in 1994 and isn’t expected to be finished until 2011. The benefits of the project will be control of periodic flooding and reduction of air pollution via the replacement of coal use with production of electricity from the water. However, progress has a high price: The rising waters consume houses, villages and towns along the banks of the river, displacing more than two million people.
Just as people were forced to flee, so too did animals. The 2006 declaration of the baiji, the Yangtze River freshwater dolphin, as functionally extinct was one of the environmental effects of this project, and many more animals are threatened by continuing dam construction.
Yet the dam building moves on without environmental impact reports clogging up the process of completing the project on schedule, a monument to China’s move toward a greener future.
Chang isn’t concerned so much with the environmental paradox here as he is with the sometimes surreal human dramas played out on the farewell river cruises.
Between May and December of 2006, Chang shot his film, building a drama of opportunity and loss. His stories focusing on the displaced and those displacing them — the dispossessed finding opportunity in an industry catering to foreigners, and foreigners who are a bit disappointed that the “old” China has already disappeared, but are there nonetheless to take a last look at what for countless centuries has been the landscape of the Yangtze.
Of the many people he met on the tours, Chang chose two: Yu Shui, re-christened Cindy, who once lived along the river and now works on the riverboats, and Chen Bo Yu (or, just as Western-friendly, Jerry).
In sharp contrast to Cindy’s situation, Jerry is the spoiled only child of a middle-class family. As one of many “little emperors” created under the Chinese government’s one-child-only policy, he has a hard time adjusting to being a servant among privileged Western clients.
Cindy, on the other hand, is the eldest of three children from an impoverished peasant family who lived in a shack near the edge of the river. Unlike Jerry’s family, Cindy’s parents and siblings barely get by. In order to have a son, her mother and father paid fines to the government for having more than one child.
She wants to go to college, but where will the money come from? To pay the bills from her only brother’s illness, Cindy works on the tour boat as a dishwasher.
In this thoughtful documentary, the river is slow, but the force of human decisions on humble people moves swiftly and just as inexorably. Along with Cindy and her kin, thousands of faceless others move, some resisting, and still others being forced out.
Chang’s film isn’t judgmental, but it is melancholy, musing about the changes and the human dramas that result from the creation of the dam.
By focusing on these two characters, we see elusive opportunities and uncertain futures for both these disparate people — their problems transcending class.
Yung Chang will be flying in from a film festival in Warsaw to be at the Laemmle Pasadena Playhouse 7 on Saturday for a personal appearance in conjunction with the screening of his documentary, which opens there on Friday. On Saturday, Chang will make a special appearance before the 5 p.m. show, stay for a question and answer session, and then speak again briefly before the 7 p.m. show.
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