Wall Street Journal: Long Journey Home - A New Year Story

originally posted at the Wall Street Journal:

by Sue Feng
February 11, 2010

With the Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, just around the corner, the trains along China’s 86,000 kilometers of tracks are once again packed with people from every corner of the country, heading home for the most important Chinese holiday.

During the transportation peak from Jan. 30 to March 10 — also dubbed the largest annual migration on earth — the National Development and Reform Commission estimates that a total of 2.54 billion trips will be taken, essentially a round-trip for every Chinese person. Trains are expected to take 210 million passengers, most of whom will be migrant workers from rural China, going home for their once-a-year reunion with their families.

Two such migrant workers, Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, a couple in their early 40s, are the subject of a documentary called “Last Train Home”, which won the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary at the end of last year.

The documentary, made by independent Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Fan Lixin, follows the Zhangs’ difficult journey (by train, boat and bus) during three Spring Festivals, from 2007 to 2009, to their home village in Sichuan Province, more than 1,900 kilometers away from their Guangzhou jobs. The Zhangs’ story reflects the bleak reality of China’s 150 million migrant workers. The couple came to work in Guangzhou’s factories 16 years ago, leaving their then-two-month-old daughter behind with her grandmother.

Over the years that the couple has worked long hours in a clothing factory to support the education of their daughter, Qin, and her younger brother, Yang, Qin has become estranged from her parents and more and more rebellious. She drops out of school in 2007 and also goes down to Guangzhou – joining her parents as a migrant worker herself.

The documentary reaches a narrative climax during the 2008 Spring Festival, when the Zhangs manage to bring their daughter back home and persuade her to go back to high school. The three of them are stranded in the Guangzhou Railway Station for five days with another 600,000 people due to the heavy snowstorm that swept most of southern China that year.

However, the parents’ effort end with an intense fight when the teenager, who had been working in a factory in Guangzhou making blue jeans for export for half a year, yells at her dad, vowing never to go back to school. And in the final part of the documentary, when the ripple of the global financial crisis in 2009 is felt in most of the factories in Guangdong province, the mother, Chen Suqin, makes a decision to go back home to take care of her son Yang, who has already shown signs of being tired of school. She leaves her husband in Guangzhou to make money for the family alone.

“A peasant’s child must study hard, otherwise you will end up like us”, Chen Suqin tells her son in their house, which is surrounded by terraced fields.

As the director of the documentary, Fan Lixin, a Wuhan native from an intellectual family, worked for China’s state media CCTV before migrating to Canada in 2006, and says it was his frequent travels to rural areas of China for CCTV that allowed him to witness the poverty there and the sharp contrasts between rural and urban life. He wanted to use this documentary to show respect to the migrant workers who, in his eyes, are “the very foundation of today’s prosperity”, yet “have been denied many basic social necessities.”

The documentary has been publicly screened over the past couple of months in Canada and the U.S., and was shown for small audiences in China during the 2009 Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival last December, though the release plan in mainland China has yet to be disclosed.

The documentary received around $1 million in funding from various financiers and broadcasters mainly in Canada and the U.S. and has been lauded as a high-quality, zeitgeist-capturing production overseas. But some observers in China have questioned Fan’s intention in filming such “unhappy things” in China.

Fan defended his purpose in focusing on the unglamorous topic of China’s huge migrant population, hoping the documentary could serve as “a bridge of understanding between the people living comfortably in the developed countries and the Chinese migrant workers who toil in factories to make the products for consumers around the world.”

As for the Zhangs, the mother several months ago returned to the factory because her husband can’t make enough money to sustain the family.

At this point, the two are not sure of the exact whereabouts of their daughter Qin.

But in a sign that their work at the sewing machines all day long is finally reaping some rewards, Fan wrote on his blog after seeing the couple in Guangzhou in December: “One nice thing the mom can’t wait to share with us is that Yang (little brother) ranked 1st in his class this year.”