FOUR COMRADES, ONE ECHO
From Non-fiction To Fiction
From Cinema To Theater
From Collectivity Back To Individuality
INTRODUCTION
In my research, I invited my "four mothers", my mother and her three sisters, who co-parented me at different stages of my life to reflect on their experiences growing up as Chinese women during the Mao’s era and navigating the post-reform capitalist period.
How did these women, united by sisterhood, navigate societal changes, political transitions, and shifting gender roles, while asserting their agency and resilience? What methods can I develop in and through cinema, to reread and rewrite their experiences of resistance in their time, while opening space for conversations across generations?
This publication presents my journey of exploring how to “speak nearby”, which was proposed by filmmaker and theorist Trin T Minh Ha, rather than “speak about,” staying close to my mothers without speaking on their behalf, in their place, or over them. Through non-linear and collective storytelling, we reflect on what past moments of feminism in a socialist era offer us today, examining how their bodies can be activated as archives without reproducing violence in the name of love, while allowing the voices of the past to resonate in the present, where they engage in dialogue through both affinities and contradictions.
My investigation began with a theme song of The White-Haired Girl, a play written in 1945 which was dedicated to the Communist Party, to me, the song embodies propaganda, but for my mothers, it is a symbol of their youth. I started to explore the complexity of what is political versus what is personal, and what propaganda can do—and, more importantly, what it cannot do in shaping personal memory.
Through this process, I came to see how Euro-centric feminism overlooks cultural and geographical differences, while imposing a linear notion of progress, and this is where my feminism began. In China, feminist discourse is often grouped under 'East Asian' feminism, a category that fails to represent my mothers’ generation or their region, the southeastern province of Sichuan. Can I talk about “feminism” as “feminisms,” without falling into essentialist views?
Though my mothers’ generation did not receive any education in feminist theory and faced ideological oppression, I came to realize that they retained a profound sense of agency, which not only helped them survive but also thrive in their lives. They refused to be defined by oppression. Rather than seeing them solely as mothers, I began to recognize them as feminist comrades.
In this publication, I will share the process of developing methods and methodology for collective storytelling, which empowers my mothers to speak as a unified whole, supporting each other as they do in their real lives.
They also take on the role of scriptwriters, imagining different versions of their lives, alternate encounters, opportunities, occupations, or even different families, while their sisterhood remains constant. Fiction provides them a safe space to express themselves, with their sense of self preserved in their solidarity. As they become these imagined versions, they embody the roles, not as professionals, but supported by one another. Their acting becomes a reenactment of their shared sisterhood, reflecting the strength and resilience they share.
The narrative also shifts from a collective perspective back to individual voices, as they take my invitations to speak and create by themselves, including singing, taking photography, and recording dreams , which all become part of a healing process for all of us, woven into the fabric of the research.
The storytelling extended beyond the medium of film, continuing into a potential documentary theater piece, where future audiences will have the opportunity to interact directly with the four creators, instead of watching a work of cinema through me. I'm also developing an artist book that gathers the artworks they created throughout this process, making their contributions more tangible and lasting for readers.
Please follow the structure of the wesite to get a sense of my process.
Four sisters, four comrades
VISUAL ABSTRACT
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