FOUR COMRADES, ONE ECHO
From Non-fiction To Fiction
From Cinema To Theater
From Collectivity Back To Individuality
FROM CINEMA TO THEATER
Meanwhile, I was trying to understand how the theme song from the opera The White-Haired Girl, The North Wind Blows, had taken root in my memory. And what this song might have meant to my mothers.
The White-Haired Girl told the story of Xi’er, a young peasant girl whose father was driven to suicide after he couldn’t repay a ruthless landlord. The landlord took Xi’er as payment. After enduring torment, she escaped and hid in a mountain cave. According to legend, she couldn’t find salt to eat, so her hair turned completely white. People believed she was a madwoman and stayed away. Eventually, she was discovered and rescued by a communist soldier who she later married to.
Out of all the songs from the opera, the one the mothers remember most clearly and the one my fingers still remember how to play, is The North Wind Blows.
The lyrics of The North Wind Blows go like this:
“The north wind blows, the snowflakes fall,
The snowflakes fall and the New Year comes.
Father left home to dodge the debt,
Seven whole days,
And still no sign of him on New Year’s Eve.
The wind whips the snow outside the door,
The wind bangs the door open.
I wait for Father to come home,
So we can have a happy New Year together…
A happy New Year together…”
It describes a beautiful, hopeful moment before the tragedy. Xi’er was waiting for her father to come home so they could celebrate the Chinese New Year. She doesn’t yet know what’s coming. The melody is lovely, full of longing and light.
Most of my mothers first heard this song through the radio. It was during the Cultural Revolution, and the radio repeatedly played works that the Communist Party had designated as the "Eight Model Operas." The decade of the Cultural Revolution, from 1967 to 1977, coincided exactly with their youth. For my eldest mother, it was from ages 15 to 25; for my second and third mothers, the twin sisters, it was from 8 to 18; and for my birth mother, from 4 to 14. At the most critical age for education, they were instead told to “learn from the workers, farmers, and soldiers,” sent to the countryside to support the labor of farmers, and tasked with rehearsing and performing propaganda pieces like The White-Haired Girl.
But each of them remembered different parts of The White-Haired Girl. My eldest mother remembers the moment when Xi’er’s father finally came home for the New Year and gave her a two-foot red ribbon as a gift. My second mother recalls the names of all the characters and the humiliation of Xi’er being sold to the landlord. My third mother hardly remembers any of the plot but can still sing the song. My birth mother’s retelling emphasizes only Xi’er’s resistance, her escape, but she leaves out the part where a communist soldier saves her.
Same story. Same melody. But their memories each hold their own agency.
I began to wonder: what if we, as a group, tried to restage The White-Haired Girl in our own way?
In what ways do their bodies, as an archive, preserve memories? What is the real essence that has been saved?
Clearly, with my background in journalism, I had no idea how to rehearse such a theatrical work. So, I needed collaborators from other fields. Since they could all sing this song, I started with that. I sought out a vocal coach who could guide them, and in the end, a musician friend from Sichuan, Wen Luo, helped them with piano accompaniment:
( 3 mins 03 seconds )
The first part is sung in Mandarin, and the second part is recited in Sichuan dialect.
The first part is sung in Mandarin, and the second part is recited in Sichuan dialect.
It was around this time that I came across the concept of "documentary theatre" in my research, which described exactly the kind of "rehearsal" I had in mind.
Documentary theatre generally refers to a theatrical form that uses real "documents" as the material for performance. These documents can include archives, reports, interviews, photos, videos, literature, data, personal histories, and more. From these materials, suitable segments are extracted and developed, then integrated into a stage performance. These materials are edited, rearranged, and recontextualized to create a new text. Compared to traditional theatre, documentary theatre offers multiple perspectives, allowing events or issues to be presented authentically on stage. It combines “documentary film” and “theatrical play”.
The next phase of the experiment began to focus on theatrical methods of working:
• Choreography:
I collaborated with Zheng Yuanyuan, an artist and choreographer also from Sichuan, who speaks the same dialect as we do. She invited each of them to recall three iconic poses they associate with The White-Haired Girl, then practiced “melting” these poses with their bodies and connecting them together. We also experimented with basic choreography, exploring how to create space for themselves while offering support to one another.
( 10 mins 56 seconds )
• Theatre Workshop:
I invited another theatre practitioner from Sichuan, Hu YanTing, who also speaks the same dialect, to lead a theatre workshop with them. Based on their personal stories, they engaged in a reenactment-style performance.
• Hot Seat
I had them sit as their fictional characters and participate in interviews with the other three. They • had to aner questions s the characters theyHot Seating:
I had them sit as their fictional characters and participate in interviews with the other three. They had to answer questions as the characters they portrayed.
In one experiment, I tested the idea of letting them organize themselves for a performance.
Without any rehearsals or direction involving me, they performed The White-Haired Girl.
Rather than focusing on cinematic elements, the audience was more likely to be drawn to their performance itself. They have their own methods of self-organization and reconfiguration:
(26 seconds )
On the other hand, I was also seeking ways to contribute, or participate, exploring possibilities for collaboration from a different perspective.
I experimented with a synthesizer to create live music for their performances. If the piano was the instrument they had pushed me to learn, then the synthesizer became the first instrument I chose for myself. What I referred to as 'live scoring' wasn’t about creating harmony. Instead, it brought a sense of alienation:
(8 mins 50 seconds)
Even in front of the camera, I often felt less like a director and more like a fortunate audience, directly witnessing their brilliant performances. Theatre brings all of this to life, allowing the audience to experience their performance just as I did, making their stories feel vivid and specific. Many times during our shoots, they would express doubts, asking me, “Is this okay?” “Can you use this?” “Do I look bad? Fat? Old?” For them, theatre may offer the chance to receive real-time, direct feedback from the audience, not just my applause.
This is the direction our research will take next: we’ll continue rehearsing, hoping that one day, we can have a live performance.
In his essay, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami wrote about his method of working with non-professional actors. He spent time with the actors on non-shooting days, telling them stories. Over time, those stories became theirs. So when the cameras rolled, , when the actors needed to tell a story, they naturally told stories they had heard from the director. In that moment, the story belonged to them. In a similar way, the stories of each of my mothers have been implanted in my mind. They have shaped who I am. And now, I find myself doing the same thing.
It has become a fluid process of rereading and rewriting each other’s experiences. We became echoes of one another, until we could no longer tell where one voice ended and the other began.We became one.
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