FOUR COMRADES, ONE ECHO
From Non-fiction To Fiction
From Cinema To Theater
From Collectivity Back To Individuality
FROM MOTHERS TO COMRADES
I was raised by my mother and her three sisters while my father has always been absent. They are mothers from different periods of my life. They all wanted to have daughters but they only had one chance because of the “one-child policy”. The four ended up with three sons and one daughter, me.
There has always been a piece of them in me.
The piece of tenderness comes from my oldest mother, who never scolded me. She was the shelter when I needed it. During my puberty, she found me and took me to her house after I ran away from home.
The piece of seriousness and anxiety comes from my second mother. She parented me when I moved to Shanghai alone for high school at age of 15. Unfortunately, we had a lot of fights during my time with her. It was not until many years later that I understood and her temper comes from her experiences of displacement, of always being an outsider in the big cities she moved to.
The piece of optimism comes from my third mother, who took care of me in the summers, when my mother went to visit my father. I would wake up from a nap in the afternoon, with pieces of sliced ice watermelon waiting for me. She spoiled me, putting me on the back of her bike seat, while my cousin, her son, had to run behind us.
The piece of fearlessness comes from my birth mother, the youngest sister among the four. She always spoke up and hardly bend. She has a personality that is rare in a society that always avoid confrontation.
When I was younger, I have always considered their harsh discipline towards me as a byproduct of the oppression they grew up with. I was convinced that they had passed their trauma of childhood poverty and being deprived of education during the Cultural Revolution on to me.
Filmmaking has become my way to involve them to rehabilitate and reflect on our bittersweet relationships. The process enabled me to discover how they, as women who grew up in the Mao era, negotiate with the oppressive and patriarchal social structure. They refused to carry the trauma with them. Instead, they survive with what couldn’t be taken, what remains, and thrive through their sisters’ solidarity.
Although the mothers' generation did not receive education in feminist theory and also faced ideological oppression, they still possessed their own sense of agency. They define their own way of resistance.
They are feminists of their time. They are more than mothers; they are feminist comrades for one another, and for me.
Can I speak of “feminism” as “feminisms”—plural, situated, and rooted in cultural, geographical and historical specificity without falling into essentialism? What can the previous moments of feminism in a socialist era bring us today?
Can they speak for themselves? Can I, in filmmaking “speak nearby” them, not “speak about” or “speak for” them, as filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha states in her film Reassemblage (1982): “I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby”? Can I position myself alongside them, engaging in a generational dialogue where listening becomes a form of care and storytelling a shared act of resistance?
Can I introduce a non-lineage and collective way of storytelling, within which the voices of the past could be heard in the present and also confront one another in their affinities and contradictions? How to activate their bodies as archives without reproducing the violence in the name of love?
What if mothers were more than mothers? What if they became sisters?
What if sisters were more than sisters? What if they became comrades?
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