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BY MIRIAM RINN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
By turns beautiful, sad, and frightening, the multi-award-winning documentary "Last Train Home" looks deeply at the human cost of China's great capitalist leap forward. All those factories churning out sneakers, toys, and T-shirts are manned by millions of workers who have traveled thousands of miles away from their rural homes to earn money to support the families they have left behind.
Once a year, during the Chinese New Year holidays, those millions of workers return home in the world‘s largest human migration. It's as if all of New York City decided to leave town by train on the same weekend. Just imagine what Penn Station would be like.
The scenes of thousands of people pressing forward to board trains while nervous police officers try to keep them in some kind of order, is truly scary to anyone who has ever been caught in a crowd. But Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan isn't interested in capturing only mob scenes. Each person in that crowd is desperate to get home to see children, parents, or a spouse he hasn't seen for a year or more. It's the story of the individuals that power China's extraordinary economic success and their sacrifices that Lixin wants to tell.
To do so, he introduces Zhang Changhua and his wife Chen Suqin. The couple has been working in the manufacturing center of Guangzhou for 17 years while their two children live with a grandmother far, far away. The factory where they sew jeans is right next to the tiny room where they wash and sleep, it seems; domestic life is so intertwined with work that toddlers are laid down to nap on sewing tables and on large stacks of fabric. Their life consists of work and sleep, and little else. If they have time off for themselves, we don't see it.At the beginning of the film, Chen asks her husband if he's bought their train tickets yet for the journey home, and he tells her that he's trying to get them at a reasonable price. Finally, he buys two at a much-inflated cost, and they manage to get on a train for the two-day trip to their home 2100 km away. The train is crammed full, with barely room to sit, much less sleep. When they finally arrive, their children greet them as if they are strangers, and to a great extent, they are. They've been home for only a few weeks in their children's lives, and their teenage daughter Qin makes her resentment clear, although she can't hide her pleasure at the gifts they bring.
Director Lixin Fan spent years with the Zhang family before he began filming "Last Train Home," and the documentary often feels startlingly intimate. The images of the countryside, wreathed in mist, are as beautiful as a Chinese painting, and a calm stillness hangs over all. The rural scenes are a striking contrast to the crowded, dirty conditions in the factory, but the director isn't promoting a pastoral ideal. The village is desperately poor. Not as poor as they once were, the grandmother recalls calmly, when they often did not have enough to eat, but poor enough that a young person like Qin would want to get out.
The grandmother and the boy work in the fields companionably, and the old lady prepares meals for them all, coaxing her grandchildren good-humoredly to eat their vegetables. That easy warmth disappears when Changhua and Sugin arrive. The conflict revolves around the children's schoolwork. Sugin is disappointed that they are not doing better in school, and urges that they work harder so they can avoid their parents‘ lives. We know from Qin's face that she has no intention of working harder--at least, not in school.
China's household residency laws discriminate against migrant workers at the same time that the economy depends on their labor. Because they are migrants, they are not eligible for public healthcare, and their children cannot attend school in the cities where their parents work. This leads to long and bitter separations, and as-yet-unknown pressure on China's long tradition of filial duty. The Zhang family has been torn apart by these policies, and it's hard to imagine Qin caring for her parents selflessly.
"Last Train Home" is Lixin Fan's debut documentary, yet he uses his camera with great assurance. The eerily quiet scenes of mobs waiting to board trains express a deep poignancy. The people are always treated with respect and compassion for the difficulty of their lives. Qin decides to follow her parents' example and look for work in a factory town, and the last view we have of her drifting into restaurant/nightclub work is disturbing. This surely isn't what her parents worked so hard for.
