“Eat your bitter melons. Taste the bitterness first, the sweetness will come after; then you will know which is best.”
It’s the winter of 2006 in Guangzhou, China. Suqin Chen and Changhua Zhan are attempting to buy tickets to go back home to their village to celebrate the Chinese New Year with their two children and grandmother. Chinese director Lixin Fan filmed the Zhan family for three years, beginning in 2006 and finishing up last year. Fan is now traveling around the world revealing the family’s lifestyle through his documentary Last Train Home.
Initially, Fan tells the IFC Center’s 6:15PM audience, he had wanted to limit the film to the epic migration of more than 130 million migrant workers rushing back to their home villages in the countryside for the Chinese New Year. These ‘long-term commuters,’ if you will, only get to see their families once a year. Last Train Home¸ however, evolved into a vessel to not only make known “the largest human migration in the world,” but also to make the “family’s story more relevant to globalization.” Fan was ultimately able to approach issues, such as how massive consumerism is supported by the tiny hands of millions of factory workers such as Suqin and Changhua, who spend their days sewing together all sorts of clothes, including jeans for Americans with waistlines “measuring up to 40 inches,” as one Chinese worker remarks.
Last Train Home Poster
Fan features two Chinese New Years in the film. Each time, the couple is on the verge of giving up their attempts to buy train tickets because they are either too expensive or sold out, yet they manage to get tickets, crowd before the train station, and wait with millions of other Chinese to board their train home. For the first New Year Fan spends with the Zhan family, he captures scenic views of what “home” is for the Zhan: Huilong Village in the Sichuan Province, 2100 kilometers away from Guangzhou. The contrasting beauty of the countryside against the ugly, industrial city where Suqin and Changhua work is so dramatic it’s overbearing even to a New Yorker sitting in her comfy movie seat. Every time the film cuts from the peaceful setting of pinks and greens into the noisy, dirty, cramped atmosphere of the city, the change is dreadful. You impatiently look forward to return to the countryside.
Suqin explains how she and her husband left the countryside in search of city work sixteen years ago, during the 1990s. They wanted to find a good job and make money to send back home. She left Qin, her daughter, when she was only a year old. Though everyone told her she should wait until her daughter was older, she believed she had no choice. Suqin tells how every time she would get a letter from the grandparents telling her how Qin was doing she would cry forever and lose all appetite. She would have to eat before reading the letters, otherwise she couldn’t eat.
Lixin Fan
Though Suqin and Changhua chose the factory worker’s life sixteen years ago, they desperately push their children to follow the university path. Upon their return for both New Years, we see Suqin and Changhua hovering over their younger son’s report card, slightly chiding him for not having placed first in his class (he placed 5th both years). However, the parents’ eagerness clashes with their daughter’s desire for freedom. Qin believes that freedom is happiness, and the only way she can be free is if she drops out of school to make her own money. She tells us that if she stays in school, she has to wait for her parents to give her money. Qin ends up dropping out of school like most of her former classmates to go work in a factory. The irony of her reasoning juxtaposed against her situation is pungent. It climaxes into a violent fight between her and Changhua when all three, including Suqin, return for the film’s second New Year.
Last Train Home does a great job of exposing the valor of sacrifice – which sacrifices we acknowledge and which we take for granted – whether it be in a personal relationship or a larger, more global one, such as the U.S. depending on the Chinese to manufacture most of their material products.
Last Train Home won the Best Feature-Length Documentary at the 2009 Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, and it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Festival. Lixin Fan is currently working on a new project documenting China’s largest wind farm in the Gobi Desert.
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