Up the Yangtze

Directed By; Yung Chang

Review By Roberto Azula

The Three Gorges Dam project is on scale most of us can scarcely imagine. As it dams up one of the largest rivers in the world, the Chinese government is forcing two million people to move away from the riverbanks. Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze tells the story of how this massive upheaval affects two young people. Through its dreamlike images and unpretentious, neutral tone, Up The Yangtze is an extraordinary elegy to broken dreams.

As the film opens in the soon to be submerged “City of Ghosts” Fengdu, we are introduced to sixteen-year-old Yu Shui, the oldest daughter of a peasant family. Yu does not have many prospects, as her parents cannot afford to send her to high school. She signs up to be a dishwasher on a tour boat trek up the Yangtze. We also follow the fortunes of Chen Bo Yu, a nineteen-year-old “little emperor” (a term that refers to the spoiled only children that resulted from China’s One Child Policy). Chen is better educated than Yu, and his rudimentary grasp of English gives him a slight advantage in the desperate job market of China. He gets a job as a bartender and porter on the same boat.

Yung creates an intimate glimpse into Yu’s attempt to escape her fate, from her arguments with her impoverished parents (who are equally frustrated with their economic standing), to her bewilderment at the militaristic, rushed job training she receives. Chen, on the other hand, is all swagger, confident that he will hit the big time someday as he brags to his friends in a KTV parlor. But the Yangtze River has other plans for his fate.

I found Up The Yantze very refreshing. Canadian-born Yung thankfully avoids the “discovering/getting back to my roots” shtick, though his opening narrative threatens to do so. Rather, Up the Yangtze is a moving, beautifully textured exercise in cinéma-vérité. Yung received a remarkable amount of leeway in filming his subjects, and Up the Yangtze features some of the most candid footage I’ve ever seen. The result is a series of very evocative, emotional scenes, all the more heartbreaking as we watch the fairly stoic Yu and Chen’s dreams crumble around them. The surreal images are choice, from tourists dressed in kitschy emperor’s robes describing their impressions of China to a man attempting to teach Chinese through piano ditties.

One scene sums up my feelings about this documentary nicely. A tourist hands Chen a whopping US$30 tip (more than what most people make in a month) and says to him, “You were a lot less intrusive than I thought you would be.” I for one would like to hand Yung Chang thirty bucks and compliment him for the same skilled discretion. By letting the camera and his subjects tell their own stories, Yung paints an unforgettable portrait of a dying river culture, without the self-serving and ultimately irrelevant polemics of a foreigner’s identity crisis. His voice-over narratives are quite concise and minimal, and he lets the stunning, relentlessly grimy images of decaying port towns, rising water levels, and weather-beaten peasants express his ambivalence and sadness. Yung wisely realizes the Yangtze is a far more eloquent storyteller than any mere filmmaker.