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"I was eight years old when the Cultural Revolution started. We did not have a book left in our house. My father had had to give up all his books and the family pictures for the festive stakes. The first full book that I read was about physics, the second about astronomy. I loved both books passionately. In 1969 I heard Beethoven and the Nutcracker Suite for the first time at an uncle's - we sat in the dark." A young woman is telling us about her life in this casual and disconcertingly direct way, while preparing a meal in her small kitchen. Her story is larded with old film footage of people who had to parade with their plate held over their heads until, lying down, they were shot cursorily. "The whole world got mad with enthusiasm, but I wondered whether our saviour, the Red Sun, ever went to the toilet." We see Mao declare the People's Republic, immediately followed by fragments of refugees, burning homes, bodies in the streets. Is this journalistic rabble-rousing, or a historically correct representation of a causal connection? Her story continues: "Our family was deported, my granddad spent thirty years in jail. Now I live in New York, but what is my identity? Whether I get crushed or a grape does, what's the difference? Cantonese she has partly forgotten, English she never learnt properly. She continues her own, often troublesome, life story while the camera roams around in Chinatown. Her salvation is that her father taught her how to paint because he did not want her to play outside. She finds comfort in the illusion of creating works of art. Never the credits will have better reason to mention the following: "Special thanks to Wenyi Hou for her stories, her art and her trust."
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Erik Daams
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Camera: Yau Ching, Ellen Pau, Editing: Yau Ching, Karen Heyson, Eric Finke, John Grod, Sound mixing: Karen Heyson, Art direction: Yvonne Rainer, Mary Kelly, Deirdre Boyle, Special thanks to: Wenyi Hou
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