What About China?

Nearly a half century after China’s Cultural Revolution, images of the Asian superpower as friend or foe to a beleaguered, industrialized West belie a mercurial nature that fascinates in this latest video essay by esteemed UC Berkeley professor and experimental filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. Similar to Forgetting Vietnam (2015), low-res video footage shot thirty years ago of Chinese rural life centering on women, children, labor, and family is reanimated and reframed through photomontage, oral histories, travelogs, poetry, and folk songs in order to interrogate what China has been, is, and could be. The generational transmission of values and ideas weighs heavily, impacting identity formation at home and in diaspora. As in her seminal works, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Shoot for the Contents (1991), and Forgetting Vietnam, the materiality of texts (video, sound, this film) captures the effect experienced by global citizenry.