Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts by Tang Xiaobing

Author:Tang, Xiaobing [Tang, Xiaobing]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

Coda: Children and truck drivers

It should not be surprising that in dramas about husbands and wives there are often children playing supplementary roles, but the involvement of a truck driver in all four films under discussion ought to be an intriguing detail. Indeed, truck drivers in rural films often serve the important structural function of maintaining connection with the city or industry, and of embodying to rural life its mobile and modernized other. That all truck drivers in this series of films should be male cannot but be a culturally and socially overdetermined choice. And that two such drivers (in Scented Souls and Ermo respectively) are morally weak or questionable characters is not an accident either.

In Li Shuangshuang and Ermo, the only child of the main couple serves as an indispensable helper in the plot development. In his own aggressive fashion, Ermo’s son, Tiger, voices the need for food as well as for a television. He therefore is an agitating agent and remains emotionally indifferent to his parents throughout the film. Shuangshuang’s daughter, on the other hand, is a humanizing element that brings her parents together. Her attachment to and dependence on both parents signifies the naturalness of a complete home, and when Xiwang decides to leave home for the second time, he is doubly at fault because he also turns his back on his loving daughter, who earlier has begged him to come home. Thus Xiwang gets even less sympathy from the audience for being an unfeeling father.

In Wild Mountains, the problematic relationship between an adventurous young wife and an overcautious husband is already indicated in their not being able to have children. The husband Huihui’s love of children, meanwhile, presents an acceptable cause for his eventually marrying his brother’s estranged wife, who is burdened with the arduous task of taking care of a son all by herself. (The original literary text on which Wild Mountains is based actually makes the symbolic value of fertility much more salient. It tells of Guilan becoming pregnant soon after marrying the now successful entrepreneur, thereby further affirming their happy union as more natural and more fruitful.27) More importantly, we as an audience grow ever closer to Guilan when she overcomes her fear of rats and takes loving care of the squirrel farm that Hehe leaves behind.

Xiang Ersao from Scented Souls, as we have seen, has a son and a daughter. Her epileptic, half-witted son is obviously the direct result of an unhappy, unacceptable marriage, but he is also an explicit symbol of the burden and stain of history. The daughter she has with her secret lover seems only to irritate her husband more, because he wants to have another boy, and a healthy one at that. At least according to the logic conveyed in the film, the daughter does not have a real father and will not carry on a doomed family line as does her half-brother.

At the same time, as we move from Li Shuangshuang to Ermo, an increasingly pivotal role is given to the truck driver.

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