About me
Title:
Migration, Space, and the Cosmology of Home: A Comparative Perspective
Abstract:
Embarking from The Wandering Earth (2019), China’s first interstellar blockbuster, in which actions of the main characters are prompted by their wish to go home, this paper surveys the homecoming narratives observed in contemporary Chinese films, both commercial hits and art house films. These films include Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (2013), Zhang Yang’s Shower (1999), Getting Home (2007), Yung-Shing Teng’s Return Ticket (2011) and commercial hits such as Lost on Journey (2010). I also extend beyond Chinese features and examine how the desire for home is represented against the background of transnational economic flow and cross-border labor movements in recent films. In the South Korean drama Way Back Home (2013), Australian film Lion (2016), Taiwanese semi-autobiographical American Girl (2021), and Hollywood productions such as Nomadland (2020) and Tár (2022), migration, social mobility, and the pursuit of freedom become jumbled and in the end all eerily resemble dislocation. To confront that reality, films either affirm the validity of homecoming or refute it with a more resolute exile. These films posit one question that lies at the center of my inquiry, namely, where is home, then?
I highlight two Chinese filmmakers, Li Ruijun, and Bi Gan, whose answers through the river scenes in their films are revelatory. Li’s River Road (2014) and Return to Dust (2022) tell of marginalized individuals searching for, returning to, and rebuilding a home against economic development that devastates their homeland. The two boys in River Road, after a long journey following a meandering riverbank, discover that their hometown is replaced by industrial plants. In Return to Dust, in a similar way, the heroine dies in a canal that was formerly a river. As an antithesis to the meagre creek that she and her husband draw water from, the canal symbolizes the torrents of time. If, for Li, the last vestige of home lies with persons living by nomadic or agrarian traditions, then Bi Gan portrays home as the place where memory accumulates and thus time can be turned back (Tarkovsky 1986: 58–59). In Kaili Blues (2015), the protagonist chooses to return to his hometown even if it has broken his heart. It is by revisiting the past, and by retelling the future, time and again, he sees a possibility for redemption. This idea is indicated through the director’s poems included in the film and visualized in the river sequence. For both directors, home does not mean a place of exclusivity; quite oppositely, it denotes a commitment to the heterogeneity of space, with which the future may be different.
