Wang Yuanyin

Wang Bing, Ta’ang, 2016

Documentary, 147 minutes

Courtesy the artist and Magician Space

“What’s the merit of marriage?” A few years ago, this question became the subject of a viral meme featuring a woman in traditional ethnic dress. Her gaze lifts upward as she contemplates the question, before delivering her answer: “Let me think … I really don’t know.” The scene, as it turns out, comes from Tisese: A Documentary on Three Mosuo Women (2021). Also known as the Na, Mosuo people are an ethnic group primarily residing in the northwestern region of Yunnan and southwestern Sichuan. By the end of the 20^th century, they had gained attention for their “walking marriage” customs and matrilineal family structures. Today, in the eyes of a new generation of viewers, Mosuo women have become representative of those who refuse to conform to mainstream gender norms. If you stream the film on BiliBili, danmu comments such as “Another day of being spiritually Mosuo” bombard the screen. The online response clearly crystallizes our contemporary fascination with—and romanticization of—life in China’s southwestern mountains, yet few notice its status as the nexus of contemporary gender discourse, the representation of southwestern women, and the evidentiary value of China’s independent documentaries. Produced by the then Hong Kong sociologist Chow Wah-shan, the film was featured in the competition section of the inaugural Yunnan Multicultural Visual Festival, known as YunFest, in 2003,[1] alongside works by Hao Zhou, Feng Yan, Ji Dan, and others. In the years that followed, YunFest would grow into one of the most important independent film festivals in China. 

Chou Wah-shan, Tisese: A Documentary on Three Mosuo Women, 2001

Documentary, 56 minutes

Courtesy the artist

This may be coincidental, but the bond between southwestern mountain regions and independent documentary filmmaking runs too deep to dismiss as mere happenstance. If we consider Bumming in Beijing (1990) as China’s first independent documentary, then by virtue of its makers—both Wu Wenguang and Zhu Xiaoyang are Yunnan natives—and the context of its production—Wu held a position at Yunnan Television at the time, China’s independent documentary was, in a sense, born in Yunnan.[2] This regional connection extends to the subject matter: women from southwestern mountains have consistently appeared in independent documentaries since the movement’s inception. Made during China’s early waves of spontaneous migration, Bumming in Beijing focuses on five young artists scraping by in the nation’s capital with dreams of creative fulfillment. The two female subjects in the film were both from Yunnan, including writer Zhang Ci, who left for Beijing from her native southern Yunnan. Hailing from the southern foothills of the Ailao Mountains, Zhang was assigned an editorial job at Gejiu Literature in her hometown after graduation. On camera, Zhang compares the stifling idleness of her job to “crossing a desert in despair.” However, what makes Zhang a memorable figure is not the motivation behind her north-bound migration, but her raw reaction to life in Beijing. While others hold forth about art, ideals, and the future, her voice breaks when she brings up the harsh reality of a Beijing drifter: “Sometimes foreigners visit Beijing, and they are curious about this place. They find it quite nice here. That’s bullshit. It is not.” This moment of vulnerability punctures the idealistic optimism in the early part of the film, revealing the ethos alluded to by its subtitle—The Last Dreamers. The last we see of Zhang is an intertitle: she married an American and went to live in America. She disappears from the latter half of the film. While Zhang’s personal journey only represented a minority experience, her choice reflected a broader undertow of her time: from the go-abroad craze, the migrant-labor wave, to the “all-eyes-on-money” frenzy, no individual trajectory remained unafflicted by reform-era developmentalism. In this sense, Zhang Ci established an archetype for southwest women’s on-screen representation: she is always leaving, leaving for somewhere nicer. Interestingly, her second departure casts a symbolic void: what comes after departure? 

Wu Wenguang, Bumming in Beijing: the Last Dreamers, 1990

Documentary, 70 minutes

Courtesy the artist

In the independent documentary practice that followed, a few works made the conscious choice to direct their cameras at women who left the southwestern mountains. What we observe from their stories is far more direct and substantiated than the grand philosophical question of “what happens after Nora leaves home.” They also strike deeper nerves as they lay bare the issue of human trafficking. The persistent trafficking of women remains an open secret in China. Since the 1940s, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan have served as the epicenter of China’s trafficking networks that target women, who are typically sold into impoverished rural households across northern, eastern, southern, and southeastern China.[3] There, they are often forced into marriage, childbirth, and unpaid labor for the buyers’ families. With the economic development in the southwestern region, poor areas beyond China’s borders have also emerged as new markets for abducted women. In Folk Song on the Plain (2002) and The Woman from Myanmar (2022), we meet Luo Xiaojia and Larry, who both left the mountains through the human trafficking pipeline. Yet as documentary subjects, their experiences occupy a moral grey zone: neither was completely ignorant, helpless, deceived, or coerced into trafficking, or an ideal victim; instead, they both displayed a clear will to leave. In the words of Lu Xun, such self-aware participants in their own commodification are “degraded.”  The Woman from Myanmar even opens with a blunt title card that includes phrases such as “reduced to breeding machines.” And yet these departees also return: during filming, both women revisited their hometowns—Puxiong Township in southern Yunnan and Wa State in Myanmar. They brought with them not only dissatisfaction with life outside the mountains but also homesickness and hopes for the future. When human trafficking is framed as a social issue to be solved and governed, the agency of trafficked women is rarely recognized. In the nation’s official discourse, these women need to be “rescued. ”[4] In political-economic scholarship, they are described as “poor and ignorant.”[5] Even within China’s feminist enlightenment movements, their awakening and choice might still be dismissed as Ah-Q style self-delusion. Despite its recognition of female agency as the essential condition of feminism, the spotlight of feminist discourse remains fixated on urban, middle-class women. Even for them, the “downward freedom” pursued by Luo and Larry appears to be perplexing, if not threatening, anomalies.  

Wang Xiuyue, The Woman from Myanmar, 2022

Documentary, 106 minutes

Courtesy the artist

Simply put, when the gaze of the camera falls upon concrete, lived realities, the audience can clearly notice the agency Luo and Larry exercise within their “trafficked lives” while, paradoxically, being challenged by this very agency. Take The Woman from Myanmar as an example—some viewers blamed their discomfort on director Wang Xiuyue, arguing that he failed to approach Larry’s laziness, greed, scheming, and cunningness from a woman’s perspective; others hastily default to acknowledging and celebrating her tenacious will to survive, a stance the film itself has endorsed with its closing dedication: “This film honors the women of northern Myanmar’s highlands in their pursuit of happiness.” This oscillation between condescending and glorifying perspectives aside, the film’s editing also influences our reading of trafficked women. The Woman from Myanmar removes almost all of the filmmaker’s questions and responses, and, perhaps to increase the density of information, Wang made heavy edits even within single scenes. This approach in fact distances the audience from the filmed subject, because we are forced to repeatedly confront Larry’s fragmented monologue.  

In contrast, Folk Song on the Plain preserves the communicative friction caused by thick local accents, as director Hu Jie and Luo Xiaojia’s interactions stumble through pauses, probing questions, and hesitant evasions. These seemingly insignificant moments have in fact physically manifested irrepressible emotions. Unlike how interview questions are framed in The Woman from Myanmar, Hu’s questions are blunt, confrontational, yet sincere: “How could you put up with being trafficked? Do you think it was your fate that brought you here? Have you considered other alternatives? I’ve noticed many here have run away.” Luo answers: “Running away? It won’t change anything. Does running away make things better? The place you run away to might be even worse.” Their back-and-forth positions the speakers as equals, which, despite the obvious power imbalance between the filmmaker and the subject, unleashes the film’s affective intensity. This intensity emerges not from the “resignation” in Luo’s every answer, but from the underlying condition her answers lay bare: Luo has long since come to understand, in her own way, the inescapable contours that shackle her existence. She has even contemplated the most extreme possibility: when asking about alternatives, Hu implies escape; Luo answers death. It is in this moment that the disturbing agency of trafficked women finally becomes readable. It manifests itself not as the awareness of autonomous selfhood, but as a recognition of one’s own vulnerability as, to borrow from Judith Butler, the precondition of bodily ontology.[6]  

Hu Jie, Folk Song on the Plain, 2002

Documentary, 70 minutes

Courtesy the artist

When the crucial role of cinematic representations becomes this visible, it is easy to notice why the image of “independent Mosuo women” mentioned at the beginning of this essay proves problematic. While scholar–cum–filmmaker Chow Wah-shan structures the narrative of Three Mosuo Women around his fieldwork, his editing and arrangement of footage have consistently foregrounded the differences between matrilineal and patrilineal family structures. The progressive nature of “walking marriage” gets amplified through this comparison, which renders Mosuo women as symbols of freedom—a utopian kind existing outside the framework of patriarchal nuclear families. What Chow, a then gender studies scholar, never explicitly states in the film is the influence of feminist theory on his emphasis on such differences.[7] No wonder the female audience of today manages to find in the film a potent expression of female autonomy. However, this accentuation of the radical nature of “otherness” operates in a two-fold way. It echoes traditional feminist strategies of appropriation and reversal, appropriating the Mosuo tradition of walking marriage as a superior alternative to wedlock and reversing the patriarchal hierarchy by uplifting matriarchy. And it implies a distinctively Chinese nostalgia of pre-monogamous, pre-capitalist matriarchal ideals, ratified by imagination. Either way, under the guise of the camera’s caring gaze, it merely co-opts the otherness of the Mosuo to serve its critique of pre-industrial bourgeois modernity. 

Documentary filmmaker Zhou Yuejun’s A Lake of Romance (2008) offers a useful comparison here. Not only was part of it filmed around the same period as Three Mosuo Women, but it also features Cha Cuo, the young woman who famously proclaimed that she “do[esn’t] know the merit of marriage.” (She is referred to as Chelacuo in Chow’s film.) In reality, Lugu Lake, where the Yongning Mosuo resides, had already begun its development of local tourism by the mid-1990s, and Cha Cuo’s family was running a guesthouse for tourists at the time. Unlike the portrayal in Three Mosuo Women, A Lake of Romance shows Cha Cuo wearing not ethnic dress, but casual clothing. She speaks candidly: I’m too busy with the family business for a walking marriage. In another scene, she mentions her lack of interest in marrying a Mosuo man, for “I can only be with him at night. I’d be lonely during the day.” This contradictory image might hold the key to understanding the condition of Mosuo people. The rise of modern tourism and tourists’ spectacle-seeking gaze, ethnic identity, economic pragmatism, romantic longings, and hesitations about traditions all converge in Cha Cuo. If not for A Lake of Romance, these layers would remain almost undetectable beneath the portrayal of Three Mosuo Women. Nor would we realize that Mosuo culture, however distinct from the Han-centric mainstream, is fundamentally situated within the same time-space of modernity. Therefore, when it comes to gender-related struggles, Mosuo women face no fewer, if not more complex, difficulties than the mainstream Han population.[8] For example, as evidenced by the interviewees in the A Lake of Romance, while matrilineal structures have indeed shaped the community’s gendered division of labor, traditional Mosuo women must bear the doubled responsibility of domestic labor such as childcare and intense physical labor such as farming. Despite cultural differences, women share a connected experience through their bodies. In A Lake of Romance, an elderly Mosuo woman recounts her life in the old days: “No matter how painful and exhausted we were, we raised every child by ourselves. One birth after another, until they emptied our bellies … I’ll need ten films to finish talking about those years.” Her lament reveals an opposing figure to the “departee”—the southwest women remaining rooted in their native land and traditions, whose lived experiences, likewise, are neither unexamined nor smooth sailing.  

Dongnan Chen, Singing in the Wilderness, 2021

Documentary, 98 minutes

Courtesy the artist

Within the rich tradition of independent documentary filmmaking in southwest China, including southwest-focused works featured at YunFest—female figures occupy significant space. In British director Phil Agland’s Beyond the Clouds (1994), we catch a glimpse of not only a pre-tourism Lijiang in the early 1990s but also the daily lives of Dianbei women across generations and social strata. In Home-Coming in Granddaughter (dir. Liang Bibo, 1997), Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories (dir. Wen Hui, 2011), and Songs from Maidichong (dir. Hu Jie, 2014), elderly women become living archives of historical memory. Home-Coming in Granddaughter follows Xiao Shuming, a woman with a unique identity: the Han wife married to the Zuosuo chieftain (tusi) of the former Yanyuan county. Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories takes place in Yimen County, where Su Meiling—third grandma—recounts her experience of the Land Reform movement and Cultural Revolution. The elderly narrator in Songs from Maidichong reveals the history of Christianity’s entry into Miao culture. 

Wang Bing, Ta’ang, 2016

Documentary, 147 minutes

Courtesy the artist and Magician Space

Singing in the Wilderness (dir. Chen Dongnan, 2021) unfolds just a hundred li away from Maidichong, in a village called Xiaoshuijing (Little Well) in Fumin County. It, however, tells a different story: a local Miao church choir found their way, through television, out of the village, performing in cities and even on international stages. However, the choir’s virality remains a rare occurrence. In the film, we witness yet another younger generation of women fleeing the southwestern mountains and making their returns, such as one of the main characters, Yaping. Wang Bing’s Ta’ang (2016) documents refugee women living on the China-Myanmar border. War has forced them on a border-crossing exodus from their homes. Vietnamese director Hà Lệ Diễm’s film Children of the Mist (2021) trains its lens on the youthful life of Di, a 14-year-old Hmong (known in China as Miao) girl. The film’s pivotal moment comes when Di experiences a violent bride kidnapping, and the director’s attempt to intervene fails to stop this “cruel story of youth” from playing out. Both the disturbing scene and the futile intervention generated heated debates amongst the audience. 

Wang Bing, Three Sisters, 2012

Documentary, 153 minutes

Courtesy the artist and Magician Space

Moreover, unlike those who unconsciously engage the participant observation methods, some documentary filmmakers explicitly adopt an anthropological approach to their ethnographic filmmaking projects in China’s southwest. One such example is Guo Jing, the founder of YunFest and a trained anthropologist, whose research originated from the Kawagebo mountaineering tragedy in the early 1990s. His short film series “Kawagebo Legends” yet extends beyond the incident. One film in the series, Wheat, observes the daily labor and communal leisure of women living along the Yunnan-Tibet border. By capturing the subjects’ awareness of the filmmaker, it turns the camera and filming equipment into the film’s very own subject. This reflexivity about the “filming-filmed” dynamics has been a site of contention in ethnographic cinema and a perennial concern in documentary practice, as reflected by Guo’s community filmmaking workshop “From Our Eyes” and Wu Wenguang’s “Villager Documentary Project.” Both decade-long initiatives grew out of a Ford Foundation-supported program called the Yunnan Women’s Reproductive Health and Development Program in the early 1990s. The program introduced the participatory photography method called Photovoice. Incorporating this technique, the program published photographs of southwestern women, taken by themselves, in the photobook Visual Voices: 100 Photographs of Village China by the Women of Yunnan Province. Unfortunately, compared to the now-institutionalized industry of documentary filmmaking, such image-making practice occupies a niche space, its representation of women seldom entering mainstream discourse. 

Finally, we return to the most overlooked—yet ever-present—image of southwest women across these films: women at work. Female labor in fields has routinely been aestheticized as “transitions” to serve the purpose of cinematic representation. To this point, Wang Bing’s Three Sisters (2012), which devotes extensive footage to laboring women, stands out as an exception. Three Sisters is set in a village in the highlands of Northern Yunnan, where Wang filmed the life of three little girls. With their parents absent for prolonged periods, the sisters exchange farm labor for one meal per day at their relative’s house. Like how these other women are labeled trafficking victims or breeding machines, the categorization of the sisters as left-behind children, once fixated, turns them into objects understandable through the framework of social issues. As a result, our feelings toward them are filtered through, and therefore constrained by, the same ethical–political paradigms. Farmers epitomize this reductive representation. The subjectivity of laboring women and men is inextricably associated with poverty, trapped in either hollow glorification—a distinctly Chinese trope—or complete erasure. Is there an alternative perspective that might awaken our perception of their representations? Isn’t what art historian Georges Didi-Huberman sees in Wang Bing’s Man with No Name (2009)—a figure who “toils all alone, slowly, effectively”[9]—what we see in Yingying, the older sister in Three Sisters? This 10-year-old reticent girl doesn’t know her mother, and her dad is seldom home. Her life consists of her two younger sisters, potatoes, livestock, earthen walls, sheep dung, fleas, the fire pit, and the company of other lonely, laboring children. It is probably not a coincidence that the film’s short version is titled Alone (2010). If Didi-Huberman draws from the aesthetic of solitude to name the unnamed man in Wang Bing’s film le premier des paysans (the first of the peasants),[10] then perhaps, Yingying is not a left-behind child, but an archetypal figure as well. Abandoned by her parents yet unable to abandon her sisters and her land, she becomes the first rooted. Or, after years of enduring poverty, she is ready to fight for her life and be the first to leave. In the end, the impoverishment we perceive in this image, like that of the southwest women portrayed, demands more than a passive acceptance of the established aesthetic formula. Unless we engage with these images in a way that is grounded in real emotion and lived experience, our seeing remains hollow.

Notes:

1. [1] Guo Jing, ed., YunFest Handbook for Ethnographic Filmmaking (Kunming: Yunnan People’s Publishing House, 2003), 50.
2. [2] See Guo Jing, “Story of YunFest,” Film Authors 16 (2017): 18-50. Independently published.
3. [3] Li Gang, Yu Yue, Zhou Junjun, and Jin An’nan, “Geographical Research on Human Trafficking in China: Progress Review and Governance Implications,” Tropical Geography 42, no. 9 (2022): 1410.
4. [4] China’s National Action Plan on Combating Human Trafficking (2021-2030). 
5. [5] Wang Mingyuan, “No ‘No Abduction in the World’: A History and Analysis of Contemporary Women Trafficking,” Caixin, March 8, 2022, https://opinion.caixin.com/2022-03-08/101852330.html.
6. [6] Judith Butler, Frames of War, trans. He Lei (Kaifeng: Henan University Press, 2016), 47.
7. [7] See Chow Wah-san, A Land Without Fathers or Husbands? (Beijing: Guangming Daily Press, 2010), chapter 12. 
8. [8] Li Xiaoli, “Body and Sexuality: The Commodification of Ethnic Minority Women in Southwest China,” Qilu Journal, no. 5 (2006): 151–56
9. [9] Georges Didi-Huberman, “Epilogue for a Man with No Name,” Peuples exposés, peuples figurants (Paris: Minuit, 2012). 
10. [10] Ibid.

Translated by Sixing Xu

Wang Yuanyin is a film critic and documentary enthusiast.