Documenting China: An Afternoon with Filmmaker Fan Jian

A village woman, despite not having finished her high school education, has become China’s most famous poet in 2015. Her book of poetry has become the most widely distributed and sold poetry book in China for the past 20 years.

 

This poet is YU Xiuhua, a 39 year old woman living in a remote village in the middle of inland China. Though she has a bright mind, she walks unsteadily and speaks unclearly because of her cerebral palsy. She wonders if she’d done something bad in a previous life to deserve the suffering she endures in her present life. Attending school was so difficult that she dropped out of high school. When she was 18 years old, her mother married her off to an old man with whom she has never connected. The relationship has become the biggest pain and source of regret in her life. 

 

Yu’s early life was marked by misfortune. Through her poems, she contemplates her fate: she writes about the human body, life, sex, and her yearning for true love.

 

Yu Xiuhua has been writing since childhood, but in late 2014 a small collection of her work was published and commented on on a popular website, and they went viral.

 

People are surprised that a woman with cerebral palsy can write such talented poems. She’s become famous, and hundreds of media outlets have reported on her. Publishing houses are lining up to publish her book of poetry, and she has a wide readership spanning all ages.

 

With the popularity of her poems has come fame and financial independence. This has emboldened her to start anew. Her husband, however, vehemently refuses to grant her a divorce, and her parents and her 20-year-old son disapprove of her life choices. To make things worse, her mother has just been diagnosed with cancer. What will she do?

 

Our film portrays the struggle of a woman and her personal desires, pitted against the wishes and daily realities of those around her. She yearns for the love of other men – as of yet, unrequited as she has not been able to break free of her unwanted husband.

 

The bigger the gap between her desires and reality, the greater the torture she feels. She expresses this through her poetry, which has become ever more poignant. 

 

Yu Xiuhua has said, “I feel my voice cannot adequately deliver my poems: my soul is trapped in my body.” To some degree, many of us feel similarly conflicted. Our deepest desires cannot always express themselves in reality.

 

After all, Yu Xiuhua’s life is the most unlikely success story – and with her success has come the possibility of breaking free: breaking free from the constraints many others would simply be forced to live with. Our film follows a period in her life in which she no longer accepts the old constraints placed on her – and in so doing, it mirrors the conflicts so many of us have to face in our own lives.

 

 

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Pacific Center, Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television