Cruising and Representation

            While watching the film, Up the Yangtze this past week, I encountered many personal mixed feelings and made many connections to things in and around my life.  During the summer of 2012, I went on an Alaskan cruise with my family. Similar to the film, the cruise goers were primarily white, older and western - minus my Hispanic family and a few others - and we were all taking a voyage to see something that was slowly disappearing: glaciers and nature. I’m not entirely sure what the personal expectations were of many people on that cruise; however, I know I didn’t really have any expectations. I knew Alaska was supposed to be beautiful and that we might encounter some whales, but I really didn’t expect to experience “raw” “authentic” “natural” America.  But saying those things after having seen the film this week makes me severely uncomfortable. I never felt like I was exploiting the land as much as I was exploiting the small towns we visited. And maybe some would argue that we aren’t exploiting as much as providing tourism and boosting economies for otherwise lower income communities with deep rooted Native American ancestry and tradition. However, those communities are suffering or struggling or exploiting themselves for tourism because they have exhausted other options. Like Cindy’s family in the film, only so many of their decisions were truly in their control and due to the hegemonic upper /middle class systems that are in place.

            During class conversation, the film kept bringing up questions about Yung Chang’s purpose for creating this film. Was the audience being made fun of? What kind of audience was being constructed? Were the cruise goers truly at fault for how they were portrayed? How much of this film represents an authentic representation of this river cruise experience and how much of that experience relates to the authentic problems of how classism forces some to sacrifice for the greater, more sustainably, environmentally friendly, good?

I keep going back to representation and identity. Who do I identify with in this film? I felt like I identified with the cruise-goers to an extent, however, I reject the way Chang represents me. Things were taken out of context and pieced together in what appeared to be an anti-Western sentiment. The same could go for Cindy and how she was represented in the film. How she is “othered” by the other women on the ship. I don’t know if Cindy was truly represented, but the problem with representation is that it is not up to me to determine.