Erasure, Representation, and Class in Up the Yangtze

“Up The Yangtze” offers stark documentation of tough times and new hurdles for families in ‘modernizing’ China during the construction of the famed Three Gorges Dam. Focusing on those displaced by the mega-hydroelectric dam that will eventually destroy their homes, farms, and arguably, culture, the film follows the lives of the relocated and their children, putting a face to the displaced Chinese locals that have long inhabited the riverside, as well as the economic futures of their children.

Their children of course, sent by their families to work on a luxury cruise ship and serve predominantly white but certainly western tourists, offer not only a look at the changes in identity and work ethic between the previous generation and their progeny, but an intragenerational look at the differences between practices and mores of different classes of Chinese youth. Juxtaposition after juxtaposition, we see the erasure of cultural practices through language and naming, enduring differences between classes, and a dilemma of representation.

While watching the film and discussing it in class, I initially had the desire to separate my interpretation of it from its “Authorship,” letting the film reveal its inner-workings itself instead of trying to deconstruct Yung Chang’s intentions through biographical investigation, exposing some kind of privilege that would undermine his work in the process. He narrates the film — I wanted that to be my conception of him as he functioned in the film — Chang as some kind of omnipresent impressionist in the background, appearing every once in a while to offer insight and narration. Trying to watch the film in such a way however, is difficult to do without making generalizations about Chang’s background. In trying to situate him in the divide between native Eastern and Western tourists so clearly stratifiable in the film, I can’t help but notice that he ‘speaks English like a North American.’

This is complicated because it seems patronizing to assume that because he speaks the language of the Empire as it is spoken by those who “claim” it, he must be from a certain region. From a Post-colonial standpoint, the propagation of American English is a symptom of perpetuated hegemony, and this at least in theory makes me wary of continuing my initial mode of reading the film. If I choose not to research the Author’s background, I am allowing generalizations embedded in my own cultural context, shielding myself with a terministic screen that doesn’t offer insights into the more specific social implications of the film, particularly regarding the way a Canadian of Chinese descent would allow (if possible) the native subjects of his film, overcome by hardship and the effects of globalization/  imperial Western tourism to represent themselves