Race Up the Yangtze

Up the Yangtze is a masterfully done documentary about the three gorges dam and its affect on the people of China. The director, Yung Chang, brings up issues of race and creatively analyzes how it is represented through the overarching example of the employees and guests on the luxury cruise ship. As I watched the documentary, I started to put the film’s issues into conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s, “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” in order to better understand one of the film’s many underlying messages.

Throughout the film, the issue of race and how it is portrayed or represented plays an important role in understanding western/eastern dynamic. On the cruise ship, many races and ethnicities are represented. But the most notable juxtaposition of race here can be seen through Chang’s portrayal of Americans versus the Chinese. There were several instances throughout the movie in which Chang presented Americans as racist, blatantly ignorant and self-righteous. First of all, these tourists have come to China to ride a cruise ship down a river that will eventually displace many Chinese families. This in and of itself seemed insensitive to me, to pay for a cruise down what will essentially cause a lot of problems for the very people on the ship that are serving you. A second example would be when Chang interviews several Americans on their thoughts about China and the people they’ve encountered. One man observed how Chinese cities were bigger and more developed than he had imagined them to be, insinuating that he expected China to be underdeveloped and less advanced than American cities, presumably. Another woman commented on how the Chinese employees she had encountered on the cruise ship were “funny” to her. This woman noticed differences between Chinese culture and her own and all she really had to say for it was that these people were “funny”.

While Americans are portrayed as ignorant and self-righteous, the Chinese employees Chang chooses to show us are portrayed equally in the same light. In a scene where the employees are having a meeting, an authority figure heading the meeting is going over the dos and don’ts of interacting with Americans and Canadians, listing things you should and shouldn’t say. Many topics he said not to mention were outdated or trivial, things I couldn’t see a normal person getting mad about. Yet Chang is showing us that the Chinese have an equally ignorant view of American or Canadian culture and therefore make sweeping generalizations about the topics of conversation that would theoretically set one of these tourists off. In another instance, Jerry, an employee on the ship, is very arrogant and in an interview, says that he knows how to work the Americans in order to get big tips. He gets the biggest tips but is extremely self-righteous and for that reason, ends up getting fired.

I sometimes think westerners are pretty racist, for example, generalizing all Asian cultures as just one culture, calling any Asian person ‘Chinese’, etc. But this documentary got me thinking that every culture is racist.  In Gates’ “Writing ‘Race’”, Gates states that “writing race” is a “certificate of humanity” (Gates 12). Essentially, for hundreds of years, humans in general have been racist and hegemonic. Humanity has always sought a way to group people, to separate themselves from “others” who are different than them. Hence, race was created in order to categorize people. Gates says race is persistent and pervasive in this manner (Gates 3). As long as there exists differences amongst humans, race or something like it will exist, and it will exclude no one. All races have the potential to be racist, and I think I finally understood this after viewing Chang’s documentary.