Young and Restless in China

By Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters. Posted June 17, 2008.

"I never thought there was such a big world out there," says Wei Zhanyan as she walks to work in a factory. A migrant worker sent to work at 13 in order that her brother could continue his studies, Zhanyan is proud of making 40 cents an hour and glad to feel independent of her family, who remain in the village where she was born. Offering a brief tour of her one-room apartment and reveling in her freedom to read a book or watch television after work, she pauses, briefly, to wonder about what might have been. "I always wondered how other parents could support their children's education, but not mine," she says. Taking off her glasses to dab at her eyes, Zhanyan apologizes to her interviewer, then readjusts. "I shouldn't have said that," she says. "It sounds like I am blaming my parents for not living up to their responsibilities. But that's past."

It is and it isn't. For even as Zhanyan lives her present life in the city she is also tied to her past. This much is made clear when she learns, just a few minutes into Sue Williams' Young & Restless in China, that her father has arranged for her marriage through a matchmaker. And so, Zhanyan announces, "I got engaged, just like that." Still, she muses, "I like to be free and independent." And so she faces a dilemma, caught between old and new.

In this, Zhanyan is much like the other eight interview subjects in Young & Restless, which airs on 17 June on PBS' Frontline. From 2004 to 2007, Williams' crew followed them, observing their professional and personal turns. The film's wide-ranging and mostly superficial structure -- cutting quickly between participants, narrating cursorily to set contexts, and offering brief "confessional" comments by each subject -- recalls alternately the Michael Apted's Up series and The Real World, a mix of pop cultural reportage and current events documentation.

Construction in preparation for the Beijing Olympics provides a recurrent image -- workers in hard hats, bulldozers, and scaffolding -- reminding you that the nation is looking forward to a "global coming out party" even as citizens struggle with day to day details. Workaholic Ben Wu has returned to Beijing after a decade in the States, with a plan to open a string of internet cafés, modeled on Starbucks, but bigger and glossier. As he leads the camera crew through the first opening, Britney Spears' Toxic wafts in the background, blue lights throbbing and stylish spaces less than crowded. The cash flow is good, he says, and his investors are happy. And yet, Wu reflects later, his wife is working on her accounting degree in the U.S., which means he's feeling lonely for much of the year. "I should just get on a flight and go to New York and be with my wife just for a weekend," he says. "My café is not gonna go bankrupt over the weekend, so why don't I do it? I can't answer that question."

Similarly dedicated to her career, public interest lawyer Zhang Jingjing sees her social and political formation initiated by the crackdown on student activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As preparations for the Olympics pick up speed in 2005, the government forcing "one and a half million residents" from their homes or erecting non-approved electric lines around their neighborhoods, Jingjing sues the state on behalf of affected citizens. Though she insists the case is not "opposed" to the government per se, she does want to ensure that the law is followed during the rush to get ready for the Games. "We targeted an illegitimate licensing procedure," she says, "We sued because we believe that people come first." Her commitment to the cause takes tolls on her own life, as she admits a year later, when her fiancé breaks off with her. She knows it's because she doesn't put him "first," but she's torn, too, and not a little hurt that he finds solace with another woman who "flattered him."

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Cynthia Fuchs is Popmatters' film and TV editor.

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