RemittancesGateway.org

Film - 'Last Train Home': China's annual holiday crush

Saturday, 25 September 2010 14:33

Source: San Francisco Chronicle
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Most Americans can relate to overcrowded airports, long security lines and jammed freeways in the world of planes, trains and automobiles known as the holiday travel season. But as the opening shot in Lixin Fan's documentary "Last Train Home" shows, we've got nothing on the flood of migrant workers who jam trains home each year to spend Chinese New Year's with family.

There are an estimated 130 million migrant workers, most from rural areas, who are drawn to large population centers by low-paying but steady factory and textile jobs. Some of them spend the equivalent of half a year's salary to make it home for the holidays.

"It's a thousand-year tradition - you must be reunited with your family on the Chinese New Year's," said Fan, 33, during a visit for the San Francisco International Film Festival. "For me it's so easy. I take a flight, two hours (from his hometown in central China), go back to Beijing. ... That's the reality of China, the disparity between the rich and the poor. You always say that China is the next superpower. I think that's a simplified way to look at it. When you examine it closely, there are so many challenges - that big population with job pressures."

Fan, who now lives mostly in Montreal, became interested in making a documentary about migrant workers while working in Beijing for CCTV, the state-run broadcaster. He came across the Zhang family - Changhua and Suqin, who work factory jobs in Guangzhou, and their two children, being raised in their rural Sichuan province home by their grandmother. As the parents travel home on New Year's 2006, they haven't seen their children in three years.

What makes "Last Train Home" successful is the conflict between their teenage daughter, Qin, who wants to get her own factory job, and her parents, who are working so she can pursue her education.

"In the beginning I thought I would film for one year," Fan said. "But things kept happening to this family - and in the world. The Olympic Games, the world financial crisis."

Fan stuck with them for three years, helped financially by the main producers of the successful documentary "Up the Yangtze," for which Fan was an associate producer.

This is Fan's directorial debut, and he admitted to having a bit of a guilt complex because he was raised in more fortunate circumstances. He wants to share his perspective with Western audiences.

"I want my audience to rethink how their lives are connected with the lives of these migrant workers," Fan said. "It's really a global village. ... I always get asked (at Q&As), 'So should I stop buying made in China stuff? Is that the way to help the migrants?' I would not entirely encourage that. If you stop buying, all these people would lose their jobs.

"I know there's tension between China and America over trade imbalance and currency. I think we should all look at the problems in our countries, and then see what we can do to help each other."