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129 C H A P T E R 6 The Imagery of Postsocialist Trauma in Peacock, Shanghai Dreams, and Stolen Life In early 2005, three Chinese films received top prizes at various international film festivals: Gu Changwei’s Peacock, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shanghai Dreams, and LiShaohong’s Stolen Life. All these award-winning films portray a family drama set in the early post-Mao era, or, as it were, at the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). A central character in the three movies is a young daughter who is alienated from her family, especially her working-class parents. The parents find it difficult to understand their children who have grown up under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “reform and openness,” which has transformed a “puritan” Maoist socialist China into a country infested with all the malignant ills of new Chinese capitalism. In such a postsocialist family drama, the female protagonist is drawn into a traumatic conflict with her working-class father, who seems to embody a repressive old socialist regime in an economic and moral decline. In this chapter, I will analyze the three films in terms of what I would call “postsocialist trauma,” a psychological and emotional trauma that a working-class Chinese family has to endure to survive new Chinese capitalism. The story of Peacock is set in a small town in northern China in 1977, just one year after Mao’s death. It is divided into three sections, each concerning one of the children of the Gao family: the daughter Weihong, the elder brother Weiguo, and the younger brother Weiqiang. The film’s first section opens with a quiet scene of the Gao family eating a meal; the parents and three children sit around a tiny table in a long, open corridor shared with other families living in a storied apartment building . It is a moving scene of Chinese family union, which is repeated and “becomes one of the film’s strongest images.”1 In a medium shot that follows, we see Weihong standing alone in the corridor playing an accordion song that sounds like a pop Soviet Russian song from the 1950s. Weihong works at a daycare center, but she is fired after she accidentally drops a baby. Weihong’s parents pressure her to find another job, and she soon becomes a bottle washer in a local pharmaceutical plant. 130 China’s Lost Youth through the Lens of Independent Cinema Depressed by her new job and a dull life, Weihong seeks to escape from her home. A chance arises when a unit of paratroopers arrives in town looking for recruits. In this episode, Weihong is first seen lying on the rooftop of the storied building and dreaming. Then we hear the thunderous sound of a passing airplane and we find Weihong riding on a bicycle dashing into a vast open field, where the girl meets head-on with a group of female paratroopers that has just landed (in a reverse matching shot Weihong becomes one of those young women in uniform). A second later, Weihong confronts a handsome male officer whose white parachute had draped over her, which can be seen as a symbolic act of Weihong’s submission to the officer’s masculine charms—she falls in love with him all through the movie. In the film, however, this episode of love at first sight is staged like a divine call to Weihong from the heavens of Socialist Realism. Against a blue sky, a number of white parachutes unfold like a lotus flower, while young male and female paratroopers descend like those Soviet heroes from Socialist Realist painting widely available to the Chinese public in the 1950s. And the plane used in the movie can be identified as either a Russian-made An-2 Colt or its licensed Chinese version.2 On the other hand, I think, this beautifully shot episode pays a belated homage to Soviet socialism that was wholeheartedly adopted by Mao in the early 1950s when Weihong’s parents were born and grew up. Although Weihong is attracted to the young man in uniform, who seemingly comes from a “socialist” heaven, she fails to realize her dream with him. Like other girls in town, Weihong rushes to the office building with hope and anxiety to take a physical examination. Yet in this sequence, Weihong is shown entering the office in the reflection of a mirror hanging on the wall, where she stares at that officer who is also framed by...

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