Saturday August 16, 2014

(Spoilers)

 

I have the movie Locke on my mind this morning. I enjoyed it. It’s a very thoughtful movie – something that you could discuss afterwards for a long time. At least, I could. I forget about most movies almost before they’re over. Movies like this stick with me.

My one complaint – if I had to come up with one – is that it wasn’t long enough. I wanted to stick with the cement pour right through the day. Perhaps this betrays my inner nature too much, but I was far more interested in his job and the concrete pour than I was in his family troubles or his problem with that crazy woman Bethan. My sense was that Locke himself didn’t care that much about his family. I got the feeling that he wasn’t interested in soccer at all, and he only pretended to be to have something to share with his sons, that he was doing it only to be a good father. As for his wife, it took me about ten seconds of hearing her voice to think to myself, “Forget her.” My experience is that women generally don’t understand or relate to the idea of work and getting a job done. You can be in the middle of a relationship nightmare and having to talk endlessly about your feelings, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have to get up in two hours and go to work and get things done. And this dude had, as we were told several times, the largest pour in Europe to deal with. If his wife can’t understand that and see the value in his work, well, that’s too bad. I wonder if other people had the same reaction.

As I said, I dealt with the relationship side of things pretty quickly and had an opinion about that. But the story about the cement pour was only partially completed. He’d dealt with the last minute wrinkles in terms of preparation, but the movie ended long before the pour had even begun. I wanted him to see it through to the end. To be totally honest, I wasn’t 100% convinced about the cement pour. I know nothing about large scale construction projects, but it felt a bit too simplistic to have just Locke and that dude Donal being the only players. My sense is that there would be a very large team involved and that they would be much more professional than Donal. So if Locke had to leave for some reason, there would still be ten or fifteen or twenty competent team members to step up and see things through. Am I wrong about that? I mean, I worked with cement pours myself during summer jobs in construction. We were just pouring a basement, a driveway, or the foundations of a house, and the amount of prep we did was astounding and the stress levels were through the roof. It seems that too much responsibility was on Locke’s shoulders alone. I also wondered if the numbers added up. I can’t remember how many trucks he mentioned, but it was something like 218, and that didn’t seem to be enough to qualify as the largest pour in Europe. But that is just nitpicking. It doesn’t affect the quality of the movie at all. It was a character study first and foremost, and that, plus the cinematic quality, was what appealed to me. It had some car porn elements, too. I loved the shots of the luxury of the interior of that car. I’m so out of touch that I’ve never even sat in a modern car like that.

I also watched a documentary from China called Last Train Home. I read somewhere that the literal translation of the Chinese is “Homeward Train”, and that seems like a more accurate title. But I guess Last Train Home gave the film a hint of suspense and drama. But that is a bit of a trick. They were never fighting to get the “last” train home. That was never part of the story. They were just trying to get any train home. And, of course, it wasn’t just a train. After the train, they had to take a bus and a ferry. And there were probably a half a dozen intermediate steps in there involving local transportation. Overall, it was a nightmare. Again, it betrays too much of my inner nature, but the whole time I was witnessing their terrible struggle to get home for Chinese New Year, all I could think was “Why bother?” I would get to the train station, take one look at the crowds and say, “Fuck it” and turn around. I wouldn’t even bother trying. Sure, this couple had a son and daughter and mother back on the farm, but who cares? The price was far too high. I guarantee most people have never seen anything like what happened at the train station on their second or third trip home. The word nightmare doesn’t even begin to cover it. As they mention at the beginning of the film, the trip home for Chinese New Year in China is the largest human migration in history.

A lot to think about in this film, too. It’s a documentary, so it’s no surprise that it rings true. But it rings true for me, too, in terms of what I’ve experienced in Taiwan and China. The people in this family seemed never to speak to each other in any natural way. And the mother and father only spoke to their son and daughter in terms of their school life – telling them over and over and over again how they should study hard. That’s all they ever said. The pressure on these kids was non-stop and unbearable. Their daughter would just stand there and look down the entire time, not speaking and not reacting in any way. To me, she looked like a ticking time bomb. And, of course, she was. The pressure was increased tenfold because the mother and father made the choice to leave the farm and go to the city and get terrible jobs so that they could send money back for their kids to go to school. And they never let their kids forget that all this sacrifice and hard work and misery was for them. And that put so much more pressure on them. The kids, of course, would react by thinking that it wasn’t their fault. They didn’t force them to go to the city and take these jobs. In fact, the emotional heart of the story was that the children hated and resented their parents for leaving them. The parents thought they were making a wonderful sacrifice for their children, but the children didn’t see it that way. They didn’t want that sacrifice. They wanted their parents to stay and be parents and not abandon them. The daughter in particular felt that all of this pressure was a prison – taking away any freedom she might have had. And school was also a prison – a place where she was told what to do all the time. So she rebelled and went off to live her own life. Her parents kept telling her that she had to study hard so she could go to the best schools and then get a good job to make money. But she wasn’t interested in that. She wanted freedom. Very interesting film.

The making of the documentary was also interesting. It covered a great deal of time – maybe ten years? And the filmmaker was struggling desperately all the time to get enough money to complete it. I read in one place that she (not sure if it was a she or a he) got one million dollars from a Canadian group. The film was supported by a Canadian group, but I think the one million had to be a typo. I’m guessing the grant was for 100,000 dollars, not a million.

There was a lot more going on in the film than just the story of this family. It was the story of China and the world in a way. There was one telling moment during which a group of poor factory workers were watching the televised opening of the Olympics in Beijing. The Chinese commentary was going on and on about how this or that part of the ceremony demonstrated the beauty and history of the Chinese culture. The people watching all this had tears in their eyes, but there was such a stark contrast between the power and luxury of the opening ceremonies and the lives of all these millions of people working in the factories. There was also the expected commentary on how these Chinese factories were all making products for export to the West. In the garment factories, they joke about how fat Americans are. They are sewing jeans with 40-inch waistlines and laughing at how fat Americans are. Another guy talks about how his factory makes raquets. They are all the premium brands in the West like “Head”, and they all leave China and go to rich countries. Then the economic crisis hit in 2008, and we see how this affected the factories in China and the people that worked there.

I was surprised that this film did not seem to help the daughter out at all. I read that some rich woman in Beijing stepped up after seeing the film and offered to pay for the education of the son. But the daughter, Qin, is still wandering from city to city working as a waitress and occasionally trying to go to vocational school. Lots of people left comments on Facebook and other places asking where they could donate money to help the family. But there didn’t seem to be any such fund to donate to.

While in Taiwan, I saw a documentary about Filipinas working in Taiwan. The story was about what you’d expect – about the difficult lives of these women and how poor their families are and how hard it was for them to get a job in Taiwan and how little money they make etc, etc. But when the documentary was over, who stood up and gives a speech in front of the audience? The director and the women from the film! There was so much publicitiy surrounding the documentary that these women were now stars and were flying around the world making appearances, and I’m sure they got lots of money. So why didn’t this happen for Qin? It’s a real mystery. She’s a natural. She’s the hero of the film and very likeable. She’s even somewhat pretty. I just assumed that the documentary would transform her life in many ways. But as far as I can make out, nothing happened. Weird.

Not much else going on, I suppose. I’ve had a terrible pain in my jaw, and that is still there. It seems to be an infection in the lymph nodes or tendons in my neck. At least it isn’t an abcess. That’s my nightmare. This kind of lymph node infection is something that comes and goes for no known reason. (I’ve got an insane street person leaning on the window right now and staring at me. His face is about a foot and a half away from mine, but, thankfully, on the other side of the glass. I haven’t looked at him yet, so I don’t know how insane he really is.) Now, of course, every time I feel any kind of a twinge anywhere, I think I’m having a stroke. That doctor actually asked me if I was experiencing any pain in my neck or difficulty turning my head. As it happened, I WAS feeling pain in my neck at that time. It was this same pain that I have now. But I lied and said that I wasn’t. I didn’t want to give him any more ammunition for his theory that I was experiencing a stroke. I was pretty sure that the pain I was feeling was not related. It was in the tendons and lymph nodes – more like a normal sore neck from sleeping the wrong way or something. And he was thinking of a pain in the neck from a blood clot blocking the flow of blood or a burst artery filling the skull with blood and putting pressure on the brain.

In the past, I’ve joked about old people talking about nothing but the various ailments they’re suffering. (And the weather.) I’ve thought about this from time to time, and I’ve been making a conscious effort to train my brain to set aside health issues and just let them be separate. It’s a natural process, and I’ve seen it in myself in the last decade or so. It’s not like a sudden shift where one day you’re healthy and the next you’re sick. No, it creeps in. It’s slow, but steady. For most of my life, I’ve had virtually no health concerns (other than stomach problems and teeth stuff). But in the last decade or so, little things have crept in. I’ve suddenly been going in to see doctors, doing this or that. They’re generally small issues, but they led to more trips to the hospital in the last couple of years than in my entire previous life put together. I can see how this creeping concern for medical stuff can grow until it takes over your whole life. The irony is that it takes over your life at a time when you are slowly dying. Anyway, my point is that I’m trying to flip a mental switch whereby I just deal with medical problems but I don’t let them dictate my life or my thoughts. I don’t want to become what I’ve seen with older retired men in coffee shops – practically a medical roundtable – talking endlessly about nothing but what was wrong with them. And their entire life was a routine built around their next doctor’s appointment. So I want to pledge to myself that medical issues won’t become the central passion of my life and write about them endlessly – unless it involves a good story of a trip to an insane third world hospital.

Tags: Beijing, China, job, Last Train Home, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Taiwan