The best documentary we’ve seen on TV this year, “Last Train Home,” was shown on the Bio Channel recently, and moved viewers with its extraordinary story about an ordinary family of migrant workers in China. Their story was painful to watch, because the parents had given up staying with their young kids to work in a sweatshop in a big city to earn money for the children’s education. Yet the kids didn’t appreciate their sacrifice.
The teen daughter felt unloved and lashed out at them. The greatest irony was, she stopped studying to become a migrant worker like her parents.
Instead of improving, the family’s fortune remained sadly stagnant. So what was the parents’ supreme sacrifice for?
The docu-drama was made even more poignant by the fact that it wasn’t “acted,” but lived. One wonders how its makers were able to achieve such a high level of verisimilitude, with the family members baring their emotions with ruthless and unflinching honesty.
The reality drama peaked when the teenager shocked her father by uttering cuss words, prompting him to hit her. After that unnerving encounter, the distraught parents stonily viewed the waste and wasteland that their shared and now sundered life had become. They spoke only a few words, but the sadness they felt was deep and truly chilling.
Kindness, nobility
A subsidiary character who emerged strongly in the storytelling was the kids’ grandmother, who had agreed to take care of them ever since they were babies. Her desire for her grandchildren to improve their lot in life was even stronger than their parents’, because her own father and mother were peasants who had absolutely nothing.
The grandmother may have been the most impoverished member of the family, but she exuded a natural kindness and even nobility that was deeply moving to observe.
The other supporting character was the younger son, who was more tractable and obedient than his older sister, yet evinced signs of nascent rebelliousness that could make their parents sadder in the near future than they already were.
Most poignant of all, “Last Train Home” tells its story within the tumultuous context of “modernizing” life in China, with its many complex changes, pressures and conundrums.
The traditional Chinese family structure is only one of the victims of the “new” China, which values productivity and prosperity over tradition, and is prepared to sunder some of its time-honored institutions to enhance its national GDP.
The documentary thus ends up as a cautionary tale that warns other modernizing cultures and societies of the many dangers involved in embarking on a relentless and sped-up journey to tomorrow today. If the traditional family is the glue and anchor of society, what will keep it together when that vital connection and unifying force is gutted in favor of more expedient objectives?
What, indeed?