Educational Media Reviews Online

Filmmaker Christine Choy provides bits and pieces of autobiographical history as she revisits her childhood home in Shanghai and various other places of personal interest, including Hong Kong and the United States. Her quest is to reclaim a house in Shanghai her mother owned, and we follow her path, although it is tortuous and difficult to fathom much of the time. She interviews people currently living in the house, their neighbors, childhood friends she is able to locate, her mother, fortune tellers, bureaucrats, and others, from whom we learn a little about what it was like to live in Shanghai at the end of World War II and beyond, under the Communist regime; events of the more recent past during the Cultural Revolution; and still more recently, how these people have fared in the decade since Ms. Choy began searching for her former home in 1992. Her mother left China and emigrated to the United States before the Cultural Revolution, mortgaging the house to get the money for passage. Eventually, we learn that she left in haste without the documents that might have enabled Ms. Choy to establish a proper claim, so the government took ownership of the house and is unlikely to give it back.

The people Ms. Choy finds and interviews in this documentary range from simple folk who make few comments and give her very little help to well educated professors of English and music, who furnish interesting sound bites as they describe their experiences living under the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, but who also lack the information she seeks. Still, she persists until she finds nearly all the individuals she remembers, now living in different places and pursuing their daily lives in a variety of fields. Interspersed with the interview segments are street scenes, entertainments (including a pair of roller-skaters who execute amazing routines for several seconds), informal concerts, old family photographs, and numerous shots of the apartment house where Ms. Choy spent her early years. The material is largely disorganized, cutting from place to place and person to person, and going back and forth in time without much to help the viewer put places, people, or events into a cohesive whole. The "story" takes several viewings and a great deal of effort to piece together.

The camera work is good most of the time, although some shots are included strictly for their "artsy" value, and add little of real value. The audio is muffled from time to time and it is hard to understand what people are saying either because they speak heavily accented English or because English titles are absent. When titles are present, they are easy to read. Individual segments are paced well, but they fail to hang together. The subject matter is highly personal and idiosyncratic, limiting its appeal.

The program does not appear to provide much "meat" for Asian studies collections, nor does it shed a great deal of light on other subjects such as Chinese contemporary history, life in Shanghai, or that city's real estate, although interesting moments lurk among its jagged slices of life.