Educational Media Reviews Online

First-time director Ban Zhongyi became aware of the existence in China of former 'comfort women' in 1992. He resolved to chronicle the lives of people in postwar China, and to bring their stories to Japan where he had been living as an exchange student since 1987. After meeting Zheng Shunyi in Hunan Province, and deeply moved by her life story, he set about to create a permanent record of her life. Where is Grandma Zheng’s Homeland? is this personal account of the life of a former comfort woman as much as it is a personal journey for the director in his attempt to bring a life to the screen.

Zheng Shinyi, her Chinese name, was 71 during the making of this video and terminally ill with lung cancer. After meeting with her in her village and hearing about her life, when at 17 she was tricked into leaving her town in Korea and taken to Hunan Province, where she was forced to submit to sexually comfort Japanese servicemen. After the Japanese surrender in 1945 she was abandoned and left homeless. Eventually she met a soldier from Kuomintang and married him. They built a family and had grandchildren. She did however express a desire to go back to Korea and was finally allowed to visit her birthplace when China and Korea normalized diplomatic relations.

Her trip back to Korea is also covered by various media as their cameras are glimpsed in the frame, and she is seen visiting sights she only remembered in her dreams. Her death in Seoul before being able to return to her children and grandchildren in China caused months of bureaucratic problems preventing her remains from being returned to China. However, after the video had been edited, her remains were finally returned to China and Ban was able to shoot that footage which he includes after all the credits have rolled by, as a sort of postscript to Zheng’s life and death.

Influenced perhaps by Frederick Wiseman’s style of beginning a scene by showing exteriors before focusing on human interaction, Ban Zhongyi produces a document that could use some tightening up. It is clearly too long at 90 minutes. Not being able to cut or shorten scenes is a first time director’s usual mistake. In this case, consciously including too many scenes of the grandchildren playing is gratuitous as is the first scene in Korea where Susan, a childhood friend, does not remember Shinyi from childhood. Had only the scene where they meet face to face and she still doesn’t remember her old friend been included, it would have had the same impact and been enough. The videography is also at times amateurish with several interior exposure problems, but as a personal document it is acceptable in the way that technical errors in home movies are acceptable.

This is a rather ambitious project for a first-time director and while we understand that the video was originally intended for a Japanese audience who have a better historical understanding of the Japanese invasion, and the effects of WWII on China and Korea, the nuances of the history are lost to North American audiences who may require many more historical facts than provided in this documentary. Ban’s work is not a history lesson, nor does it reveal much in terms of societal evolution, but, it does provide an excellent anthropological snapshot of a contemporary Hunan Province village and one of its families. In Japanese, Chinese and Korean with EngIish subtitles. Recommended for academic areas in Women’s Studies, World War II History and Asian Studies.

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