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In this essay, I want to first discuss some of the immediate responses/thoughts that I (and my partner since we watched together) had after watching Trinh T. Minh-ha's film What about China and before I got to her essay. I will then reflect on these immediate thoughts with engagement of Trinh Minh-ha's essay “Outside In Inside Out” (1989).
To begin with, I do appreciate the attempt to de-essentialize the idea of “China” and the question of "What is China?", and especially her introduction of the question “Whose China?”, which is a question that has not been asked enough. I appreciate the fact that she addresses China in a way that decentralizes Beijing - the period of Mao and cultural revolution instead hauntingly lurks in the living environment, on the walls as prints and sprayed slogans, and as utilitarian objects. The focus of the film rests in areas, cultures, and architectural structures mostly in the south of China, or in words and memories of immigrants and diasporic members away from mainland. I also appreciate the film’s attempt to decentralize Han-ethnicity’s position in the representation of China, by addressing narratives and memories of ethnic minorities such as Hakka, Yi, and so on (if I recall correctly). These focuses are of course interconnected, as many of the ethnic minorities reside in the sourthern part of China, subject to the violence of sinification and ethnic repression, which drove many of them abroad in diaspora. The majority of diasporic Han in the U.S. also mainly comes from the southern part of China. The film thus strikes me as an attempt to radically destabilize the concept of China.
Now onto the 'negative' part of my and my partner's response. The immediate response to the film is that as a film that addresses "What about China?", it strikes us (both grew up in China) as at once very familiar and very strange. The familiar impression comes from the images and folk songs from Southern China, where we both come from. The strange impression comes from the choice of music and the selection of video footage. Some of the comments that we had when watching the film are: "the music choice is so funny and sometimes ridiculous", "we are probably not the audience of this film (judging from the music, which often times registered different connotations for us who are influenced by pop culture)", "doesn't this music sound like some kind of orientalist film would use?", "what the hell is going on with this young woman's voice that chants musical terms in Chinese terms that sound so funny?", "oh this is a 2022 film? Why is she making this film now?", and notably, "-is Trinh Minh-ha Chinese? -No I believe she's Vietnamese and then moved to the U.S. -Then why is she making this film? -I don't knoow. Maybe she has some Chinese lineage in her family? -This looks like a film made by an outsider."
These conversations got me thinking about the dividing line of insider and outsider, which I was glad to see also popping up in Trinh Minh-ha's essay. Were I to make a documentary film about China, as someone who was born in China, Shanghai, who has lived in this country for 18 years and then stayed in the U.S. for 7 years of studying, am I insider-enough to do that? The languages that I speak are mutually contaminated. Now is hard for me to fluently engage in an all-Chinese conversation (especially a critical one) without occassional slip of English words, as I acquired many of the related terms in an English setting. The way I consider things is also very different from those who have never received American education. I have been geologically distant from the physical reality of China, entirely for three years. I am Han ethnicity. I come from a middle-class family in one of the major cities in China. Which qualifies me as an insider and which disqualifies? I also thought of Chinatowns in the U.S., and my encounter of those early generations of Chinese diaspora/immigrants. Chinatowns also gave me that similar feeling of at once familiar and strange. While recognizing familiar cultural symbols in Chinatowns, they are also physical structures that harbor the newly 'mutated' Chinese diaspora culture that won't be recognized as "authentic Chinese" for mainlanders, which integrated the immigrants' nostalgic memories of China and American popular imagination of China. Is this not China? Does geological distance, nationality, ethnicity, class, language define authenticity (a question that I also found in Trinh Minh-ha's essay)?
Eventually, I came to realize that this idea of "authenticity" is the ultimate trap. It lives on the labels of those artifacts sold in American stores, or billboards/menus of restaurants for an "authentic Chinese experience" or "authentic Chinese food." It also lives, on the other side of the globe, as "真" or "正统" (the correct lineage) that describes a han ethnicity's China, as a rhetoric deployed by the discourse of the ruling political party, claiming a historical, cultural, national, and ethnic authority that defines what really is China.
I found some of my thoughts corresponding to Trinh Minh-ha's criticism on the making of ethnographic film by the "insider" that derives from the "outsider"'s desire. To have a supposedly "insider" to "inform" the "outsider" of the culture, it assumes that the insider is able to properly represent their "indigenous" culture, seemingly assigning them some kind of authority and legitimacy. According to Trinh, ultimately what is problematic is the idea that there is a certain essential nature of a culture that needs to captured, and it can be captured by its "native", which draws a clear distinction between the "native"/"the insider" and the outsider, stressing and even reinforcing the sense of otherness. As she points out, the contempoary context of immigration and diaspora further complicates this question about "WHO can correctly represent a culture, who has such authority, and who counts as 'native' and who doesn't?"
However, this doesn't mean that I don't have doubts about Trinh's film and her argument. One question that I have is that, as we de-essentialize the concept of China (for instance) and dispel the previously assumed position of authority, can we still carve out space for criticism for a film like Trinh's film? Second, recalling Homi Bhabha's discussion of cultural differences in “The Commitment to Theory” - is Trinh dealing with difference in a similar or different approach as Homi Bhabha? Third, towards the end of Trinh's essay, it seems that she advocates for a strong sense of self-reflexivity of the filmmaker in the film, which seems to be missing in her 2022 film. Am I misunderstanding the final part of the essay?
Film:
What About China? (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2022)
Essay:
Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989), “Outside In Inside Out,” in Questions of Third Cinema (ed. J. Pines & P. Willemen), London: BFI, 133-149.