moral responsibility

Just finished watching this movie 活着 (to live) by Zhang Yi Mou. I think the movie was two parts, I've only watched one of them, but that was enough to give me a strong impression of the director's intended message. The story is about a Chinese family during the Cultural Revolution. The family consists of a mother, father and a mute daughter. The parents worry that their only daughter won't be able to find a husband, but in time their fears are allayed when a strapping young man comes to sweep their daughter off her feet. I use the terms "strapping" and "sweep off her feet" loosely, because, after all the movie is set in China during the Cultural Revolution. Appropriate to the time period, the husband and wife wear very conservative PRC clothing: the husband is in what looks like a blue workers uniform and the wife wearing a jungle green one with red stars that symbolize her loyalty to the Communist Party. The wedding itself is a very modest affair, with the husband and wife to be pledging their allegiance to Chairman Mao and bowing before a newly painted red portrait of him on the wall outside their house.

As the movie progresses we see more and more instances of the effects of the Cultural Revolution, for example on the day of the expected birth of their child, the mute daughter's parents go to see the village head; in one room they chat about the fortune and great luck of the grandparent's to be, while in the other room, the village head's wife is weeping hysterically while she packs her husband's belongings. As they grandmother and grandfather to be are walking out of the village head's house, he explains to them that he is being summoned in for questioning by the party. During the Cultural Revolution such things were common—one's loyalty to the party was something that could be brought into question at any time. When they get to the hospital, the parents notice that there are no elderly doctors, the only people walking around where young girls wearing red armbands. In class we learned that during the Red Guard Movement—the first two years of the Cultural Revolution in which Mao called upon the youth to excise the bad elements (landlords, rightists, capitalists etc.)—Red Guards wore red armbands in order to show their status as participants in the revolution. The parents are not convinced that the young girls know what they are doing so they ask their son-in-law to go find an older doctor. He comes back with the doctor that had once delivered babies at the hospital that they were at; around the doctor's neck was a sign that labeled him as a bad element. The father noticed that the doctor was famished so he went out to get some mantou(buns) for him to eat. The hunger stricken doctor devours the buns in an instant, which leaves him in a state of delirium offset by the occasional hiccup. The father brings him some water to drink in order to help down the buns that he had eaten too fast. The camera then switches to the room that their daughter is in; the cry of a baby signals that their daughter had given birth. Everything seems perfectly find until the nurses try to clean up; in a series of dramatic cuts, the situation turns from happy bliss to dire desperation. The nurses were unable to cut the umbilical cord properly and as a result, the mother continues to bleed profusely; they try to get the experienced doctor to help out, but due to eating seven mantou and drinking water that caused them to expand in his stomach, he was completely incapacitated.

I found the last scene to be incredibly ironic: because the doctor was being publicly denounced and punished by the Red Guards, he had not eaten for three days—his inability to assist in the situation was determined as soon as he was given the mantou to eat. Because the young nurses had taken over the hospital, the mother to be was at the hands of people far too young and inexperienced to be delivering a baby. Thus the mother had almost 0% chance of survival. Perhaps the greatest irony of all was that the very Chairman Mao that the family had be praising and pledging their loyalty to was the cause of the Cultural Revolution that ultimately brought about the conditions in the hospital that caused their daughter's death. And yet the Chinese people still seem to praise him like a savior.

This Monday I went to learn how to cook 肉饼（roubing –also known as meat pancake）. While the meat pancake was the reason behind my nonstop throwing up and diarrhea five hours later, the conversation that came up while we were eating was quite insightful. My cooking teacher's husband and I started to discuss the Communist party and Chairman Mao. I can't quite remember how we got started on the conversation, but I do remember that he believed that Mao was a great leader because he was able to unite China; I have heard this argument many times before so it wasn't surprising in the least. Ah I remember now how we got into the conversation. It started with us talking about roubing—ironic how the topic starter eventually came back to have the last laugh with me running to the toilet to apologize for looking down on it. Roubing was the type of food that poor peasants ate, except without the rou because back in those days when uncle Hu (teacher's husband) was living in the countryside, as most young people did, meat was scarce. He said back in those days you had to eat your meat fast because if you didn't it would be gone before you knew it and then you would have to wait months until the next holiday. This conversation got us talking about the state of peasants in China and the fact that they sell their food at such a low price to the government that they can never really escape the poverty line.

Uncle Hu made the point that despite the widespread poverty in China, the peasants were not going hungry nowadays. China was united under Mao and has forever been better because of it—so believes Uncle Hu and millions of other Chinese like him. In his opinion, Mao was a true political genius. Using the concept of Communism to unite the predominantly peasant population, Chairman Mao was able to bring the entire country under his control—a feat that none were able to accomplish prior to him. During the period of land reform, farmers were given land from the government to ensure that they had a vested interest in the new government. With the peasants content, Mao could work on securing power and strengthening China. Eventually I had to mention the Cultural Revolution and the 30 million plus lives that were lost as a result of the violence and widespread hunger. Uncle Hu's response was: not everyone's perfect, by then Mao was an old senile man bent on securing power for himself; but in his opinion, Mao had undoubtedly had led China onto a path of prosperity by the act of uniting the country under him. When I think about it now, I can see why Chinese people are able to revere him so highly; after all he did unite China, even if it cost millions of lives in the process.

After a moment to think over Uncle Hu's argument, I decided to ask him why the loss of life didn't seem to matter to him. This spawned into a larger debate about the difference between American and Chinese politics which essentially differed on the issue of moral responsibility. The Chinese perspective is that a country should deal with its own issues before it goes and meddles in another country's issues. When I asked him about Darfur, he said that the situation was unfortunate, but that it still wasn't the responsibility of any country to step in; his parallel analogy was that of a Chinese father being reprimanded by the police for disciplining his child with violence. In Chinese culture, the father has dominion over his family's affairs, no other person has right to interfere; in a nutshell that's the Chinese approach to world politics. People that are born in times of unrest and chaos are unfortunate, but that doesn't mean we should go save them. His bottom line was: "If everybody began to interfere in the affairs of other countries, where would the world be?" At that point I had nothing more to say, I realized that they had a good point in denouncing America's tendency to meddle in the affairs of other countries. But at the same time I could not give up my belief that life is sacred; people have a responsibility to protect it.

In the end he chalked it up to a difference in upbringing and values. It seems so trivial a distinction, but I guess our individual cultures do have very different value sets and thus the environment in which American and Chinese children are fundamentally different.