"The mountain goddess if she is still there
Will marvel at a world so changed."
-Swimming, Mao Zedong
“I came to Oʻahu to get educated, instead I lost my innocence.”
-George Helm
Over the past three years or so, I've been saving scraps of writing about how Jia has functioned, especially in his post-hometown/post-blacklist career, as a profoundly ecological filmmaker, with the hopes of putting together an essay about it once I'd found the right structure for it. With this…
The struggle to place the shared experience of a queer life (together) between the spaces of a heteronormative routine. Its ending lies somewhere beyond hope or despair—it felt like I was seeing them slide into an acceptance of this asynchronous love, fractured by time and circumstance, and mended in equal capacity by the wordlessness of physical contact. On the one hand, an unsparing depiction of the day-to-day oppression that threatens to tear queer love apart, perhaps without end, and on the other hand, the affirmation that even despite this, queer love can and will persist.
For how minimalist it is, this movie packs a huge punch.
Before my sophomore year of high school, I went to China for a few weeks with my parents. We stayed with my grandparents in Qidong. At the time, they lived in an incredibly shabby apartment—residents don't pay a maintenance fee and the whole building is left to crack and crumble. They had bought a new apartment in a nearby development that was nearing completion, however, and were planning to move there in the near future.
Initially, my grandparents suggested we…
