Before The Flood

Up the Yangtze Directed by Yung Chang at IFC Center

Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze is like a tragic fairytale. The Three Gorges Dam is a feat of engineering whose massive water displacement threatens the homes of farming families who live along the banks of the Yangtze. In the ultimate enactment of the Chinese government’s motto that “the small family must sacrifice to help the big family,” one such family sends their teenaged daughter, Yu Shui, to work aboard a tour boat company as they gather their modest belongings and prepare to relocate. The ominously named Farewell Cruises offers their wealthy, mostly foreign clientele a chance to see the land along the Yangtze before it’s flooded completely.

At times it’s hard to believe Up the Yangtze wasn’t scripted. The argument Yu Shui has with her parents the night before she leaves— her mother refuses to see her off, because, she jokes, “I can’t read, I’ll get the wrong boat”— is out of a Dickens novel, as is the parents’ visit to the ship’s lavish dining room, diametrically opposed to the one-room shack the five members of the their family share. Chang follows the Titanic model of ship-as-class-cross-section: above, Americans clink the champagne classes Yu Shui has slaved to wash below decks.

Chang also could not have asked for two better main subjects: while Yu Shui is shy and sullen, her counterpart, Chen Bo Yu, another teenaged crew member, is cocky and arrogant. His employ is the casual pocket-change endeavors of an American high school student on summer vacation, while Yu Shui, it becomes clearer and clearer, as we watch her father’s emaciated frame carry furniture on his back up the steep hill to their new home, could be her family’s only hope for the future.

With all these lyrical elements in play, Chang’s extraneous voiceover narration is baffling, and all but unbearable. A Chinese-Canadian, he interjects, with pretentious authority, anecdotes about his grandfather’s life in China. This self-absorbed move shows a lack of awareness for the power of his own film. In one interview, a merchant who was forced to relocate bursts into tears and explains, “Being a human is hard, but being a common person in China is even more difficult.” Surely a moment like this, which is supposedly what documentary filmmaking is all about, expresses truth in a way no pre-fabricated speech about the beauty of the old Yangtze could ever hope to.