The Other Half

China is often depicted by the traditional media as a nation with a booming economy, a thriving middle class, and an unlimited future. We're led to expect that it soon will become the world's unchallenged economic and geopolitical superpower.

But there is another side to that narrative, a story of how the other half lives, those many millions who are caught up in the turbulent backwash of industrial and commercial growth. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to see a small masterpiece of a movie called Ling yi ban ("The Other Half") at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The film, made inside China in 2006, tells a compelling story, seen through the eyes of a young woman trying to make her way through a maze of societal dead ends that confront her at every turn. Trying to find a decent job, dealing with a troubled boyfriend, fending off groping or overbearing suitors, negotiating a hilly terrain of generational differences with her nagging mother, and, finally, fleeing a deadly chemical spill, she does her best, as we all must do in our own circumstances.

Few people may have the chance to see this movie, at least not in a theater, but you may be able to rent it on DVD. As a movie buff (and as an observer of contemporary world society), I strongly recommend it.

Using natural lighting, ambient sounds, and a jerky or sometimes stationary hand-held camera, the director, Liang Ying, skillfully mixes a blend of professional and nonprofessional actors into a stunning triumph. Sometimes portrayed as quasi-documentary or shot as cinéma vérité, and at other times as a more straightforward low-budget melodrama, this highly unconventional effort shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does. Stick with the strange sound track and deliberately murky photography long enough, and eventually the power of what you're witnessing, in totality, may overwhelm you.

I had the experience of being completely consumed by this film, the essence of what is called a "suspension of disbelief." I was in southern China -- Szechuan -- breathing polluted air, stifled by oppressive humidity, worn down by an incompetent strangling bureaucracy. I struggled, as our heroine struggled, to find a way out, to escape the dismal dead end that the other half must face each and every day of their lives. For me, of course, escape was as near as my theater exit. For her and for them, it's not so easy.

It's important for those of us lucky enough to live in progressive, modernized western societies not to take our good fortune for granted, and also not to forget or underestimate the difficulties faced by so many others.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics

Comments

[the oakster1]

in one ear . . . right out the other; i'm not going to resay everything I've said of why we shouldn't confine humanity on earth just because of earthly problems;

It's trully amazing that these guys are going to go to such extreme solutions and talk about keeping people from combining things that don't belong like the info, commercial, and military sectors, but bring up religious anti-sciece throughout hunanities history, and they start playing all their vagueness games; i'm not going to reiterate all the details again and again.

These guys just cannot let humanity get away from the fear mongering that comes from gangsters and copland situations which will destroy b.s. all of humanity ocnfined on earth forever. THere's only one reason; because they are irrationalists. They are as socially bound up with irrationality as Bill Joy is . . . as Plato and Eusebius were who said, "it's o.k. to let the general population believe in superstitions if they are so hellbound to have it; it gives us more money and reason to enslave them!"(it's the gist of what Eusebius quotes in his "Preparation for the Gospel).

I've said enough; i shouldn't have to say anything; if people don't see why it isn't a good idea to be socio-politically bound up with anti-science past, then it is because they are, and this is the solution to the Fermi Paradox.

[the oakster1]

. . . and oh yes, once again, you want the earth and to be bound up here on earth forever with all these anti-scientists, then you can have it! I don't care! But to b.s. and demonize anybody who wants to get away is a crime against humanity.