FAMILY NARRATIVES AS NATIONAL ALLEGORIES

One of the first (and rather odd) things one notices about these popular resistance-war narratives is that very little is said about the massive violence of the war itself. The enemy is almost never seen. No Japanese appear in either Far Away Love or Eight Thousand Miles. In A Spring River, Japanese atrocities are shown in detail only in the relatively brief episodes involving Zhang Zhongliang's capture, the occupation of his native village, and the closing of the school for orphans in Shanghai. Postwar Japanese films like The Human Condition (Ningen no joken, d. Masaki Kobayashi, 1959) contain many more details about the brutality of Japanese forces in China.

The most obvious explanation for such an omission is that postwar filmmakers simply did not have the budgets or the technical means to recreate the sort of

---

large-scale battle scenes one normally associates with war epics. Instead, the directors of these works skillfully inserted bits of wartime documentary footage in a few strategic places to give a graphic sense of the terror that engulfed combatants and noncombatants alike. But it is not these explicit treatments of violence that make the three films successful and convincing as holocaust narratives.

Rather than focus on violence, these directors, and the many who followed their lead in 1947 and 1948, decided to emphasize the social consequences of protracted war. This appears to be what the postwar audience wanted. More specifically, all three films dwell almost exclusively on the fate of the family unit in the holocaust environment. Telling the story of the war in the form of family histories made sense in basic production terms. Postwar filmmakers had the means of executing such a plan. More important, however, the decision resonated with a long family-centered tradition of Chinese cinema.^[23] Nothing was more important in the mid-twentieth-century social structure of China than the family unit. And, more than anything else, ordinary people experienced the war as members of family groups.

All three films adopt the view that in experiential terms it was not the nation as a whole that suffered during the war, it was Chinese families that suffered. And the losses were staggering. Families were ripped apart and then reconfigured in a variety of unfamiliar ways. In Far Away Love, Yu Zhen loses her father, her brother, and her son. Morover, the war forces her to confront issues of legitimate and illegitimate authority in family life. In the end her marriage is destroyed. In Eight Thousand Miles, Jiang Lingyu's family disintegrates before her eyes. When she returns to her native village, her father is dead and the family dwelling has been sold. During the course of the war she loses all respect for her relatives in Shanghai, who fail to support her plan to join the resistance. Her cousin Jiarong becomes a war profiteer.

Wartime dreams about reuniting families are dashed when the war is over. Lingyu's family exists in name only. When Lingyu learns of her family's corrupt and exploitative postwar activities, she moves out and rejects her relatives. Indeed, when she turns to journalistic work, her own family becomes a target of her scathing investigative reporting.

Lingyu's attempt to start a family of her own is frustrated. She has a child, but it is by no means clear that she will live to see the child grow up. The prewar Chinese family seems to have no future. For people like Yu Zhen (in Far Away Love), Lingyu, and Libin, its role has been assumed by the collective surrogate family of friends and comrades that evolved in the interior during the war. It is this group that plays the nurturing and support roles normally associated with the consanguine family, and that commands the loyalty and respect of people like Yu Zhen, Lingyu, and Libin.

The account of wartime family breakup in A Spring River is even more devastating. This is because the fascinating protagonist, Zhang Zhongliang, is markedly different from the positive characters (Lingyu and Libin) that one encounters in

---

Eight Thousand Miles. The story of Zhang Zhongliang and his family is more interesting and more painful precisely because Zhang appears first in "Eight Years of Separation and Chaos" as a heroic figure. His heroism has two interrelated dimensions. First, he is an ardent patriot, willing to sacrifice to defend the nation from Japanese aggression. Second, despite his youth, he is an old-fashioned, Confucianstyle family man. He is devoted to his equally traditionalistic wife and son (promising that they will be together "forever") and profoundly filial in his interactions with his kindly mother. Zhang's excellent relations with his family are central to the subsequent development of the narrative. He is willing to sacrifice for the nation-state because, by doing so, he will be protecting and defending his family way of life. In this film (and in Eight Thousand Miles) the dominant vision that positive characters have of postwar life entails a "great reunion" that will bring decent families back to where they were in the prewar period. Victory meant family restoration.

One of the greatest tragedies of the war is that for millions of people the "great reunion" never happened. There was no return to prewar modes. Indeed, in Far Away Love, hopes for a family reunion are dashed well before the end of the war. The case of Zhang Zhongliang in A Spring River is particularly poignant (and more complex than the cases of Lingyu and Libin in Eight Thousand Miles) because he is a "good" man who went "bad" during the war itself. The visions he had of a "great reunion" are not simply denied to him (as they were to Lingyu and Libin), but he abandons them once he becomes entangled in a web of wartime corruption, greed, and moral depravity. Most disturbing of all, it is by no means clear at the end of the narrative that the corrupted hero can be reformed and returned "home" to his mother and son. The whole meaning of the term "family" has been distorted beyond recognition when Zhang, confused and panicky, is shown together on (of all days) National Day with his prewar wife, his wartime wife, and his postwar "secret" wife.