Review of Last Train Home (2009) by V H — 30 Oct 2010

I recently returned from a month-long trip backpacking around China. Much of my travel was done by train, with journeys ranging from about 12 hours to a whopping 45 hours. Luckily, I find train travel to be quite enjoyable.

My trip was timed to get me out of China a few days before what's known as "Golden Week", a week-long national holiday which begins around October 1st. Almost every traveler I met had timed their trips similarly, as we'd all read warnings that trains would be fully booked during the entire period, making travel damn near impossible. I imagined that the entire Chinese population must be in perpetual motion during this time, millions of happy holidaymakers crisscrossing the country willy-nilly. How else to explain the trains being full throughout the entire period rather than just on the first and last days? After watching the documentary "Last Train Home", this suddenly makes perfect sense.

There are actually two Golden Weeks in China. "Last Train Home" focuses on the other, apparently more-celebrated one, which coincides with Chinese New Year in January or February. According to the film, there are over 200 million migrant workers in China who've left their homes in rural areas to go to work in factories in distant cities. The only time they're ever able to visit their families is during the New Year's holiday. The only means of transportation they can afford is the train. And the country is so huge that trains often take several days to reach their destinations. My perception that people must be spending the entire week flitting from on vacation spot to the next turned out to be completely off-base. Most people are just trying to go home. And by the time they finally get there, it's just about time to turn around and go back.

"Last Train Home" spotlights one particular family of migrant workers in which the parents left the family farm to work in a distant city when their now-teenage daughter was still a baby. The daughter, Qin, along her younger brother, are now in the care of their aging grandmother. The parents work long hours in a clothing factory, sharing a tiny apartment and sending most of their earnings home to their family. Their big hope is that their children will study hard enough to get into college so that they, too, won't end up working in factories.

The film follows the family through several annual holiday visits during which relationships between the parents and their children, who barely know them, become increasingly strained. Qin resents her parents for abandoning them and finds it hypocritical when her mother professes her guilt about leaving the kids behind but still jumps right back on the train at the end of each holiday. She soon leaves school to find a job in a factory herself, causing her parents even more anguish.

The train is a recurring presence throughout the film. The first year, by the time the parents are able to get to the station to buy tickets, they're already all sold out, forcing them to return day after day hoping for a cancellation. The next year is even worse. This time a snowstorm has shut down train travel throughout the country and Qin and her parents, along with thousands of other desperate travelers are stranded outside of the station for several days hoping to be able to eventually get home. Take the chaotic scene at the average American airport during a holiday snowstorm and multiply it 1000. Forget about Army cots; these people aren't even allowed into the station.

I really enjoyed this movie, in part because of its "Hey, I was just there" appeal. I watched with an anticipatory sense of vacation nostalgia, on constant lookout for things I recognized, be they the tiny pink train tickets, the oversized plaid plastic zippered "suitcases", or the ubiquitous instant bowl noodles which are the Chinese traveler's staple.

This helped me to overlook the movie's main flaw, which is that many of the scenes feel a bit staged. Though part of the reason the dialogue often seems unnatural may due to the translation, the mother's utterances, in particular, often seem inauthentic. It's not that I don't believe that she actually means the things she's saying - mainly that she feels guilty about having left her children -- it's just that it's hard to imagine that the camera would just happen to keep catching her expressing this same sentiment to her husband some 16 years after they made the decision. And the plastered-on half-smirk he wears in most of the scenes - as if he's trying not to burst out laughing from self-consciousness - only added to my unease.

There's one volatile scene that's definitely not staged - Qin actually yells at the camera that we're finally seeing the real her - where the raw emotions on display are in stark contrast to the rest of the film. Maybe it's just too much to expect regular people to be able to act "naturally" when there's a camera a few feet away from them.

I'm also a big skeptical - or at least curious - as to how the filmmaker came to select a family whose daughter just happened to drop out of school shortly after filming began, giving it an extra dramatic punch. Is this whole thing actually a reenactment, or did the director just get really lucky?

But whether this particular family is authentic or not, the plight of Chinese migrant workers is real, the lure of new-economy factory jobs causing societal upheaval is real, and the over-taxed train system which links the old and new Chinas together is most definitely real.

I recommend both seeing this film and travelling by train in China. Just be sure to buy your tickets in advance, bring plenty of instant bowl noodles, and whatever you do, don't travel during Golden Week.