A shrine in the cave might be the last vestige of China these silent men and women ever lay their eyes on, if prayer works and keeps them protected from the occasion for another shrine; the ceremonial kind, erected in honor of their memory. In pairs, wave after wave, the escapees bow before an altar, and leave behind an incense stick that burns like a fuse. They assemble outside the cave under a cloak of weak starlight and wait until everybody makes their peace with "kami", then it's a short, but arduous walk along the shoreline to the harbor, where a tugboat is moored, and the exodus can officially get on the way.
Sometimes a prayer has no answer. Sometimes the best laid plains can blow up in your face.
Hong Yungsheng(Long Duan) lost a friend on that ill-fated boat. Recently deported from America, "Younger Brother"(the nickname he largely goes by) rides a riderless moped through his modest neighborhood with the self-assurance of someone who has been abroad. Forced to live at his ancestral home with "Big Brother"(Yiwei Zhao) and his wife, Hong doesn't feel the shame of co-dependence like how the elder sibling says a grown man should, which is self-evident by his charge's non-chalant carriage as he helps himself to food and drink like a V.I.P. in degraded trappings. "Big Brother" instigates a fight, triggered by Hong's seeming entitlement to his dead friend's wheels; an acrruement of wealth that adds to the first born's emasculation, which began when the second boy went to the states and had an American son, while he remained home, impotent, in both, the figurative and literal sense of the word. Having seen the west, Hong revisits his old haunts like an impostor, so it's only appropriate that he hangs around with Yan Shu(Wu Ruifang), an actress, a person who trades in masquerade, who acknowledges that her friend is "strange". It's not meant to be an insult. She wants to be estranged, too.
"Er di" documents a country on the brink of conversion, when the economic miracle was still incubating in a third world cocoon, as media communiques dispatched news of ongoing negotiation talks between Japan's bitch and the World Trade Organization. But Hong doesn't have the luxury of extrapolative faculties at his ready disposal; face to faces waiting for the runaway émigré to expound on the evils of defection, the neo-American wearing a China man's mask, says nothing. The government official hired Hong to teach a workshop that promotes China as an alternative to the "land of milk and honey" for young people who might be tempted into seafaring temptation. Hong never engages in anti-government sloganeering, but his silence is the new rebel yell, and it carries the inference that he'd rather be stateside than pushing an agenda of state-sanctioned propaganda. But here's the rub. Is what the government pushing, really propaganda? The filmmaker can see what his protagonist can't. A great leap forward, a real great leap forward, that had nothing in common with Mao Zedong's plan for economic revitilization(1957-1960), was just over the horizon, but the voice on the radio goes unnoticed in the Hong household. Since the news isn't editorialized, nobody understands that a fluttering superpower will emerge from the hemorhaging cocoon.
Aficionados of Chinese films charged with political dissidence, for example, Tian Zhaungzhaung's "Lan feng zheng", will be surprised by the quiet way that "Er di" criticizes America, a riposte the film uses as an answer to Hong's indifference towards his homeland that's conveyed through the metaphorical value of Shenfang. When "Big Brother" kidnaps Hong's son from his mother's family, the filmmaker demonstrates how the superpower subordinates a lesser country such as China(as it was before they joined the WTO in 2001), through the progressions of a stolen day in which father and son are briefly reunited. At the graveyard, Shenfang's backwards cap and surly attitude towards his Chinese National grandparents, looks unmistakably American, as the boy simply refuses to kneel before the tombstones. At the beach, Yan Shu breaks the stony look on Shenfang's face by being a circus performer of sorts, executing somersaults on the dirty sand. And on their bicycle ride home, the boy sits in front while his father pedals, in other words, the foreigner does all the work as the American benefits from his hard labor.
Ultimately, "Er di" can be construed as a tragedy, in which the people who brave the boat are more pathetic than heroic. On the eve of Hong's departure, the breaking story of the day is China's acceptance in the WTO's fold. Hong and the other drifters are running away, not running towards, prosperity.
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