Customer Reviews

For the Children

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After her husband and child died, the peasant Meili Zhang founded a school for the children in her isolated, parched village in northwest China. She was not a teacher, but she did her best and she loved her kids. She founded the school, she says, "so that the kids may have hope." Xia Yu, a gorgeous young woman from Beijing a thousand miles away, and a "real" teacher, comes to help at the school. She corrects their pronunciation, teaches them some English, and encourages Meili to obtain a computer. Of course, mutual culture shock sets in. Xia stares in disbelief as the same pail of water is used to wash clothes, rinse your face, make tea with orange rinds, and water the donkey. Meili can only respond to her guest's strange ways with "Teacher Xia, you city people are strange." What transpires is an unfolding friendship of two women from radically different socio-economic and cultural contexts. Two sub-plots revolve around the men in their lives--Meili's love for the local "film projectionist" Wang Shu, and Xia's estrangement from her husband because of her growing affection for Meili and her school. Late in the film turn about is fair play when Xia takes the entire class of peasant kids to Beijing. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

I was crying throughout the whole film. It is very powerful, and touching. It is very well done with superb acting. Be prepared for a moving and beautiful experience.

My middle school students liked it. There is a lot of cultural information. Teachers should watch the movie with the students and pause it to give some explanations.

I have a large collection of Asian movies and this one is very dear to my heart.I really like the story with the little shocking twists and turns,and the amazing ending that really brought tears to my eyes.Nothing short of a little miracle movie-very close to perfection.It's gonna warm up your heart and make you want to watch it again.

Chinese (mainland) films are earnest projects, and this story is certainly one. It's remarkably similar to another called NOT ONE LESS, where a female teacher becomes determined to help the ignorant and poor charges in her care.

Far in the miserable, cold and dusty parts of northwest China, old stone villages sit, still inhabited, with sheepherding and potatoes as the main income for the peasants. They look like stereotypical 1960's Communist peasants, with dirty faces, forlorn expressions, flat effect, torn and patched clothing, ill-fitting and baggy pants. Both children and adults dress in a bulky unattractive way, with their skin and teeth in terrible condition.

In one of these villages, a woman loses a husband and then a child, and feels herself therefore not even a woman, a person with nothing to be proud of. She finds a solution to her despair in starting a school for the local sheepherding people's children. They're not a pretty sight, but they're very obedient and determined in their small, dusty stone school. To think, if the time is 2007, that not even a school had existed in this town! The teacher's conviction that education will literally pull them all out of the dust is based on her husband's foolish stealing of steel pins holding down a local train track, causing two trains to derail. He is, naturally, sentenced to death, for what he thought a petty crime. His widow, our heroine, thinks that if he'd had education, he would not have been so ignorant and still be alive.

What pleases this viewer in such films is the sheer realism of these desolate Chinese towns, the blowing dust, the sad interiors, the furniture and food details, the clothing, the stoical and blank faces of the people, the everyday misery such as pulling water up from a well with a knotted rag rope.

As the plot thickens, another teacher arrives, a Beijing young woman fed up with a bad marriage but loaded with money, a giddy and silly type, but educated beyond the local woman's literacy. She immediately is correcting the elder's pronunciation of the ideograms in front of the class. Her husband eventually becomes part of the plot, as does a male movie projectionist, already married, who falls in love with the headstrong older teacher.

I cannot guess others' perceptions, but for me, the plot is secondary to the overall feeling of the village and its grinding poverty. If anything, I can guess that these films will one day be seen by even the Chinese as long-forgotten histories of their own peoples, their ways of lives in different and difficult places. Are these films dull to most? Probably, unless you want to see old China.

I like the little English lesson the Beijing lady tries to give: the heroine puts the new words together in the Chinese way, "STUDY STUDY HARD DAY DAY UP", which means, "STUDY HARD EVERY DAY!" The doubling of nouns and verbs to intensify or pluralize a meaning, as in "chop-chop" meaning "fast-fast" cannot be clearer.

When the kids ultimately get treated to a trip to Beijing, in a supermodern hotel and spa, with new clothes and glitz, the teacher and students start crying at their determination to return to their desperate school and STUDY STUDY HARD DAY DAY UP".

It's almost religious! Except it's Chinese materialism at its finest, inspiring!