"Born into Silence: Conflicts and Internalization in the Current Generation of Chinese Women", a response by Liberal Studies student, Carol Qiu, who is “going local” at NYU, Shanghai.
The short, beautifully crafted film, “The Coin”, by Siqi Song, speaks to the faith I need to find within myself when I go from somewhere familiar to a new environment. It anticipates some of what I expect to face when I come to NYC next year to study. Her technique, using felt to build a world of stop motion animation, takes me immediately to a place I have never been before. It’s direct, visceral. Her reactions to the food she confronts, like a hamburger, the distinct voice and visual effects - these had emotional force for me. It was like my stomach was churning along with hers, though of course the character in her film is actually inside her own stomach. The girl’s struggle with the exotic food is reflective of the anxiety and homesickness she faces, but this is not just a film of symbols, it takes us to a place in our bodies where the conflicts we internalize directly manifest themselves, Chinese women have to hold so much inside it’s no wonder that at some point many of us actually feel physically sick.
After the girl leaves her jar of lucky coins on the train, she suffers from various unsettling feelings, and every food that is shaped like her talisman conjures up the lucky coins to her, a promise that isn’t ultimately fulfilled. The jar is the girl’s sunshine and hope when she travels to an unfamiliar place alone, it’s a way to never lose touch completely with what she’s already come to understand.
As a Chinese person, I’m familiar with the tradition of finding the lucky coin inside only one dumpling during the Spring Festival, and it reminds me of my own family and my own hometown, especially watching the film in Chinese. I’m not abroad right now, but even as a student in a big, unfamiliar city I have mixed emotions. I want to call my grandparents, to hear their voices, even if it’s to lecture me about things I should or shouldn’t be doing, but I’m afraid I’ll start crying, silently of course, so they won’t know on the phone. We need to change, respond to new groups of people, new demands. But I don’t want to lose the people I already have in my life, to forget friends or family, to lose track of the tools for living they represent to me.
Chinese young women generally encounter more challenges and take longer to recover as they receive pressures from both their traditional and new environments. As the only Asian girl in my STEM summer program in the US, I was afraid to show how overwhelmed I was by the information taught in the lectures. I didn't understand the Boolean Algebra used in timed and sensor-automated traffic lights, and I didn't believe quantum particles could exist in multiple places at the same time. I was afraid of disappointing my classmates and teacher, of letting down my grandparents. So I became quite, introverted and went entire lessons without speaking to anyone. If not for my friends back home, I don’t know what I would have done. They are the lucky coins in my case, as much or more than my family. That’s why I created a response that is centered on them.
My response to Siqi Song’s film uses portraiture to explore the internal and external identity conflicts faced by young contemporary Chinese women. I wanted to touch on the modern and traditional aspects of their lives, so I chose to use a range of mediums and techniques - Chinese and not, ancient and futuristic - to capture the likenesses of my friends, I wanted to get at the expectations they face from families or peers, how they try to overcome the struggles of navigating in two worlds that are so different from one another. Obviously studying internationally challenges us in particular ways, but we are already translating back and forth between competing worlds at home. That’s what the images, languages and stories I’m sharing about my friends will hopefully give you a little taste of.
Each of the section subtitles are written in Nushu, a secret 19th century women’s language used in Hunan, In Mandarin, the language of my youth, and American English, one of the languages of my future.