1939 Yangzhou, China

LiangXiu Ye
Born 1933
First movie memory in Yangzhou, China (Jiangsu Province)
Interviewed on January 29th, 2018
By Kevin Hu

I was probably around 5 or 6. I can hardly remember any of the details of that day. Was I with my parents? It’s hard to say. In Old China, the family was more than just a mom, a dad, and the children. You lived together with your entire extended family, with uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents. I remember walking to the theater with “the adults”, but I’m not really sure which adults. It could honestly have been anyone.

I didn’t know what I was getting into, since I had never seen a movie before. I wouldn’t say I was excited, but more so neutral towards the entire idea. I had no clue what the movie was going to be since the adults had decided what movie we were going to watch. When you were that young, you had to follow whatever older people said, no questions asked.

The movie was called “Da Lu”. Don’t let the name confuse you. Although Mainland China is referred to as “Da Lu” as well, the Chinese characters in the title are different. It would actually just be translated as “The Big Road” in English.

It was about workers building a highway for the Chinese Army. The actors? I can’t really say that I remember who they were, or who any of the characters were, really. I was too young to understand. I couldn’t even make sense of the story! After all, the movie was about war, and asking a six-year-old to understand war is not a small task. I’m sure that the actors must have been immensely famous in China at that time, but for someone as young as I was, those things don’t really stick with you.

(Grandma chimes in) The theatres were so large! There were so many seats, and it seemed like every seat was filled whenever there was a movie. Adults, kids, everyone was there. The movies were up on a big screen at the front of the theater. There was a projector at the back of the screen that generated the movie images.

Of course that’s how they were projected, but at that time, I had no idea that movies worked like that. In that moment, it seemed as if magic had brought that movie onto the screen before me. That was where the real impact was! The lights went off, and suddenly a bright image appeared on the screen. Then the soundtrack started playing. For me, that was the show. Seeing those bright moving pictures in the theater was all the entertainment I needed. That and the cars. There were cars that moved up and down the street in that movie. Now those really got me excited. Actors and storylines? Those were things that were difficult for me to get into when I was young. It was that bright screen itself that was the star of the show. That and the cars.