1943 Chongqing, China

Pamela Tang
Born 1938
Harbin, China
Interviewed 9/23/19
By Michael Tang

I was five or six years old, and we had just moved to Chongqing because of the war. The Japanese had occupied the North, so the government had temporarily moved the capital to Chongqing to regroup. I didn’t mind though, the Japanese were bombing the country and you knew the war was happening, yet I still had a happy childhood, especially when we went to see movies.

The first movie that I ever saw was The Thief of Baghdad. It was an American movie, and back then in China, and especially during the war, American movies were very rare. We didn’t have any movie theaters back then, so we watched it on the wall of a barnyard while we sat outside. Our entire family had moved to Chongqing, so movies were always a family experience. The other children and I would run around and play outside before the movie started, and it was always fun having the family together.

I don’t remember much about the movie. None of us could understand English, and although it had Chinese subtitles on the bottom of the screen in a bright red font, none of us could read Chinese either. I didn’t understand the plot, but I remember the screen. The movie was vividly colored, and most people in China had never seen a movie in Technicolor before. The main character could fly and do magic and all of the children loved that. We had no clue what was happening, but that part of the movie really resonated with us. We all wished we had those powers.

It was really enjoyable. I don’t remember all of the movies that I saw in China, but I remember that one. I wish I could talk more about the movie and my impression of it, but I mostly remember the experience. Summer time in Sichuan Province is beautiful, and we played outside all day and would sit on a boat in the Three Gorges River and float past of all of the villages. And remember, this was before they dammed the river. Back then, it was a lazy, slow-moving river that we would travel on, and one of us would walk on the bank and pull the boat when the river got too slow or muddy. It felt like flying. Maybe that’s why we liked the visuals of the movie so much.

They don’t make that kind of movie anymore. I know they make adventure movies all of the time today, but for me there is something special about that movie. It was so lifelike and inspiring. Just seeing a movie, an American movie especially, was a rare occurrence and people came from all over the city to see it. I don’t think that I’ll ever feel that way about a movie again. Nothing has ever quite captured the wildness and wonder of the movie, and I never saw it again. I don’t really want to either. You know how you feel the first time you ever see a movie right? You can never really capture those feelings if you watch it multiple times. But I will always remember watching that movie, sitting on a small plastic chair in the middle of a field in Chongqing as the war went on nearby, wishing I could learn to fly.