1953 Yiyang, China

Liying Zhang
Born in 1937
Yiyang, China
Interviewed on February 5, 2021
by Iris Yang

This interview was originally conducted in Mandarin.

My earliest memory of watching a movie is around 1953 or 1954 when I was sixteen or seventeen. The entire school would sponsor trips once or twice a semester, and we would all walk to the movie theater together in these big lines by grade. It took about twenty minutes and the theater was called the Yiyang Renming Theater. People in my town didn’t really go to the movies by themselves — it just wasn’t a thing, and there weren’t that many movies to watch. Plus, whenever a movie came out, it was likely that we would watch it with the school so there was no point paying to watch it again. In the summers, there were also free outdoor movies projected on a big screen and we would just bring our own chairs. Those were pretty often — weekly or monthly, depending on how many movies there were. So I got to see a lot of movies as a teen, but I don’t remember ever having to buy tickets to see them.

In the theater, I remember the projector spinning, and the movies were all in black and white. There was no food or anything (even if there was, none of us would have had the money to buy it) but it was quite fun to walk all the way to the theater and sit in there with your entire school!

The movies we watched were supposed to be educational, but they usually had interesting stories and ended up also being entertaining. Definitely no romance though — the school didn’t want to promote such things! They were mostly about war and the like and included some form of propaganda (like showing how bad China was before and how China improved under the Communist Party). Back then, the movies we saw were more like plays than the movies you’re used to today. We had to write reviews about them for homework.

I don’t remember which movie was actually the first one I saw, but one of the films I watched with my school was “The White-Haired Girl” (白毛女). It was actually originally a play in the 40s, and was then made into a movie in the 50s. The movie is about a girl from a poor family that owes a debt to their landowner; the landowner comes to collect the money, but they’re unable to pay, so her father runs away. On New Year’s Eve he returns to celebrate with his daughter, bringing her a single red ribbon as a gift because that’s all he can afford. There’s a very famous song from the movie in this scene, and pretty much everyone knew it. Here, I’ll sing it for you…