1954 Beijing, China

Ding Su Xiang
born 1940
Beijing China
interviewed 9/2
by Alan Lin

Movies came to China pretty slowly. I was lucky to have grown up in Beijing, this great big city: many of my friends didn’t see their first movie until well into young adulthood. Yet even in Beijing, it was long before we were able to see any western or American movies. Many times we would watch either Chinese or North Korean films, mostly very patriotic war movies. They were in black and white, and usually filled with patriotism or truly dark and depressing.

I can’t remember for sure what the first movie I ever watched was. It could have been The Spring River Flows East. That was a very important movie for the time. It’s still a classic Chinese movie today; anyone around my age or even a bit younger would probably have seen it. I think I must have been only 14 years old when I saw the movie––definitely still in middle school. I went out with my classmates and together we walked to the movie theater. Living in Beijing meant that everything was accessible to pretty much everyone by walking. We walked down to the theater in the summer sun after school. Summer in Beijing is quite similar to the summers here on the East Coast: it’s hot and sunny but most importantly very humid. Our school uniforms were sticking to our skin, and we’d peel them off like bandaids. We’d try to cool ourselves off as best as we could with paper hand fans, but there’s only so much we could do.

Movie theaters in China did not have concession stands, but instead the streets outside the theater were lined with food carts selling roasted peanuts and other fried fatty foods. In China they use dirty oil from the gutters to cook food in the street carts, and you can smell all this dirty oil burning from all the fryers. You could smell it from almost a block away. I always bought roasted peanuts for the movies. 

The Spring River Flows East is a love story about two young Chinese college students set during the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. It’s a really long movie, split into two parts. I remember getting restless in my seat, feeling like the movie would never end. It follows a man who leaves his family to fight in the war against his Japanese. He is separated from his family for over eight years, and ends up starting a new life in Shanghai with his mistress, unaware of the life of his past wife. Meanwhile, the wife becomes poorer and poorer, and eventually finds herself working as a maid for a family friend of the mistress. The two reunite, but the man chooses to stay with his spoiled and wealthier mistress.

I remember it had beautiful acting: the two leads were some of the biggest actors in China at the time. What really struck me about the movie was its optimism. The Japanese occupation was such a dark time–it was the time I was born into–and the movie also deals with some really harsh situations. But even at the lowest points, the characters still seem to be driven by some sort of optimism, which I found to be very inspirational. The movie is also very patriotic, which spoke to me a lot back then.