1972 Xian, China

Warren Bao

1952

Xian, China

Interviewed on February 08, 2022

by Kylen Wei Bao

The first movie I watched was The Flower Girl: a North Korean revolutionary film about a girl who picks mountain flowers everyday and sells them to provide for her ill mother and blind sister. It was a very sad movie; the flower girl’s family is in heavy debt to the landlord, and her father died eight years ago working for him. Her brother also worked for the landlord for eight years to help support the family. However, the landlord ultimately expelled him from the property because the brother was not able to pay interest for a loan. The movie ends on a sad note, with the mother and her sister passing away.

What I remember most about the movie wasn’t the plot, but the experience of watching with my friends after class. Watching movies back then wasn’t a common occurrence—we didn’t go to a theater, but went to a friend of a friend’s house. He was an engineer that knew how to show movies via an outside projector machine. Because we weren’t in the countryside, our neighborhood had a variety of people who could do different jobs, including screening films. I lived in a large manufacturing district, so there were a lot of engineers and college-educated people who could do all kinds of things. I was very lucky in that regard. 

We had to walk a mile to get to the engineer’s house to watch the show. Everybody carried a very simple, crude, wooden stool to sit and watch; if you didn’t carry the stool for a mile, you had to stand to watch the movie. The engineer hung a screen between two trees, and my classmates and I sat on our stools outside on the dirt: open space where we could sit and watch. The screen was not very big; it was about three to four meters wide (ten feet). 

Watching movies was a very irregular occurrence, that happened every half a year or so; it was very rare to see a film back then. I had heard from a friend who was in high school that there would be a screening, and I was very excited to go; it was a completely new thing to me, and I had never seen a film before. There were no TV’s, and I had never even heard of a theater before. However, I knew that foreign films were especially interesting; if you had the opportunity to see one back then, you had to go. The movie was also free for us; later on, when they showed films in theaters, you needed to pay ten cents to see the film: a luxury that we did not have. 

Back then I lived in a big apartment building, in a place which wasn’t fully rural, but wasn’t a city either. Our community was a small village, in which everyone knew each other. We didn’t do a lot of homework back then; rather, the older kids acted as mentors for us, and we spent all of our free time playing outside after primary school. When I was younger, I wanted to play so much with the older kids, I would do my homework as I walked back home, with a notebook in my left hand and a pencil in my right, so that by the time I got home I had no homework and would be able to go outside and play. We were all very close together.

The way film screenings worked back then was completely through word-of-mouth; there were no phones, no email, no landline to gather people together to watch. Instead, usually big kids from the high school would take the lead; they would hear about screenings around the neighborhood, and tell all of the kids (around 20-30) in our building. We would get permission from our parents and all travel together, with the older kids acting as leaders for us. It was almost like traveling to a different town to watch a movie, even though it was only a mile away. 

I most remember going with my friends. I was good friends with one older kid, who was a few years older than me and lived a floor above (I was on the first floor). On each floor of our three-floor apartment building, we had four families; it was almost as if every floor was a triplex. Each building had three entrances, each entrance had three floors, and each floor had four units. There were four total buildings on our block, meaning there were a lot of families in our neighborhood and we were all very close together. The parents were very close, but everyone also had their fair share of quarrels as well. At that time, there was no birth control, and this was also before China’s “One Child Policy,” so each family had at least two kids. However, there were usually three to five kids per family, so you can imagine how many kids there were across the entire neighborhood. 

I don’t recall too much about the plot of the movie; it was moreso an activity that we could all do together. I do remember that it was very sad; the father passed away, the brother was imprisoned by the landlord, some philanthropist gave the money to the girl only for her to return and find her sister and mother had passed away. The film was black and white, but the imagery of the film was striking; I remember the flowers the girl had picked, and the tattered, poor clothes of the family . 

Another major aspect of the film that stood out during my first film experience was the sound of the movie. I was amazed at the speaker which they played sound from. That’s the biggest thing I remember; the sorrowful voice of the girl singing “Selling flowers, selling flowers, my mother is sick.” The sound was so melancholy to hear, and it played out in my mind again and again. I don’t even remember the end of the plot, but I do remember the girl’s voice; it was so sad, yet so beautiful. 

I haven’t thought about that movie in a long time, but thinking back to it makes me feel nostalgic. It was a much simpler time back then. We didn’t have much, but at that time I felt happy to be with my friends.