A Tale of Two Halves

Narrative Synopsis

A Tale of Two Halves begins with a little half-Chinese girl, born in a Western country to a Chinese mother and European father, coming home from her first day of school. “Mummy, mummy,” she says, “I learnt a new song at school today!” And then quite naively she begins a focused yet rapturous recital for her Chinese mother: “Chinese people are so funny, this is how they count their money! Oocha, oocha, turn around and boot ya!” Of course, this little half-Chinese girl is oblivious to the irony of her gesture, the racism of her rhyme, and the ambivalence of her birth which will one day send her off in search of her roots to discover a much bigger story which reflects her ‘inability to settle’.

Jumping forward in time to the present day, the little half-Chinese girl, now 35, tells of a screenplay she has written, inspired by her forebears. She meditates on the nature of writing, describing it as “a journey of subtraction, a journey of descent.” There are two ways of climbing downwards, she tells us: “One is to go into the earth. The other is to plunge deep into the ocean. Being a nomad who has always travelled between water points, I chose the latter, and it lead me back to the home of my great, great grandfather.”

We transition back in time to the Bogue, a narrow strait where the Pearl River meets the South China Sea. Close up on a murky, noxious solution as it plumes into frame. The camera pulls back revealing millions of tons of dissolved opium being discharged into the sea – the result of an Imperial edict in 1839 demanding that opium dealers be arrested, opium pipes confiscated, and all raw opium seized and destroyed. It was this action that led to the British Empire declaring war against China.

Returning to the present day, our 35 year-old narrator is on board a ferry, travelling along the same tributaries into which the poisonous solution was poured 171 years earlier. In voice over she tells us it is her first trip down these waters, and that she is going in search of her great-great grandfather’s home. His name was Moy Bak-Ling and he was one of the many Overseas Chinese who, because of the Opium Wars, took the brave step of leaving the known Chinese world, leaving their families behind in search of ways of supporting them.

The film recounts the demographic crises in nineteenth century China, in particular those caused by the unprecedented British demand for Chinese tea, the ensuing trade imbalance, and the subsequent Opium Wars. Significantly Moy Bak-Ling was born in 1839 at the outbreak of the first Opium War, and he left China at the outbreak of the second in 1856, at age 17. The film then looks at the incredible diaolou structures and fortified watch towers built by the returning Overseas Chinese, who, having made their fortunes in the gold rush, wished to protect their villages from the banditry that had become rife in the wake of the Opium Wars.

Parallel to the story of Moy Bak-Ling leaving China, is the story of the narrator – his great-great granddaughter – returning to her ancestral village some 150 years later as she looks to lease one of the abandoned diaolou watchtowers near the village and make it her home. Woven into the narrator’s journey is an examination of the present day trade imbalances between China and the West. The narrator looks at how the USA has taken over Britain’s role as the major world superpower and she speaks to international experts who offer their thoughts on shifting balances of economic and political power and how the lives of ordinary people – Western and Chinese, past and present – are affected.

A script for A Tales of Two Halves is currently being written and will be presented in voice over by several narrators, the main narrator being myself – the half-Chinese great-great granddaughter. The voice permits both a specific experience of the self and a particular relation to the world, and several narrators from both ‘sides’ of the polemic, as well as the position of the ‘excluded middle’, will be used in order to explore the possibility of plural perspectives and multiple histories.

The film’s images will be textured and comparative, exploring the history of cross-cultural exploration, dispersion and infiltration. These themes will be explored from three perspectives – the ‘us’, the ‘them’, and the ‘nomadic subject’, the latter a person who moves across different cultural and spiritual landscapes without ever settling or belonging in any one of them. Colonial and postcolonial assumptions of European superiority will be pitted against parallel Chinese assumptions as the film attempts to create a discourse that exposes dualism and considers alternative ways of viewing cross-cultural relationships be they political, economic or social.