My Life in China: More than an Immigrant Story
Image courtesy of The Museum of Chinese in America
By GRACE LI ‘20
This past Saturday, Asian Society hosted a film showing of My Life in China with director Kenneth Eng. A documentary film that follows the director and his father to Hong Kong and then to a small village in China, the film is a story about immigrants, a dream, and a relationship between father and son.
Beginning in Boston, the film opens with a rough sketch of how the director’s father journeyed to America, “walking six days, and swimming four hours” to reach Hong Kong in the effort of defecting. Despite being educated, Eng’s father could only secure jobs in the restaurant industry. Though he eventually opened his own Chinese restaurant, that dream was short-lived due to bankruptcy. Believing he had failed at achieving the American Dream, Ken’s father contemplated moving back to China, where perhaps he would be able to live out the rest of his life in the village in which he grew up.
The film ends with Eng and his father, having traveled overseas to Hong Kong and Macau, at the village his father grew up in, in Toisan. Through interviews with different relatives, the viewer, along with Eng, slowly begins to understand how much Eng’s father sacrificed for his family to be able to grow up in America. The contrast between the lives of Eng’s relatives and the life Eng—introduced to us in the opening scenes of the film—leaves the viewers to wonder what life for Eng and his father would be like if his father just stayed in China or Hong Kong.
Would his father’s life been easier, more successful, if he decided to stay? Is it now too late for him to return back to the life he once had?
Culminating in the childhood home of Eng’s father, the journey allows the viewers to thoroughly understand the weight of the decisions he made. Eng’s father carried with him the lives of his family as he swam towards a new, yet unpredictable, life. Maybe in Hong Kong, he could have made enough to support his family. But in America, he could plant the dreams of his mother in American soil as he had hoped. Journey by journey, Eng’s father worked to forge a life for his kids where they didn’t need to experience the hardships that he went through. By the end of the film, the sacrifices his father gave for his life touches the director, who becomes part of his father’s narrative.
The film is more than a story that follows an immigrant’s journey from China to America. Touching upon the ideas of hope and belonging, the film also navigates the relationship between father and son. Eng’s father, not wanting his son to understand the extent of the hardship he experienced, inadvertently distanced himself from his children. Through the making of the film, the viewers witness the transformative powers of storytelling and listening through the impact of his father’s story on himself.