Authors: Unknown
When the couple had first decided to bring their son to Beijing, they had abandoned their farmland and sold what few possessions they had. They borrowed heavily from their extended kin network knowing that they would never be able to repay such large sums of money. The provincial government had given them 1,100 yuan (approximately US$170) and the Women’s Federation (Fulian) gave them 500 yuan (approximately US$78), but there were no further sources of assistance they could appeal to locally. After arriving in Beijing, the family had tried sitting in front of the Beijing Television station offices in hopes of catching the eye of a journalist or television producer. Being featured on television might have led to viewer donations, but they failed to attract media notice. The mother explained that her husband had thought of jumping off a bridge to get attention for their plight, but she said there
still
would not have been any guarantee of success, and she would have been left to care for their son by herself. She speculated that if her son’s illness had been a case of AIDS or SARS they would have received immediate attention from the health authorities because communicable diseases were a threat to public health.
Having exhausted all other options, the mother explained that their only remaining hope was to mobilize public sympathy or attract media attention so that a hospital might volunteer to help them without payment. She knew of a case of twins with leukemia who had received free treatment after they had been featured on a television program. The mother admitted to me that she knew there were people who lied about medical conditions to swindle money from the public, but she again pointed to their display of documentation as evidence. Returning to Anhui would mean certain death for their son. As long as they remained in Beijing they would have at least a slim chance to save his life. Here they were closer to the city hospitals, and they could still solicit donations on the street to cover some of their costs. Then, in a surprising turn, she mentioned a desire to show their son something of the world before he passed away.
The Spectacle of Dying
Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
—GUY DEBORD, SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
This family’s story, filled with details of fighting against the odds, has all the elements of melodrama. Melodrama can have a powerful affective charge, but at the same time it can be easily dismissed as overwrought sentimentalism. Peter Brooks captures the term in all its connotations: “[Melodrama is] the indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety” (1976: 11–12). I extend the scope of melodrama from a literary genre to the representation of life on the street as it is performed by those playing a role already scripted for them in media portrayals of suffering among the weaker segments (
ruoshi qunti
) of
society.
This form of representation transforms the trials of the everyday in a manner that is not threatening to the established order. The melodramatic elements serve to limit the power of social critique if the story is too intensely personal; yet, it is also the appeal to a shared sentiment on a personal level that makes melodrama highly effective and potentially revolutionary. The side of the street becomes a mise-en-scène. The child’s body on the stretcher and the parents’ distraught appearance accompanied by their medical documents make the reason for their presence very clear. Melodrama exposes the ethical dilemma in an unmistakable manner. It is its own form of silent cinema where “the melodramatic body is a body seized by meaning. Since melodrama’s simple, unadulterated messages must be made absolutely clear, visually present, to the audience, bodies of victims and villains must unambiguously signify their status” (Brooks 1994: 18). However, the parents’ attempt to fix the meaning of their son’s body is blunted by cautionary tales of scams, bogus claims, and fraudulent stories that thrive in a society where market relations are rapidly supplanting socialist redistributive logics.
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In this case, there is no obvious villain figure because the systemic violence is obscured from view. So who is responsible for this family’s suffering? Neoliberal rationalities of government shift the responsibility for costs and risks onto the individual as the state withdraws from providing social welfare. Thus, the family must bear the responsibility for their own suffering and work to represent themselves as worthy subjects of public compassion.
In Brooks’s recounting, melodrama came into being out of the collapse of a clearly ordered social hierarchy caused by the French Revolution. From this historical context he writes that “the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet . . . the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern” (Brooks 1976: 15). China’s turbulent history and continuous revolutions throughout the twentieth century have led to the upheaval of the social order with lingering historical traumas that the state continues to suppress and manage. The Chinese Communist Party erected a new idealized moral order with the birth of the People’s Republic of China, and that project is evolving with the incorporation of economic liberalization policies. Melodrama then is deployed to represent the idealized moral order and the accommodation with that order through easily recognizable characterizations. In China, melodrama and “socialist realism” have been widely used in past revolutionary campaigns by the Chinese Communist Party. Examples
of
the Soviet-inspired genre can be seen in paintings, woodblock prints, and propaganda posters of the time. Plays performed in this period employed melodramatic elements to clearly communicate the exploitative practices of feudal landlords and the heroic potential of the people in overthrowing feudalism to establish a new social order (Anderson 1990; Andrews 1994).
This melodramatic imagination was also found in Meiji-era literary fiction at a time when Japan was involved in the project of modern nation building. Ken Ito argues that Meiji melodramatic fiction depicted ideological contestations of an old order unraveling as Japanese society modernized. The traditional Japanese family that served as the moral grounding for the nation was under attack:
If modernity had brought the social dislocations attendant upon industrialization and urbanization, as well as the ideological challenges posed by such new concepts as popular rights, individualism, socialism, then the “traditional” family could be used as a force for order, an institution for the proper location and training of citizens within the national hierarchy. (Ito 2008: 21–22)
Thus, melodrama was used to save the “traditional” family instead of revolutionizing it for a modern society. Portrayals of moral battles between the forces of good and evil in Meiji melodrama were an attempt to validate the “traditional” values believed to be under assault by modern sensibilities. In the case of contemporary Chinese society, the Communist Party revolutionized the gendered and generational hierarchies of the family to pursue a socialist vision. Reform-era biopolitical projects further transformed the family through the one-child family policy.
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The family of three on the street exposes the vulnerability and costs of having only one child, especially when that child falls ill, but this is not a sufficient moral claim in a society operating on the principles of market reform. Their subject-position (as “beggars”) makes their claims open to suspicion.
Melodrama can just as easily serve to uphold the ideological status quo when the goal is to come to some accommodation with everyday trials and tribulations. In this case, the desire for a hospital to donate a bone marrow transplant keeps the social order intact because the resolution does not exceed the ideological parameters of what is permitted. Even the mother in her distraught state did not condemn the government for its failure but extended her sympathy for its overstretched capacities and only wanted the government
to provide health care for children. Sacrifice is expected, and they were willing to forgo their home and even their lives to save their child. Would you call this a defeated or willing acceptance of their situation? Or is it the outcome of the material constraints they face and the language they must employ to receive public attention and medical assistance? The political order in contemporary China deploys the techniques of melodrama to transform the readily visible signs of everyday tragedy into moral cues for the people. However, in the fine line between melodrama (potential to act to change the outcome) and tragedy (the outcome has already been determined, and action is after the fact), the failure of the parents to move passersby invites public condemnation for not doing the right thing to save their child. The parents were not in the city to find work; they chose to beg. This gave them more time to care for their son, but their refusal to sell their labor can be viewed as another condition of failure. Their refusal to participate in the market marks them as improper subjects of development in the eyes of the state.
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The family on the street must work against being seen as failed subjects of economic development. At the same time, they must fight against what Georg Simmel calls the blasé outlook that is characteristic of mental life in the metropolis:
The essence of the blasé attitude is indifference toward the distinctions between things. Not in the sense that they are not perceived, as is the case of mental dullness, but rather that the meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless. . . . This psychic mood is the correct subjective reflection of a complete money economy to the extent that money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of how much. To the extent that money, with its colourlessness and its indifferent quality, can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveller—it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. (Simmel 1950: 14)
This blasé attitude is also combined with suspicion. According to Simmel, a mode of thinking develops in an environment where the density of people and the multitude of external stimulation are overwhelming. The blasé attitude then is a means of self-preservation as well as the outcome of the
domination
of the money economy. The market reforms have produced “a changing calculus of the value of human life” (Anagnost n.d.). The urban dweller is guarded against any attempt to manipulate his or her emotions. Beggars on the streets are dismissed as calculating actors. The issue at hand is not the authenticity of the family’s need but the manner through which suffering and pain are communicated. The social reality that families increasingly cannot afford medical care is a very real phenomenon in China. This is a circumstance that more and more families are experiencing every day. It is also dramatized on television. And yet I heard over and over again from Chinese friends that the people begging on the street are all scam artists, and even the mother acknowledged the existence of frauds as she tried to differentiate her family from them. The mother’s mention of the television feature on the twins with leukemia showed that she too is watching television and is informed by social scripts of how the family in need should appear in public in a manner that is convincing. The observed are also doing the observing, responding to the expectations of the audience to give a more convincing performance. The stakes in this performance have very material consequences measured by the money dropped into the plastic bin.
“Life’s Little Warrior”
Chengcheng was another ten-year-old child dying of leukemia. After her parents were told by medical specialists that she had only two weeks to live, they decided to return home so that she could continue with school. Chengcheng wrote a poem, “Experiencing the Language of the Heart” (
tihui xinhua
), which she sent to the local newspaper. The wife of the lead singer of the Chengdu pop music group Mix Play convinced the group to set the poem to music. She was impressed that a young girl could have such a deep comprehension of life, and in the news story she was quoted as saying, “The pain of illness led this ten-year-old child to understand a lot prematurely; she has the maturity that her age-mates do not have!” (CCTV 2007). The group arrived at the hospital to teach the song to Chengcheng, and the entire process was recorded and uploaded to Chengcheng’s blog.
12
Local university students volunteered to document her struggle through photographs, videos, and entries from her diary. They also designed individual blogs for fifty other child leukemia cases to set up a blog network entitled “Life’s Little
Warriors.”
Her story was eventually nominated as one of the “most moving stories of 2007” by Chinese Central Television (CCTV).
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The poem was described as capturing “the laughter and tears of her ten-year-old life and to transmit her understanding of life after enduring the torture of illness.”
A touching family scene depicted in the story is Chengcheng at home surrounded by her family as she takes her fourth-grade final exam. In the days leading up to the exam date, torrential rains had washed out the dirt paths. In any case, Chengcheng was too ill to attend classes. On the day of the exam, beyond the expectations of her parents, Chengcheng woke up at 5 a.m. to help her little brother prepare for school and help her mother make breakfast before she “stood quietly in the doorway as she watched her brother carry his school bag down the familiar dirt path.” Nevertheless, the village teacher walked “10
li
[five kilometers] on a dirt path against the scorching sun” to deliver the examination paper. The young girl saw her teacher arriving covered in sweat, bowed deeply in appreciation, and went to turn on the electric fan in the corner of the room before she sat down at the family table to write her exam. The newspaper story describes the scene as follows: