Through this free “translation”, Li explicitly occupies all layers of the narrative for foreign-language viewers. While this might, at first glance, create a sense of distance, Li’s self-aware, humorous tone actually creates a sense of closeness. She relativises her narrative authority by combining it with a quirky mise-en-scène, akin to Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012).
The interaction between Li and a family member is as clumsy as it is charming during a visit to Tiananmen, the gateway to the Forbidden City. They try to take a photo as a souvenir among all the tourists. Li is sent from one corner of the frame to the other, standing far away and then moving closer and closer. The scene is a beautiful reflection on coming home: where exactly should one stand in order to both blend into the picture and stand out from it?
By dividing her film into days and rapidly changing settings (we travel from the grandmother’s living room to a friend’s snow-covered roof terrace and a coffee shop), Li attempts to grasp the capriciousness of her dismemberment. This resonates poetically with the static frames that leave a lot of space around the characters: the lower half is populated, while the upper half remains virtually empty, except for Li’s subtitles.
Having lived abroad for quite some time now, the filmmaker feels that she is losing a part of herself. Li therefore sees her return home as a re-engagement with herself, although this process shouldn’t be interpreted too romantically. According to Anh Hua, in more recent diasporic narratives, the homeland is less readily viewed, nostalgically, as “an ‘authentic' space to belong to”. Hua, A. (2005). “Diaspora and Cultural Memory”. In V. Agnew (Ed.), Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home (pp. 191-208). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442673878-012 While Li adds a mocking illustration of Mao Zedong with childish pigtails to the collage on her bedroom wall, she hears her father compare Hong Kong to a “child who has forgotten his biological mother after living with his wealthy stepmother”. That same feeling also looms large in the subtitles during a conversation with a like-minded friend: “Brent and I agree that when we are not in Beijing, we miss it a lot, but if we stay here longer, we go crazy.”
Li exposes rifts between herself and her loved ones, not to bridge them, but to know where her boundaries lie. For Li, home is where, apart from disrupted expectations and a few uncomfortable questions, the hustle and bustle of life becomes background noise. Because: “At home, I can just really be a loser, and I know that it is a place where I will be okay. They don't expect me to sit straight or talk smart. I can just be whatever.”
Home is, ideally, the place where we can shamelessly lose ourselves without having to resort to anonymity. It’s the place to which the journeys back and forth, no matter how often they’re repeated, will never feel the same length—regardless of the number of unanswered questions and ambiguous answers we hold in our pockets.
