Grandma's Love Letters: In the End, the Times Land on People

Lots of movies use an era to tell a story, and use a story to write about an era. The storms of the times sweep people up and down, and in the end the weight of history lands, concretely, on the joys and sorrows of one person, one family.

Lots of Chinese movies work this way, and many of them do it well.

Take To Live. It follows Fugui's family from the Republican era into the People's Republic, through the civil war, land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. One wave of history after another crashes over Fugui's miserable life. Lots of people come away from To Live remembering the births, illnesses, and deaths in Fugui's family, but behind all that is an entire era.

Or take Farewell My Concubine. It starts from the fates of Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou and runs from the Republican era through the war against Japan and the founding of the People's Republic to the Cultural Revolution. Their relationship rises and falls dramatically as the times change, and every change comes with a turn in history. The times decide who they are, and decide how they have to survive.

Grandma's Love Letters is also a movie that presses an era into people's fates, but compared with To Live and Farewell My Concubine, it's a little different.

The difference comes from the director's restraint in handling the relationship between the era and the characters. When it's over, you've seen an era, and you also feel you've seen a good story.

It's a clean story. You could even say a bit simple.

Zheng Musheng is a poor young man who falls in love with Ye Shurou, a landlord's daughter, and the two of them elope. It's a very old plot. In today's terms, a no-good bad boy runs off with a rich girl and takes her off to a hard life. But set against the backdrop of the era, a story of eloping for love shows how great love can be.

The movie has plenty of other corny moments too, especially the misunderstanding the whole movie rests on: a mailman loses, in a rainstorm, the letter Xie Nanzhi sent to Ye Shurou revealing the truth.

Never mind how corny that is. I even think it's a smear on China Post.

So this movie doesn't win on its story. Where it really succeeds is in using a simple story to build three vivid characters.

One is Ye Shurou. A woman brave enough to elope for love. But in those chaotic times her husband has to flee overseas to make a living, and she raises three children alone and waits for him her whole life.

One is Zheng Musheng. A Chinese man born into the tides of history, forced to flee overseas to make a living. He has no education and can't read, so all he can sell is his labor. But he's loyal, hardworking, and because his love for his family keeps him going, he has a young man's fire in him that won't go out.

When I first found out Zheng Musheng would die, I thought the director would surely give him a death that was both very much of its time and very small. And that's exactly what happened. Out of his sense of loyalty, he steps in to help someone, gets stabbed to death by robbers, and is thrown into the sea. Stepping in was part of who Zheng Musheng was. But in that era, how many Chinese laborers who went overseas were stabbed to death? How many of their bodies sank into the ocean?

And Xie Nanzhi is the movie's best-written character, and also the one who's on screen the most.

She ties the two halves together. Through her we see Zheng Musheng's life overseas, and she carries everything that comes after.

She's truly one of a kind, and the director clearly wants to bring that out, which is why the movie focuses so much on the label "zou zai."

I can't really say whether the term is feudal. "Zou zai" means "the kid who'll leave." Whatever feudal baggage it carries, I can at least say its origins surely have to do with the old preference for sons over daughters. Of course, lots of places have the idea that "a daughter will marry off sooner or later."

The movie shows Xie Nanzhi's independence through her refusal to accept the label "zou zai."

Refusing alone wouldn't be anything special. What matters is that Xie Nanzhi spends her whole life living that refusal out.

If a "zou zai" has to be a kid who leaves, then Xie Nanzhi staying by her father's side her whole life is the best rebuttal there is.

I'm really glad the director didn't force in some open-minded husband for her. I was worried at first, because early on I found out Xie Nanzhi had a son, so I kept hoping it wouldn't go that way. Turns out he's adopted. Honestly, that made my day!

Xie Nanzhi also has some really precious qualities. She always earns her own money through her own work. She stays calm in the face of hardship and gossip, and she sticks to the path she believes is right.

The most moving thing about her is that she never makes that persistence look dramatic.

She stays quiet and unknown, and never tries to prove anything to anyone.

She just lives, one day at a time, doing what she thinks she should do, one day at a time.

People call her a "zou zai," and she won't accept it. People think a woman has to marry out sooner or later, and she stays by her father's side. People think a woman should rely on a husband, on a family, and she supports herself with her own work.

She never seems to set out to rebel against anything, but her whole life is a kind of rebellion.

That's another thing Grandma's Love Letters does well.

It doesn't make the era especially big. There aren't many sweeping historical scenes, and hardly anyone steps forward to tell you what kind of era this is. The era is just hidden inside the characters' lives.

Why does Zheng Musheng leave his wife and children and cross the sea to make a living?

Why does someone who can't read take writing letters so seriously?

Why can one lost letter keep two people apart for so many years?

Why can Ye Shurou do nothing but wait at home?

And why does a woman like Xie Nanzhi seem so unusual just for wanting to live her own way?

The answers to all of these are in the era. The director just doesn't write them on the characters' faces. I really like that approach. A lot of so-called period movies are in too much of a hurry to make the audience realize "this is the tragedy of an era."

As if there has to be a war, there have to be gunshots, there has to be a political campaign, there has to be some huge historical event, to prove the characters are being swept up by the times.

But that's usually not how ordinary people actually feel the times.

The times rarely come knocking on your door in person.

They might just mean someone can't find work, a father has to leave his hometown, a woman never sees her husband come back, a letter can't make it across the strait, and a family as ordinary as can be ends up on a completely different path.

To history, these things are all too small.

When Zheng Musheng dies, history won't bother to record his name.

Ye Shurou waits her whole life, and history won't write on any page how many years she actually waited.

Xie Nanzhi stays by her father's side her whole life, and that won't become an important event in any grand narrative either.

But to them, it's everything.

That's what I meant earlier when I said Grandma's Love Letters is a little different from To Live and Farewell My Concubine.

In To Live, the era is one flood after another. Fugui's family stands in the water, and every time a wave hits, someone is swept away.

In Farewell My Concubine, the era is a giant hand that keeps changing the stage under Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou's feet. One moment they're stars, the next they might be the ones being denounced.

But the era in Grandma's Love Letters isn't that intense.

It's more like the sea.

Usually it looks calm.

Zheng Musheng goes out to sea, Ye Shurou waits on the shore, and Xie Nanzhi spends her life with her father.

Everyone's fate unfolds around this sea.

The sea never says a word, but it separates two people, separates a family, and separates so many people who could have had a different life.

So when I thought again later about the letter the mailman lost, I suddenly didn't hate that corny plot device so much.

Because it turns something enormous into something very concrete.

The missed chances caused by an era might, in the end, really come down to one letter that never arrived.

History books tell us what happened in a given year, how many people went overseas, how many left their hometowns, how many families were scattered for good.

But a movie doesn't give you numbers.

A movie just tells you that Xie Nanzhi wrote a letter for Zheng Musheng.

Ye Shurou never got it.

So she waited her whole life.

That's what moves me most about this movie.

History's job is to record what happened.

A story's job is to tell us what those things actually meant when they happened to a real person.

So after Grandma's Love Letters, what I remember isn't how many big events happened in that era. What I remember is Zheng Musheng, who couldn't read but never stopped thinking about his wife and kids at home. It's Ye Shurou, waiting from youth to old age. It's Xie Nanzhi, who never in her life became the "kid who'll leave" that people said she was.

These characters are all small, so small that in the sweep of that era you can barely see them.

But precisely because of that, I feel like I actually saw that era. Because an era was never the years, events, and numbers written in history books.

In the end, the times land on people.

They land on why someone left home, on why a woman waited her whole life, on a single label, on a letter that never arrived.

And finally, they land on the long life of one ordinary family.