I just read an introductory commentary about a movie called "下海"， which is an outdated term referring to a phenomenon of a time during the last decade of 20th century when an overwhelming number of state enterprise workers 'volunteered' to quit their jobs looking for better opportunity doing their own businesses. It's undeniable that many of these people made their success by openning and doing well in their private businesses, but , if one has any knowledge of the economic circumstances around the period, he may wonder just how many of them ever made it against all odds?

  This film, directed by a French man, is about the story of a northeastern woman, Lina, who just like hundreds of thousands of Chinese former state-enterprise workers, left herself jobless , "voluntarily", on an adventure which she has neither faculty nor experience to navigate, to look for a better life. After a long and exhausting effort and spending huge amount of money, which was such a stress on her already destitute family,  she found herself on the land of France. But she realized this was nothing of a dreamland for her at all before long. It's basically hard for her to land a job that would exceed 500 dollars a month, a far cry from what the job agency had unscrupulously promised, as 2000. She was working as a housemaid for a family of Chinese original at one point, but her countrywoman of the house had no sympathy whatsoever for her, not even a sense of pity that comes naturally with more or less of a kindness. As a matter of fact she found the mistress had an actual repugance towards her, displayed conspicuously by saying something like "northeastern people are generally lazy and stupid." So she quit the job after a violent vocal confrontation, finding herself again roaming around on the streets in desperate search for jobs, with no stone unturned in Paris.

  Just as she was running out of money and facing a dire risk of becoming a vagabond in a foreign country, a Chinese woman took her in for a temporary shelter where a bunch of Chinese women were living and of which they were paying the rent together. But she had no sooner learned they were all hookers pimping customers on the streets. Her instinctive aversion to their work was all over her and came unconsciously from the moral understanding of a simple and traditional Chinese work-class family. She distanced herself from the little society that provided a roof over her, and had the least words with them only when she had to. But the sense of dignity was crushed to pieces when she got a call from home noting her that her single-digit square meters snail house of her family of three was being sold to repay her mortgage loan she took paying the job agency getting her abroad. This ended up as the final straw for all her dreams and hopes, and worst of all, the possibility of a living as she had been used to was actually reduced to ground zero. 

  She wept night after night in her bed with muted sound for fear of being heard by her roommates. But she had decided there's nothing in the world she could bear less than let her husband and little son live on the streets, so there must be something to be done. And one night as she was lying in bed early as usual, she happened to overhear her prostitute roommates talking about their business of the day. She had been generally immune to their shameful content of conversation all the time, but when it came to the matters of money, it did make a difference. She was shocked at the notion that the money they earned one night with a customer accounted for one third of her monthly pay as a housemaid, and it may only take less than a quarter of an hour. It's equally shocking that she realized how badly she needed money to save herself from hell more than any time before.

  It was long nights of self-struggling thoughts before she made up her mind to go with this dirty business. But she still kept herself away from her roommates slash now de facto co-workers, because she thought she was doing this for saving her family and it would have been unthinkable for her doing this job had she ever had another option, so she was different from them. It never occured to her there might be deeper or at least equally justifiable motives behind most of them; and it was long before she became aware this was a path of no return. 

This was no easier way of living, however, even as elapse of time and the satisfaction with it being of less of an urgency to meet minimum needs washed off the guilt and humiliation entangled in her heart, the scarlet letter on her identity would never be obliterated on a profound level. On the surface French society embraces the legal status of sex workers, as they are called, it even provides health care service specifically for this special community. But this is certainly not a respectable job even for French johns who pay them. One time after she was badly beaten by her customer, feeling helpless and devastated, she just couldn't keep herself together and burst out in a long and sorrowful wail in the arms of the woman who took her in, it suddenly came across her mind that what her roommates must have experienced was no more enjoyable for themselves, and they would not hold on with it without a fair reason.

From then on she made a direct turn of attitude towards her roommates. She accepted them as her friends and began to eat with them on the same table. The family-like vibe in the little room did help to lift up spirits especially like on the eve of a Chinese Lunar New Year, when they wrapped dumplings and cooked together, drinking, dancing, singing like all the distress and gloom around the previous year concerned them no more. But in the deep heart she was never content with the status quo, and was determined to earn enough money, as quickly as she could, not just to pay off the loan, but to buy a big house, to start a business for her husband, most importantly, to start her life anew.

Life as what it was standing on the street side and exchanging eye contacts with customers awkwardly was given a new meaning now.  This kindled her hope for the future, as she dreamed of her reunion with her husband and son--after weary working days--in a big new house, and she could always love the happy smile on her husband's face as she saw visible lines had been written on his forehead by arduous years. And it seemed she was so good and even professional now under this drive, she's doing extremely well in this business and it's pretty safe to say she had made a good fortune after a few years. The only shadow cast in an otherwise fulfilled future life was the fact that she had to keep a permanent secret deeply buried in the past and tell lies whenever the circumstances dictate. She felt terribly sorry for her husband, but she thought she could make it all up for him by giving him a free and pleasant life since after his middle years. Just like most of the Chinese working abroad, her money was remitted back to her family, and she had little fare left for her own pleasure and entertainment.

And the news that she's a housemaid in France and earning fair amount of money doing the job, a fundamental lie she thoughtlessly fabricated for her last half of life, had made a big stir in her hometown. Her sister-in-law on her own side, Dandan wrote her a letter and said she wanted to come and do as Lina did. In China sister-in-laws on one's own side usually have an important status in a family, and she couldn't argue with her parents when they wanted her to take Dandan in. So come as she did, but it didn't take long before Dandan found out that a housemaid job could hardly supply for her basic sustenance in France. In a restaurant facing Lina across a table, Dandan insisted she tell the truth about what she was doing in Paris, and Lina, having no idea of how to get away with it, pointed to a prostitute immediately standing outside the window, said, "there, that's what I'm doing." The hard cold truth smashed Dandan's dream and life as it had done to Lina's, for Dandan was under a heavy debt as well paying a job agency, and she just couldn't afford to get back home with her hands empty. After crying thoroughly in Lina's lap, she made up her mind to enter the business.

Time went fast and the day finally came when Lina had earned enough money to make her dream come true, and she was back home with Dandan welcomed heartedly by the family. The sunshine face of her son, the intimacy with her husband made her feel well at ease, it seemed all the past had dissipated like the clouds after a summer rainstorm, everything had seemed normal, until one day she found her husband would not like to come home constantly. He always said he had been busy at the store, a little family business started by Lina's money, but she could tell that what she had dreaded most in her life had happened. So she went to the store one day to see him, it was such a mess compared to what she saw last time she came, her husband sitting at one corner of the room on the ground, leaning against wall, drunken, buried by piles of empty bottles.

It's clear now her husband had heard something, and it turned out later that Dandan had accidentally given away the secret of their business in France. Now she understood what she had dreamed of in Paris had vanished for good, the pain and scars she bore physically and mentally would worth nothing but a branding mark that would accompany her forever. Within a few months she was divorced, her husband moved out of the house and went to the south for job seeking, while she got the custody of their son. Now that she had given up all the hope of life for herself, her only light in the darkness lurching forward was him, the only love she had that would hold on as purely and simply as before. But the shadow of the past wouldn't loose its grip though, and it was poisoning the only seed which promised to grow as the safeguard harbour of her soul. Gossips had its toll on a young and innocent heart, through social opinions, even without exception of a school. One day she got a call from school, and when the caller knew it's her, the son was asked to talk instead; and when her son got the receiver, the voice told him to ask for his father to go to school for a parents' meeting.

She had developed numb nerves to gossips over time since her divorce, the days had long gone when she dreamed of gossiping sound droning around for days on end; She would walk around her neighborhood with deliberately ignorant eyes and ears, and exchange greetings with those who were comparatively more friendly. Nothing would break me down, she thought. Nothing, but, now it seemed, her son's happiness. Seeing the look of sadness and anxiety explicit on  his face after the call with his teacher, she was wondering how many days it was they hadn't had a talk about his life at school, it seemed now the boy had been shunning from daily interaction with her when she intended to initiate such conversation. The feel of prickly pain that had haunted her during the early months of her divorced life was grinding in her heart again, how could such a young and tender heart like his afford to shoulder so many consequences of her sins? Thinking of these, she decided to see his father with him for the Lunar New Year day.

At the end of the film, the family of three reunited again in the father's little rent room in a south city. It was night when they arrived, the light in the little room was dim but the happiness on the faces of the family was bright, the erstwhile ambience before Paris was in a while alive and active again, as the father was hugging his son ardently like he had never done before. And the couple was cooking noodles for their son together just like one of those long lost past days, as he was tired out by the journey and sleeping; but it was obvious they could never regain the intimacy though,  now that in his sobriety they could engage on some friendly yet less sensitive topics of conversation while cooking. The film leaves the space for imagination to audience as of what can be expected of the couple's fate as the last scene fades out here.

One aspect of the film drawing my fascination, other than the tragic story of an individual woman who got her life out of track in an attempt to find happiness, is about social abnormalities that marked an insane period of time. As far as I get to understand the economic and social setting behind the woman's story by searching news of the time , it's actually massive layoffs of workers by state-owned enterprises whose management had long been characterized of low efficiency, bureaucracy, lack of innovation and creativity; since the economic reform had made the country unprecedentedly more reliable on world market, when the Wall Street financial crisis of 1987 raged the globe , the yet transforming half-open economy had never been prepared for it. It's never a hard decision to make, however, when the authority realized the state enterprises needed to be reshaped to achieve some efficiency;  thus what they could do first and foremost was to cut redundant workers on the payroll. It proved a havoc-wreaking policy though, while it seemed justifiable and of common sense at first. Neither the system itself nor the people had the capacity to be adapted to the novel idea of self-employing businesses in such a broad scale. Many many people committed suicide at the time, cuz they had never experienced anything like this before in a secluded economy, just like that of north Korea today. They had worked and lived in an already destitute, hand-to-mouth but one job for life state, one of maybe thousands of households could afford to buy a black and white TV set; It's like they were trained and accustomed to the way of living and so when the large scale layoff took place, they were faced with immediate starvation and devastated by the fact that they could see no hope at the ages when they got unemployed, which were mostly well over middle 30s or 40. And they had no retirement pensions to support their older life while most of the families had 3-4 kids and parents to feed. This is what happened to the leading role at the period.

Not many people today would care about what was it all about in a torrential systemical social upheaval decades ago. Some may still remember what was going on on a renowned square in the capital city in the Autumn of 1989, and in the then Soviet Union and many east European nations. I would not suggest the politics had to have causal links with economic influence, but it's arguable that it could not be a coincidence that so many countries with a similar regime were encountering the same kind of social unrest. And I just couldn't believe that CIA could have single-handedly managed all of these movements. But it doesn't seem to matter now, as that piece of history is slipping from the memories of most people which may be good both for a conscious and vigilant authority or for people having their traumas healed after so many years. Maybe our posterity somehow at a certain point will be permitted to judge on those events that have no relevance with them at all, but I don't think that would make much difference. It's the people's stories, even of the kind of people like Lina,  which we may have erroneously placed below moral bar, that have some significance for me. Because it defines what we were and what we are and will be without being manipulated as in those well-intended history textbooks, and I really think this matters most and should never be forgotten.