Essential Docs: Last Train Home (2009)

I have a friend in his early thirties with two young kids. He told me that one of his biggest anxieties is knowing that, as he ages, it will become increasingly more difficult to relate to his children.

Lixin Fan's 2009 film Last Train Home is very much about this generational divide. Originally intended to document the largest annual human commute on the planet, in which approximately 130 million migrant workers return to their rural homes for the Lunar New Year, Last Train Home slowly develops into an affecting look at the family lives strained by the realities of our globalized economy.

The film follows Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, an uneducated married couple working thousands of miles away from home in order to put their kids through school. Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin live in a cramped apartment with the only semblance of privacy coming in the form of thin curtains separating themselves from the other workers. The Lunar New Year is the only time of the year that they travel back to their hometown to visit their family and, even then, they are only able to stay for a few days before making the long journey back to the city. They toil humbly and without complaint. Their only wish is that their two children, the teenaged Zhang Qin and her younger brother, complete their studies, giving them a chance at a better life.

As the film's narrative develops we see that Zhang Qin has other ideas. She almost never sees her parents and, when she does, they do very little but nag her about her grades. We see that her resentment has been building for some time, and in a following scene she prays that they will never return.

Against her family's wishes, Zhang Qin drops out and takes a job at a factory making jeans. She figures out that, if she quits school and goes to work, she can spend money on herself, as she has nobody to support. Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin are understandably heartbroken, but they are impotent to assert any authority; to Zhang Qin, her parents exist almost exclusively as dissenting voices on the telephone.

It's easy to vilify Zhang Qin and read her actions as a betrayal, but she's just as wounded as her parents. While she comes across as ungrateful—which is not untrue—her behaviour becomes easier to understand after some reflection. Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin sacrificed for Zhang Qin and her brother but, through no fault of their own, they were never really there: as a baby Zhang Qin was left in the care of her ageing grandmother, who is well-meaning but out of touch with the modern world. We infer a relationship between the parents and their daughter, but, in many ways, they are strangers.

Zhang Qin fundamentally does not understand her parents' good intentions because, really, how could she? It's easy for an outside observer to empathize with Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, but it's considerably more difficult to do the same with Zhang Qin. At the end of the day, however, she's the one that has had to live with her parents' absence. Although socioeconomic realities have determined this family's dynamics, there are no substitutes for a mother and father's presence.

Within the context of documentary film, Last Train Home has drawn favourable comparisons to Hoop Dreams. Like Steve James's 1994 look at American teenagers striving for NBA stardom, Last Train Home is a narrative that could only have occurred organically. Documentaries of this mold are impossible to pre-plan, and I imagine it takes considerable talent and dedication to recognize what is unfolding and see it through. Lixin Fan and his team capture these workers' lives with a steady hand, and their presence goes virtually unnoticed by the film's primary subjects save for a critical scene near the end where the family's tensions finally boil over.

Even among families living in more priviledged conditions there is often a breakdown in communication regarding what parents want for their children. I can only imagine how frustrating it can be when lessons learned are lost on subsequent generations. While I would almost never question parents' intentions—especially because I don't have any children, so what the hell do I know—we need to recognize that people need to exercise their own agency, and that, often, this means making their own mistakes.