Based on a heartbreaking true story: China’s abandoned children remembered in short film
- Chinese filmmaker Yuchao Feng believes his short film Pearl can help heal the wounds of the past for his family and many others who have suffered a similar fate
- Feng based his short film Pearl on his mother’s account of being abandoned by her own mother in Fujian province at the age of six
One Sunday afternoon in February, 2017, Chinese film director Yuchao Feng was in his flat in the US state of New Jersey when he received a phone call from his mother that would shock and inspire him.
Feng knew something was wrong – not just because it was 3am in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin, where Wang Jingjing was calling from, but because they rarely spoke.
“My parents were not around much when I was growing up in Ningde,” says Feng, recalling the city of three million in Fujian province, in the country’s southeast, known for its tea cultivation. “And we talked even less after I moved to the US to study film in 2011.”
Feng’s mother was having a nightmare similar to those that had plagued her for more than 40 years. As they talked, he learned that she had been abandoned by her mother at the age of six, a secret she had kept bottled up for decades. For the first time in years, Feng felt close to his mother.
“I wanted to dig deeper into my mother’s psyche, to know her better,” he says.
Feng did just that. The experience inspired him to write and direct Pearl, a heartbreaking short film set in a fishing village in Xiapu county, Fujian where his mother grew up, in which a poor widow (played by Liu Lu) abandons her six-year-old daughter to seek a better life with her son. The young girl, Lin, portrayed beautifully by first-time actress Yating Cao, is destined for a much harder life, which would have been typical, Feng says.
