If I had to compare modern China to something in my imagination, I would think of a beautiful, intricately decorated, multi-colored, ancient vase that has been broken and glued back many times, slowly losing its original appearance, only retaining the memory of its past here and there. With each subsequent assembly, it looks more and more not like a mosaic, but like a monolith sticky with glue covering the decorations.
This is the impression one gets while watching Violet Du Feng’s Hidden Letters – a documentary presumably telling the story of the power of sisterhood, Chinese women and their silent struggle for equal rights, in fact overwhelming with the image of a modern country in which a strange combination of socialism and capitalism fuels the economic power and excites with the promise of money. On the other hand, it still cannot get its foot out of the gap that neither the great leap forward, initiated in Mao Zedong’s time, nor any subsequent one has been able to bridge. On the one hand, we have multiculturalism compacted into a shapeless mass, and on the other, the modernity that uses tradition only to sell its interpretations of the past at a better profit or to more effectively prolong the life of the patriarchy served under the guise of virtues, values and nostalgia.
Of course, Du Feng talks about the eponymous secret Nüshu alphabet, traditionally inaccessible to men, practiced only by women, but she does it in the Western fashion, falling into a trap of which she herself seemed to be aware. Just like the representatives of companies that try to start a business by using Nüshu design to produce and sell kitsch gadgets, the director tries to sell viewers her vision of contemporary Chinese femininity, or rather, a fraction of it. Unfortunately, this style, at times reminiscent of a television, hollow arthouse interpretation, gives the effect of artificial optimism where there is a gloomy abyss of the lack of real, equal rights, the shackles of tradition swallowed by capitalism and patriarchy spat out in a form so cunningly enticing, that even these women aware of their struggles get lost in it and act to their mutual disadvantage – for example, perpetuating the pattern against which Nüshu was created, the pattern of the dominant man and the requirement to have a partner.
Watching Hidden Letters, we are closer to nervous laughter at the absurdities seen on the screen than to reflections on the marriage of capitalism with patriarchy in the Chinese edition and the mechanisms that preserve order in hearts and heads. Although the subject taken up by Du Feng is noble and necessary, against the backdrop of the ruthless power of money and culture, whose good elements are slowly but surely falling apart – as seen in the film in crumbling old buildings and emptying small towns and villages – the director’s naive optimism pales.
The Chinese director’s documentary should be read between the lines and emotionally – where it seems funny, it is poignantly sad, where it promises hope, excruciatingly and desperately screams: about the dying of an unique culture, about the disintegration of people and places, about a fight in which there will be more Pyrrhic victories than returns with a shield. Although the optimism felt in the last scenes seems naive, one can agree with the director on one thing: the process of building women’s awareness in China has begun and the time will come for its second and third waves.
