“Return to Dust”— Disappearing Narratives and Cultural Divides
by Ziting Jiang
“Return to Dust”— Disappearing Narratives and Cultural Divides
by Ziting Jiang
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A poster for Li Ruijun’s 2022 film “Return to Dust,” which has garnered acclaim for its depiction of the hardships of a peasant couple in rural Gansu province. (Image: Google Images)
In the film “Return to Dust,” a 2022 film by Li Ruijun depicting the lives of a couple in rural Gansu province, the protagonist Ma Youtie uses a metaphor focused on the land for his own life experience. As a person deprived of his voice, he describes himself as the wheat growing on the land, subject to wind, sun, and rain, with no opportunity to advocate for himself.
“Being blown about by the wind, what can wheat say? Being pecked at by the sparrows that fly over, what can wheat say? Being nibbled by its own donkey, what can wheat say? Being cut down by the summer’s sickle, what can wheat say?” Ma says, while working in the fields.
The film presents life in the northwest part of China, in Gansu’s countryside, and focuses on the fate of Ma Youtie, a poor farmer, reflecting the struggle with poverty still faced by countless rural people even after China’s announcement of “complete poverty alleviation.” Ma and his wife Guiying also face pressure to move, as farmers around them sell off their land for urban development. The film portrays a cultural scene different from that of Chinese cities, which also prompted me to reflect on the commonalities and points of integration between rural and urban cultures. The eventual forced withdrawal of the film from theatrical release in China also led me to explore the broader question of whether a culture can also return to dust throughout the course of history.
Across China, though rural and urban areas coexist within the same nation, there still exist some distinctions between the realities of life in those two places. By depicting the harsh realities of agricultural life, “Return to Dust” exposes the obvious contrasts and profound divisions in cultural experiences between them.
In a later passage of the film, Ma Youtie articulates the sense of helplessness in a more direct way when planting wheat with his wife Guiying; he says he feels as if he’s planting Guiying’s footsteps.
When Guiying says she doesn’t want to be planted because then she’d be unable to go anywhere, Ma Youtie responds, “We have feet, but where can we go? We are still growing on this piece of land.”
An image from the film of Ma Youtie and his wife Guiying transporting wheat. (Image: Bing Images)
This attachment to one’s birthplace seems to be the living norm of rural people in an agrarian civilization that has lasted for thousands of years: born to the land, returning to the land; and without the land, both a civilization and its people may perish. The film’s story is a microcosm of Chinese traditional farmers who grow namely on the land, enduring hard labor and treating it as an unchangeable fate. Meanwhile, for many urban dwellers in China, it is a reality unfamiliar to us.
Social theorists may provide insights into this phenomenon. According to Osland and Bird’s theory, we can see it as a cultural paradox—wherein the behaviors or concepts of a culture appear contradictory depending on the context (Osland, Bird, Delano, & Jacob, 2000). In the film “Return to Dust,” this paradox manifests as a deep divide between rural and urban experiences of life.
The contrast between the simplicity of countryside life and the sophisticated city lifestyle is obvious. Urban dwellers, accustomed to the convenience of city life with its quick-paced transportation and spontaneous journeys, might find it hard to reconcile the existence of such dramatically different realities in the same country, especially in places like Gansu in the northwest. Indeed, national broadcasts on CCTV News have announced China’s targeted poverty alleviation, proclaiming that 98.99 million individuals have collectively ascended to a moderately prosperous society. While the national narrative may celebrate widespread socioeconomic gains, “Return to Dust” remains firmly grounded in the truths of those who were overlooked beneath these grand statistics, offering a real glimpse into the lives that comprehensive poverty alleviation programs occasionally missed.
Although rural and urban cultures appear distinct on the surface, Osland and Bird’s model of “Cultural Sensemaking” can also help reveal an underlying organic connection, from which we can discern some universally existing cultural laws and patterns from different cultural contexts (Osland, Bird, Delano, & Jacob, 2000). As Ma Youtie remarked in the film, “Everyone has their destiny, so does the wheat. It has its destiny too. When summer comes, it gets harvested by the sickle,” which serves as a profound metaphor for the societal lower-class farmers who labor intensively and offer their work to nurture society, often only to receive discrimination in return; they seem to be defined by their utility to society. The exploitation of Ma Youtie by the rich, and the way he’s used by his relatives who favor utilitarian value over familial bond, reflect how societal structures harvest a large majority of laborers’ work to sustain a privileged few.
A Sixth Tone article describes how the director of the film required the entire cast and crew to move to rural Gansu for nearly a year, and the female lead of the film, renowned actress Hai Qing, to move in and live with the local, untrained actor who played her husband, Ma Youtie, in the film. (Image: Sixth Tone)
This not only accurately depicts rural reality but also mirrors a universal truth of our entire societal ecosystem. When capitalists declare that “The 996-work schedule is a blessing” and “We don’t need cost-ineffective employees,” I sense the law of the jungle, so evident in the countryside and ever-present in city dweller’s lives. This also reveals to me the interconnection between different cultures in our society — despite varying forms of expression, this essence remains similar.
Here, I ponder a deeper issue: If a person can return to dust and become a common denominator of the society, can a culture also disappear into the dust for not aligning with the mainstream cultural values? After the movie was released in China, it caused an uproar online. Some said, “This movie discredits China’s image,” others said it was “deliberately catering to the foreign award-winning formula,” and some called it “blackening socialist new rural areas.”
More interestingly, the endings released domestically and internationally were different. The Chinese release ended with, “In the winter of 2011, Ma Youtie, with the help of the government and enthusiastic villagers, moved to a new home and started a new life.” This modified ending might have been influenced by censorship and other factors, to align with comprehensive poverty alleviation and core socialist values promoted in China, which emphasize virtues like “truth, goodness, and beauty” as guiding principles for cultural content.
But in the director’s original version of the film, Ma drinks pesticide and takes his own life after witnessing the death of his wife, Guiying, who accidentally drowns in a river. I find this version, the international version, which ends with Ma Youtie paying off his debts and selling his property prior to taking his own life, more coherent with the character’s psychology. Sure enough, less than two months after its release, the film was forced off screens. I understand that during the Two Sessions, China needed to promote cultural confidence. However, culture can be romantic, gentle, as well as sorrowful and stern. If Chinese cinema cannot even tolerate a film with a realistic theme, how many unknown cultures in China have disappeared into dust under the impact of mainstream culture? In Beyond sophisticated stereotyping: Cultural sensemaking in context, the authors mention the concept of “sophisticated stereotyping”— making judgments about cultures based on more complex theoretical concepts rather than using simple negative, stereotypical appraisals (Osland, Bird, Delano, & Jacob, 2000). Perhaps without this film, I wouldn’t have seen the current situation in the rural areas of Gansu, and my understanding of the countryside might only have been limited to beautified pictures and thoughtfully compiled data in the news. We might always be wrapped in the illusion of news data and political propaganda’s sophisticated stereotyping.
While the diversity of rural and urban cultures within China exhibits distinctive characteristics, there still lies a shared essence beneath their varied expressions. However, the concern of cultural disappearance is evident when non-mainstream narratives are replaced by dominant discourses, as evidenced by the storyline of Li Ruijun’s powerful film. It is imperative to pay attention to, and preserve and honor the diverse aspects within a larger culture, understanding that all elements of it will enrich the broader cultural narrative. It is the inclusivity that ultimately may ensure the vibrancy of cultural diversity, and perhaps that the larger culture – in its embrace of that inclusivity – will not return to dust.
Ma Youtie and his wife Guiying burn paper money on the side of the highway, in a traditional good luck ritual. (Image: Still from Berlin Festival film clips on YouTube)
Ziting Jiang
Ziting Jiang is an undergraduate student of the Class of 2027 from Jiangsu, China. She always believes in the power of human connection and is on a journey to reach broader realities through her writing.
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