To Live

Here's a quick one before I go to sleep.

Today, we watched the 2nd part of 'To Live' during the joint lecture. There was this poignant bit where the boy (Youqing)'s parents packed a tin of dumplings for him and sent him to school though he's so tired. In school, he was killed when the district chief's car knocked down the wall while he was asleep on the other side. At his grave, his grieving mother opened the pack of uneaten dumplings (still perfect albeit a little brown) plus another bowl of freshly cooked ones and implored her dead son to eat, and thereafter to have a good sleep, because he had never had a good night's sleep when he was alive. It was at this point when I noticed many of the students brushing tears from their eyes. It was indeed a moving scene, the quiet melancholy very tastefully done without histrionics.

Then, another scene of note happened towards the end of the film, where Fengxia (the protagonists' daughter) was giving birth in a hospital run by ridiculously young doctors, who reigned supreme because of their socialistic fervour rather than medical expertise. Worried, Fengxia's family brought in an aged professor of obstetrics, who had been labelled as a 'reactionary' and jailed, to see to Fengxia's delivery. The family then made a tragic error by buying 7 buns for the straving professor, and to add fuel to the fire, pumped him with water after he's eaten the buns (they later said 7 buns become 49 (7x7) with the water). Thus, when Fengxia suffered serious internal bleeding after giving birth, the hapless young doctors could do nothing while the professor was totally bloated and knocked out. We were all panicky as we watched the family running to and fro, between the gasping Fengxia (who's dying from loss of blood) and the similarly gasping professor (who's 'dying' of overeating). It's really a tragicomic moment. It's funny because the situation's so absurd. The professor who could save Fengxia having gorged himself with numerous buns because he was starving as a result of persecution by the young doctors who were too useless to help Fengxia. Tragic because we see a life - a new mother that is - ebbing away and no one could do anything. It's a moment where you don't know whether to laugh or to cry because you realize the whole situation's so ridiculous, and it's the most memorable bit for me in the film.