The vivid, passionate poetry of Yu Xiuhua has won over readers from around the world with the intimate portraits of her relationships, innermost feelings, and circumstance through her writing. Yu, who began writing poetry at the age of 27 from her family’s farmhouse in China’s Hubei province, posted lines from“Crossing Half of China To Sleep With You” to her blog in 2014 and became a viral sensation overnight, with the poem being shared over one million times on multiple Chinese social networks.
Named by the The New York Times as one of the eleven bravest women around the world in 2017, Yu is also a prominent feminist and advocate for disability rights, as informed by her experiences with ableism and forced lack of autonomy due to her cerebral palsy. In award-winning documentary filmmaker Jian Fan’s 2016 film Still Tomorrow, Fan captured an unflinching, poignant glimpse into Yu’s life as she sought a divorce, addressed long-standing conflicts with her mother, Zhou Jinxing, before Jinxing’s death in 2016 from lung cancer, and came to terms with her blooming fame.
On Monday, August 6th at 10 pm, Still Tomorrow makes its national broadcast and streaming debut PBS’ documentary series POV, and pov.org. Ahead of its release, International Examiner reporter Sophia Stephens spoke with Fan over WeChat about the film, Yu’s story, and their multiple collaborative relationships throughout the making of Still Tomorrow:
IE: In a 2016 interview about Still Tomorrow with International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, you said: “Chinese people don’t often open up their real feelings inside… they often channel it through another way.” How do most Chinese people address their feelings, and how does Yu Xiuhua?
JF: The common Chinese [person] always want to hide their emotions, and not speak out about their feelings… Yu Xiuhua, she’s very frank, and she often speaks out her feelings to people, and she didn’t hide. This is her strong personality—she tried to express herself, and didn’t hide anything. She is not a shy woman, and she is brave to speak out.
IE: What do you enjoy and/or admire about Yu Xiuhua’s poetry, and about Yu Xiuhua herself?
JF: At the very beginning three years ago, I knew she was a poet, so I tried to find her poems on social networks. There were not so many of her poems then, but these poems touched me deeply because there was so much passion, so many images, and she is very frank in her poems to express her feelings. She spoke of the woman’s perspective, the feminist perspective, and this was very attractive to me three years ago… I am lucky that I found her. Before this film, I also filmed about social issues, and some journalistic topics, but never about a poetic person. This was an opportunity to make a poetic film.
IE: How did you build a relationship with Yu Xiuhua, and when did you know that she was truly letting you into her life?
JF: We first met at her house three years ago, which was full of journalists, so I wanted her to feel that I was different. I did many preparations before meeting her, and I talked with her for two or three hours about her poems, so she found that I was not a normal journalist… we stayed a very long time in her house, trying to observe her life. After the first night, we kept a good friendship, and we kept filming on and off for over one year. Outside of filming, we spent a lot of time in her house with her parents talking, cooking, and eating together, even working together in their farmland.
IE: How did that closeness and comraderie add to your relationship with Yu Xiuhua, and your telling of her life through film?
JF: When we told her story in the film, we tried to let the audience know about the relationship between filmmaker and subject, and in the film, you can feel that. I think it’s important to let the audience know about this, and I think that filmmakers should not hide in their films, especially documentary films… because of the different close relationships, including with Yu Xiuhua and me, she could open up to our camera about her parents, her husband, etc., because of our trust. I wanted to let the audience feel and know the trust between us.
IE: There are some very vulnerable moments in the documentary—including Yu Xiuhua’s asking Yin Shiping for a divorce—that touch upon her disability and struggle for independence. What was it like to capture and witness Yu Xiuhua’s conflicts with those closest to her?
JF: Before filming, we spent a lot of time in her house. After maybe three to four months of shooting, we set up a very good relationship with her family. For Yin Shiping, it was different—the relationship was different. I think Yin Shiping also wanted to speak out his feelings, especially about the marriage… I tried to know what his feelings were in this family, this house, because it’s not Yin Shiping’s house, it’s Yu Xiuhua’s parents’ house… what were Yin Shiping’s feelings about her poems, her personality, their relationship? I also wanted to find some kind of balance between Yu Xiuhua and Yin Shiping… I let Yin Shiping know about my feelings, perspective, and opinion, and wanted to know his voice.
When we were shooting some quarrels, Yu Xiuhua’s mother told us not to broadcast [that] during those days—three years ago, we didn’t, because she didn’t want to let so many people know about the conflict in their house. We did broadcast it last year, two years after she passed… Yu Xiuhua’s mother tried to protect her family, to protect her daughter, but the result was totally different. I want the audience to not only know about Yu Xiuhua’s perspective, but also her mother’s—it’s two generations, two different womens’ opinions about culture and family—and I wanted the audience to know the different perspectives of Chinese women through their relationship and her mother’s voice.
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