Yellow Earth: Young Idealism vs. Old Realism

Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth is a poignant film highlighting the young and old and the realist and idealist. It is also a story of fate. Set in early 1939, during which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) are repelling a Japanese invasion together, Yellow Earth follows the story of Gu Qing, a CCP soldier dispatched from the southern province of Yen’an to the northern KMT-controlled region of Shaanbei. Gu Qing is tasked with the collection of local folk songs to be later rewritten with communist lyrics.

For the purposes of his assignment, he lives with the poor family of a widower and his young son Hanhan and daughter Cuiqiao. Over the course of his stay, he learns that the songs he seeks epitomize not happiness and joy, but rather suffering and anguish. He is also surprised to learn that marriage in Shaanbei is arranged, to which the audience discovers that Cuiqiao’s marriage has also been arranged, to her extreme dismay.

Though Gu Qing is changed by his experience living with the family, the family is also influenced. Both Hanhan and Cuiqiao are attracted to the promises of the CCP, such as good grain for everyone. Especially tantalizing to Cuiqiao are the CCP’s promise of equality for women – that women in the CCP can read, write and fight. Cuiqiao tries to elope with Gu Qing but is turned away. When Gu Qing does not return the following April, when Cuiqiao is married, she flees at night on the Yellow River. Gu Qing later returns to the village to find the villagers dancing to end a devastating drought.

This straightforward plot belies complex contrasts and themes. Of these, the contrast between youthful idealism and senior conversatism is one that stands out. Like many other youth of the era, Hanhan and Cuiqiao readily believe the CCP to be a catalyst for change and prosperity. Like many other elderly members of the era, the father is much more skeptical.

This skepticism is borne of a deep sense of reality the father possesses and Gu Qing distinctly lacks. When Gu Qing objects to the young age at which girls are married in Shaanbei, at the beginning of his stay, it is apparent that he is unaware of the harsh realities that obligate such a practice. Instead, he insists on his ideals, saying that the custom "has already changed in the South, it must change in the North, it has to change all over China." When Gu Qing laughs at the father's prayer for rain, it is obvious that he is unaware of the importance of the yellow earth and rain. Gu Qing also misses the point of Hanhan's song -- believing it to be one about wetting the bed rather than about child-bridegrooms.

This skepticism also evidences itself through the father's answers to Gu Qing's questions. When Gu Qing asks why marriages in Shaanbei are results of arrangement and not love, the father wearily asks in reply, "What's love when there's no food?" When he asks how peasants can remember so many songs, the father tells him that they remember when they suffer. Finally, when he asks the father why girls must suffer, the father summates the entirety of all his answers: "Fate."

Ironically, despite these and other incidents, Gu Qing does not appear to notice the disconnect between his ideals and the family's reality. Instead, he continues to spout communist ideas, believing that these ideas would overcome fate.

For better or for worse, these ideas ensnare Hanhan and Cuiqiao that they, too, could overcome fate. Ultimately, their fates are ambiguous, perhaps symbolizing the ambiguous fate of the CCP.

In closing, the break between old and new is also epitomized in the making of Yellow Earth, which marked the beginning of the Fifth Generation era of Chinese filmmaking upon its 1984 release. Departing from the past, Yellow Earth often used long camera shots to emphasize the vast earth and water rather than the characters. Yellow Earth also broke from the old by indirectly criticizing the foundations of the CCP.

Unlike Cuiqiao and Hanhan, however, the fate of Yellow Earth -- as a historical and cultural Chinese milestone -- is clear.