Postman, Mountain, Dog

That, at least, was the translation of the Chinese title of this movie, showing up in English on the screen beneath three ideograms which I took to be symbols for these three things. The movie is advertised here as "Postmen in the Mountains" which has its own surreal quality but lacks something in poetry.

This is an absolutely beautiful, uncomplicated little tear-jerker that might well serve in the place of an actual trip to backwoods China. See it on the largest screen that's showing it because the rich, moist beauty of this landscape, in shades of emerald vegetation and rust-red earth, deserves all the amplitude it can get. P, M, D is a quiet tale of a worn-out rural mailman turning over his physically arduous but emotionally rewarding delivery route to his son, and it's just bloody wonderful (unless you're in the mood for "Overmuscled Smart Mouths Outrun Fake Fireballs, Drive Huge Vehicles Very Fast, And Shoot Enormous Guns", that is; this is not that movie).

Very little "happens" in the usual sense; they walk, they talk, they meet and greet the villagers along the route, following the old man's cheerful, handsome dog that has been his work companion for years. There is an occasional voiceover comment from the son about how he never really knew his father and in fact was, as a child, fearful of this intermittently present stranger.

The father's commentary is silent, shown in flashbacks set off by what he sees now on his last journey as a faithful functionary of the State, serving the poorest, the most isolated, the least "important" people, whom progress has passed over. Their children escape to the wider world and never return — except for the postman's son, who at last discovers where and how his mysterious, traveling father has spent his life. He accepts the father's task, with its burdens and rewards, as his own.

Yes, it's all considerably idealized; the old man is as beautiful and frail as a dragonfly, the son is adorable, the mom is gorgeous and patient. The dog, which is the only character to actually have a name of his own, is a happy surprise in a tale about a nation which until quite recently considered pets to be parasites fit only for execution, if not actual consumption. You don't feel the landscape's heat, the humidity, the weariness of endless hard and often nearly vertical walking, even in glorious surroundings, in faded old sneakers.

Problems with local political bosses are only alluded to, not permitted to poison the enchantment; and you would not know from this film that there has for some time been a quiet epidemic of suicide among Chinese peasant women (they drink poisonous or caustic farming chemicals, for the most part, which suggests how desperate they must be); or that the fate of infant girls in rural China is not a kind one in general; or that drunkenness, with all its attendant social misery, is a perennial problem in most such rural backwaters; or that isolated villages can be hotbeds of anger, persecution, and crime, on an intimate scale but nonetheless painful and destructive.

This isn't that movie, either. This movie, although it's basically the tale of a true if unsung Hero of the People, is outside of time in ways that make it essentially outside of politics, sociology and pathology too.

It's about truths that don't change in the hill country, be it China or, perhaps, the Ozarks, or the hilly spine of Sicily, or the remoter villages of Northern New Mexico: the slow roll of seasonal time, the need for people to depend upon and take care of one another in hard environments, the inventiveness and toughness stimulated by necessity, the costs of being left out and left behind (but also the rewardsof being left alone, comparatively at least).

And, of course, it's about the reluctant yielding of the older generation to the new, with all the sadness, trust, and proud resolve that such a transaction can involve at its best.

Aw, go see the movie, for crying out loud! On an afternoon when you've been rushed off your feet taking care of your family, or frazzled half to craziness by your boss or your co-workers, or depressed by the consistently rotten, cruel and bloody world news, slip into this world for a while and feel yourself slow, breathe, and open with the breadth of the landscape and the sky.

Okay, I cried. Even though the music is too sweet and too loud, and I know what those villages smell like (wood smoke and sewage, mostly), and in some scenes near water you can see the insects that fill the air and, no doubt, bite. I heard some sniffling in the rows around me too. Maybe the tears are for the fact that this stunningly beautiful world of the same work and the same faces and porridge for supper (if you're lucky) is bound to pass away -- or perhaps in gratitude for the fact that it will never pass away, not even if our busy human scrambling and scheming takes shiploads of us away to other planets to live in artificial environments under alien suns.

But enough of sentimental speculation: let me just add a few comments as one who had the privilege of traveling in China, about fifteen years ago.

The big difference between this setting and the cities we visited is the lack here of swarms of bike riders and a heavy-lying layer of filthy, polluted air (from soft coal fires, not cars). And the quiet, of course; the expansive quiet of broad sky and slope and valley is very different from the hushed but ceaseless whisper of bikes and foot traffic and horse-drawn or human-pushed carts.

I've read of great differences now, although even then our guides told us that there were already capitalists about, people with -- could this be true — secret private swimming pools built into their houses and apartments.

At the time I didn't think Hong Kong had nearly as much to fear from Red China as Red China had to fear from the encroachments of eager capitalism all around it. I came to this conclusion when a young hotel employee came to fix something in my room in Beijing, and became fascinated by my unremarkable wristwatch: "That's nice watch," he said, and the flare-up of consumer avidity in his face told me a great deal about the future of China.

Meanwhile, in the movie (which takes place far from any city), the country folk are poor. Really poor, hardscrabble poor. There are no silos in evidence, no loading docks, no railhead; this isn't the breadbasket of China we're seeing, but subsistence farming. The villagers have white teeth because the nearest refined sugar is days away, their tobacco is probably grass, and the "tea" they drink doesn't stain your teeth.

You see what's poured from a kettle into bowls for the postmen to drink when they stop at people's homes? That's just boiled water, unless I miss my guess (anybody see any actual tea preparation on the screen?). It's what the Chinese call "white tea": what you offer a guest when you are too poor to have any tea-leaves in your house. You serve plain hot water, which is graciously accepted and drunk.

The old man's pipe looks home-made, his version of the corncob pipe, and he probably picks, dries, and smokes some local substitute for tobacco as well. When the story is told about how a woman who, though lost and exhausted, refused to ride home on the bullock she'd been tending because it was the only bullock her village had, we know we're not talking about apple-cheeked country folk who roast a pig in honor of a guest's arrival. I thought of one of our guides telling us how there were still peasant villages living on the edge — and sometimes over the edge — of starvation in the more remote areas, although nobody talked about them officially.

All of the middle-aged, educated people who guided my little group spoke of how during the Cultural Revolution they had been snatched out of comfortable homes, their studies at universities, or hard-won school-teaching positions, and sent to live among peasants to learn to work hard, like "the people". The peasants had precious little use for unskilled hands which brought with them extra mouths to feed, and these kids had terrible times. It wasn't about humiliation: it was about staving off starvation and suicide.

"We still don't grow enough food for all our people," one soft-spoken man told me. "Even now." I'm not sure how much of this was about exporting crops to other countries, and how much about other factors.

This is the country in which it was determined that every bird ate such-and-such an amount of grain from the fields, reducing the harvest; but that if every person killed a bird that would take care of the problem. It did. The crops were then ravaged for years by hordes of insects unchecked by the normal predation of birds. Birds are now treasured and protected (one morning at the panda preserve I found some of the soldiers stationed there standing, talking excitedly among themselves, at the end of the single dirt street, staring up at a hawk circling over the forested peaks above).

Or take the stands of dead trees we saw on hilltops and ridges in one heavily eroded northwestern area. Local villagers had been ordered to plant those trees as part of a reforestation effort, but nobody stayed around to order them to lug precious, heavy loads of water up those hills to the new plants.

I'm not saying that Chinese farmers are dolts, by the way; I'm saying that Chinese officials living in cities forced real farmers in the country to do idiotic things for political reasons, for a long, terrible time.

Those brilliant green rice fields, by the way, are fertilized with human shit; you smell it everywhere. You're not supposed to; the stuff is collected and sealed into cement storage tanks which are intended to turn it into a clean, sweet, non-infectious slurry that nourishes the soil. But the smell was everywhere. A closed agricultural system — nourishment comes out of the soil, goes through the digestive tract, and returns to the soil to build more crops to eat — was less elegant in reality than in the abstract, at least in this case, and at that time.

And less pure. Not for nothing does the boy's mother warn him not to drink any "bad water" on his journey.

The two men stop in a village where a wedding dance takes place by firelight, and the boy is attracted to a pretty girl and dances with her; the father tells him to be careful around her, "those Dong girls are fierce". The Dong people, like several other ethnic groups included within China's more remote and wild borderlands, are minorities who somehow survived the steamroller of Communist standardization, but only just — probably because there wasn't enough money involved to buy the loyalty of the young. No doubt they will succumb instead to the juggernaut of Western consumerism, if it ever reaches them in a form they can partake of (the postman's son carries a little radio with him, and at one point we look down on a bus or truck winding its way from somewhere along a dirt road among the hills).

In fact the scene of tribal dancing, with homemade percussion and everybody in colorful ethnic dress (that looked a bit quality controlled, if you know what I mean) and singing together and on key, reminded me of a program I saw on Chinese TV during my trip. It was about how the minorities were no longer being persecuted for being different (socially, racially, religiously, linguistically, economically, who knows how else) but were being helped now by the government to preserve and revitalize their cultures. Some very clean, bright, boringly choreographed "ethnic" dancing was exhibited as proof. I found it depressing at the time.

So a slightly jarring note was struck for me by this glimpse, in the movie, into the ethnic life of what was supposed to be a poor but happy (and excessively clean) Dong village (some political facts don't seem to change much either). The Dong people I saw lived alongside a muddy road leading up into the wilderness of the panda preserve. They looked grim, tough and muddy too, although not in any way unhappy with our presence.

It was steep, beautiful, rugged country, dark and soaking under summer rains. The only arable land that I saw was the skinny little bright green strips at the bottom of the ravines, half the ground taken up by fast-rushing streams that could flood out crops in an instant. The farmers' ramshackle wooden houses perched precariously higher up the sides of the rocky slopes where the road, too, had to cling (we were in fact laid over with some other travelers at the panda preserve when a large rock fall blocked the road; and it took several days for army troops to be trucked in to clear the way so our busses could leave again).

Well, that was all over a decade ago, and in a part of China where there were no broad green meadows and valleys to farm; and the movie is so magnificently beautiful and sweet that I'll gladly fold it in among my own memories of China as another, happier vision of the hinterlands with all their glories and their pains.

I am left with one nagging question about "The Postmen, the Mountain, the Dog", though: what kind of a life is that old man going to have with nothing to do, living in a house with no one to talk to but a woman he's fond of but barely knows and who barely knows him?

The fact that such a question can pop into my head about actors portraying fictional persons in a story filmed to please the eyes of foreigners as well as the folks at home I'll take as another testament to the compelling power of this gorgeous film.

--SMC

Copyright © 2000 by Suzy McKee Charnas