Last Train Home

Plot Summary

Every spring, China’s main cities are plunged into chaos, as all at once, a tidal wave of humanity attempts to return home by train. It is the Chinese New Year. The wave is made up of millions of migrant factory workers. The homes they seek are the rural villages and families they abandoned to seek wages in the booming cities. This brief holiday is their one opening out of the suffocating reality of the factories; a fleeting chance to reconnect with a world they left behind. It is an epic spectacle that tells us much about China, a country discarding its traditional ways as it hurtles towards modernity and global economic dominance. In Last Train Home, an emotionally engaging and visually beautiful debut film from Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan, we are drawn into the fractured lives of a single migrant family caught up in the movement between city and countryside, both driven and damaged by economic realities beyond their control. The film opens with unsettling, incomprehensible scenes: crowded, crying, shouting, desperate people waiting for trains which may or may not arrive. Tickets are limited because of astronomical demand, and people are determined to return home at any cost. Visibly frightened policemen seem to have only the most tenuous control over a situation which may boil over at any moment. The film shifts focus and allows us to experience the massive migration through the eyes of a middle-aged couple: the Zhangs. Clutching their belongings, the Zhangs manage to cram into a nightmarish train in Guangzhou and make a 50-hour arduous journey across the country to be reunited with their children. 16 years ago they left their ancestral village and infant daughter to find work in the city. They have toiled in poorly ventilated, dimly lit garment factories, consoled by the hope that the wages they earn will pay for the education of their children and lift them into a better life. In a bitter irony, these desperate hopes for the future are threatened by the couple’s very absence. Qin, the child they left behind to be raised by her grandmother, has grown into adolescence crippled by a sense of abandonment. Alienated from faraway parents she hardly knows and resentful of their advice, she drops out of school in an act of teenage defiance. Lured by the money glow of the city, she too will become a migrant worker. The decision is a heartbreaking blow for the parents. In classic cinema verité style, Last Train Home observes the Zhangs’ attempts to change their daughter’s course and repair their ruptured family. Qin is one of millions of kids growing up without one or both parents. All across rural China, villages appear to be missing a generation; families have been cut in two. Grandparents tend the fields and care for the children while parents work in the cities and send their wages home. China’s stunning economic growth depends on uprooting and exploiting cheap labour from the countryside. The result is divided families, uneducated children and a social instability that clashes with the deeply-felt family values of China’s traditional culture. The Zhang family of Last Train Home is a microcosm of a society caught between old ways and new realities. Against this backdrop, Qin’s teenage rebellion takes on a special significance. She is rejecting not only her family’s wishes, but the old-world virtue of self-sacrifice that shaped them. In the new era, money and the freedom it offers replaces family as the prime motivation. As we watch Qin shift from gathering crops, to sewing clothes in a factory, to serving drinks in a neon bar, we share in the confusion that rapid change has brought to China. It is a confusion and frustration that is echoed by other characters in the film, who struggle to understand their lives as part of the larger forces at play...