My personal language as a creator (description of words and my thoughts and feelings).

It involves my overall feelings during the shooting and the interpretation of some specific cultural backgrounds (such as Fujian immigrants and immigrants’ education issues for the next generation’s children).

 

First part

In the more than 300 years since they first landed in Britain as seafarers in the 1690s, the Chinese have started from scratch, worked hard, and finally set up their own businesses and built new homes.

I filmed a Chinese seafood store in Edinburgh. It was just a case in the context of the immigration wave, and was not special at that time. Many people like him were experiencing the same.

To a certain extent, the influence of the immigration wave of people from Hong Kong and Fujian, has pushed many immigrant families like Huaxing Seafood to develop.    When I, as a Chinese, film immigrants who share the same “national identity” as me, can I use the advantage of “the same cultural background” to chat with him like an “insider”?

Starting over is a big challenge, especially to survive in a territory and culture that does not belong to you. In the midst of established knowledge, we enter into British culture, where we first encounter something entirely new and struggle about how to exist.

Our filters and fictions of Chinese in the foreign land are more based on the romance of novels and the ubiquitous Chinese restaurants, but we don’t really know them.

 

Second Part

The identity is not glamorous at all after going abroad.The food industry like “Chinese restaurant and takeout” turns out to be one of the most common ways to immigrate.

Most of the older generation of immigrants with low literacy levels and little understanding of English were starting from being handymen in Chinese restaurants – to chefs – and eventually opened their own takeaway shops, especially the Fujian people. According to statistics, Fujian people have mastered two thirds of the takeaway shops in the UK till now.

As the consensus of generations of immigrants, the kitchen knife has become the basis to survive. The practice of the older immigrants is to “cook wherever they come from”, but with the fierce competition, the latecomers “northerners” realized that only “integration” innovation can make a difference, so they paid much more efforts to uncover the mystery of “integration”.

Behind the food is the Chinese people’s simple and sincere love for life. The so-called immigrant identity is nothing more than a man-made object compiled by short and specific experiences.It is also the hope for a better life in the future.

 

Third Part

Choosing the path of immigration has completely changed the trajectory of their lives, but I don’t want to call it diaspora, and what I see from them is more than nostalgia and wandering.

Whether the protagonist, who has not yet obtained his identity since he came to the UK 15 years ago and is still in a state of “migration”, has once and for all got rid of all kinds of hemp in the “family” relationship caused by Chinese belief?

I think it has been perfectly answered by the younger brother who told me a lot of “blanks, holes and question marks” from stuttering, and the sister who seeks “stability” all the way.

Hometown turns out to be their parents in the screen of the mobile phones, “upholding the family honor” after making certain achievements, and their pride from enduring so much hardships.

But the goal of their generation is not to reproduce themselves, but to make their children “free”. They strive to provide everything better for their kids, and want them to change their fate with knowledge rather than coolies.

 

Ethnic Chinese who grew up overseas also face questions about identity and what they see as the “Chinese imagination.”

Immigrant temperament is not only shown outside, but also hidden in each of us. Expectations, anxiety and abandonment are the common sense of the modern society. As long as we are on the road, we will definitely become a better version of ourselves.