"The Chinese Will Come": The Arrival of Outsiders

The Chinese will Come
from the East
and drink water
from the river Morava.

So read the subtitles at the beginning of the documentary film The Chinese Will Come (2017), as I silently sat alone in a cinema full of Serbian audience, secretly relieved that the movie had English subtitles — after all, I wouldn’t be able to understand it in Serbian. In fact, I was so relieved that only minutes later did I start to smile at the poetic coincidence in this scene. A Chinese girl has indeed come to the movie — I have indeed come to Belgrade.
Let me start from the beginning. I discovered the 11th Beldocs International Documentary Festival on May 7th, our second day in Belgrade, during a visit to the Yugoslav Film Archive. The premiere of this film happened three days later, our last night in Belgrade. Although Adam and Anna felt too tired to join me, I decided to go to the movie by myself anyway — how could I resist a documentary on the lives of Chinese workers in Serbia, especially after watching a trailer like that?

The Chinese Will Come (2017) – trailer

Or, perhaps, these objective facts are not the entirety of the story. The true origin of my experience is this: despite other more important layers of my identity, I identify myself and will continue to identify myself as a Chinese. I have arrived at the film screening not as a random outsider interested to know more about Chinese migrants in Serbia, but as a Chinese visitor curious to see how this Serbian film depicts my people. My experience that night took a rather different turn — while I came to study the film and the filmmaker, I learned more about myself and my own perception of Chinese migration.
I have always known that most of the Chinese migrants arrive in foreign lands out of need rather than interest, that they are fighting a more difficult battle to support themselves, their family and the life they envision. However, never before did I sit down and watch their life for 90 minutes: middle-aged women dancing in the squares of Serbia for entertainment, a young couple raising their child in the convenience store they run, a farmer family dealing with a bad harvest. The camera watches silently, recording details of their lives with as little intervention as possible. As the realities of their lives unfolded in front of me, the difference between my arrival to the country and theirs became increasingly salient.
“Many were brought here by their relatives and worked for free.” One young man said in the film. “They came because they wanted to see the world — to see Europe.” “I’m worried about my mother,” said the husband of the shop-owners, “I should bring her here, so that at least, people will say that her son has taken her to a trip abroad.” “But how are we going to afford the plane ticket? Where is she going to say?” asked the wife immediately. At these moments, I was awfully reminded of why I came to Serbia, and more importantly, how I came. I didn’t come to see Europe and the world. I came to explore another Europe. The migrants came to the country because their relatives were the only connections they had to an outside world, while I get to choose and pick whether and where I will study abroad. Despite all my excited accounts of the program, my parents weren’t even convinced that they would want to take the time and visit Belgrade, let alone bragging about the experience. I thought back to the day I flew to Chicago to get myself a Romanian visa — it was, and still is the most pleasant visa application I’ve experienced throughout my life. While all the guards at the US Consulate in Shanghai would yell at applicants in line as if they were unruly animals, the Romanian immigration officer seemed so glad and surprised that I wanted to visit Romania. Needless to say, I enjoyed being welcomed, but I also enjoyed a sense of ease, even of superiority when I thought about visiting Romania. It was a sharp blow to realize that this ease and sense of superiority derived from certain privileges and biases — be it class, be it (nesting) Orientalism — an an even sharper one as I digested the idea that not every member of my fellow nation had such privilege.
The film presents the footages in a three-day framework, President Xi’s three-day visit to Serbia. The detailed broadcast of his visit contrasts the unchanging daily lives and increasing difficulties of the Chinese workers. But this is not true for all Chinese arriving at the country. During my stay in Belgrade, I stumbled across another kind of Chinese who came to Serbia, a group of tourists visiting the Fortress. They seemed happy, carefree and well-dressed. I exchanged a look with Anna and immediately we reached an understanding: wealthy Chinese businessmen and their family. They probably came to this region to answer President Xi’s call for more investment in the region — and to have fun while they were here. I wonder if they were aware of another group of border-crossers in this region, Chinese who came to the country not for investment and profit, but because they couldn’t find a good job in their homeland. I wonder if I’m any different from these carefree visitors enjoying their business trip. Granted, I have come here to study nationalism and xenophobia, not to do business, but isn’t it just another way to consume and make profit out of the region? Have I — now that the program is to an end — tried hard enough to become more than these businessmen?
“How do you think President Xi’s visit might affect the lives of Chinese workers in this country?” asked a Serbian talk show on TV, as the documentary film started to reach its end. “Not much; I’m afraid to say that these Chinese workers are in a very bad situation,” answered the guest speaker. Just in front of the TV, the farmer family was eating dinner together, in a way that made me miss my family. Thinking back to the meals I’ve shared — truly shared — with strangers and friends and family, I can’t help but feel that we are at once different and similar, distant and intimate — that in a certain moment, my experience of border-crossing and encounters converged with theirs, even just briefly. Maybe it is wishful thinking, but I like how we are sharing experience, emotion and the envisioning for home, not just a point of arrival.