October 12, 2011 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 23 husband and wife and about 100,000 other people stuck in the railroad station for about a week. Teenaged girls pass out and the police have to call in soldiers to keep order. The potential passengers argue vociferously with the soldiers, but no one gets shot or slugged while the cameras are present. Eventually, the husband and wife luck out and get in the train. One of the passengers points out that his company manufacturers tennis racquets with American labels that nobody is supposed to know are made in China. Everybody agrees that China should win the Olympics because there are “billions” of Chinese and only “a few million” people outside China, so to not win would be to lose face. Back at the factory, a muscular but skinny worker holds up a pair of jeans in disbelief and ridicule. “Foreigners have size 40 waists! Did you ever see a Chinese with a size 40 waist?” When the mother gets back home, the first thing she demands is to see her son’s report card. She rebukes him for not getting better grades and tells him to study harder. When the mother tells her teenage daughter that she wants to come home for a year and keep an eye on her, a catfight breaks out and the father wades in and actually gets taken off his feet before he restores discipline by knocking the daughter down and kicking her a few times. “You want to make a movie about what things are really like?” the daughter yells at the unseen cameraman. “Take a movie of this!” Shortly, she moves out, works in a different factory, and rooms with cynical girlfriends who decide they would rather roam the world in search of adventure than settle for a life of matrimony. She gets a job in a restaurant/bar and is last seen sauntering around the dark streets in deliberately tattered clothes after an evening in a decadent disco. The parents spend the rest of the film walking around like guilty robots staring into space. The man in the train who talks about the tennis racquets raises an interesting point: Chinese manufacturers get a very small profit margin on the products they dump on the American market, and the Chinese workers who manufacture the tennis racquets don’t earn enough to eat and save money at the same time. Where does the money go? As Maoism fades, China in the 21st century looks something like China in the 1930s, minus the opium and the colonialists -- but not to worry. The next show is “Surviving the Tsunami” a Japanese-made follow-up to the killer quake and tidal wave that left 23,000 dead. These guys aren’t dangerous to China any more; they are endangered themselves. The show explains why the extensive Japanese seawall precautions didn’t work. Briefly, some of the waves spiked when a secondary undersea earthquake jolted them higher than anyone could have expected, and waves broadsiding one another increased their intensity. The warning system functioned perfectly, but some people stayed home because they couldn’t move their old people quickly enough – and died along with them. One woman dragging an elderly mother with diabetes made it to the tile roof, but the water engulfed them anyway. The younger woman’s quilted waterproof jacket made her buoyant, and as soon as she surfaced she dived back down for mother and saved her, too. Another man, trying to drive out of the tsunami’s reach, was swept away in his car, which landed upside down atop a bridge. He clambered out, saw a total stranger floating by on his own upended car, and risked his safety to reach out and drag the stranger onto his bastion. The two of them watched helplessly as other people floated out to sea on cars and houses. They wept quietly when they talked about it. Only a brain-washed racist would fail to see the humanity and the courage of the struggling Chinese couple trying to do the best for their kids and their lovable grandma while courting self-destruction through incredibly tedious overwork, or the rebellion of the teenaged Chinese daughter who has seen what life had to offer her parents and isn’t interested. The humanity and courage of the Japanese tsunami victims saving relatives and random people alike at the risk of their own lives is also emblematic of a culture that values courage and self-sacrifice. Americans have done that. We do it a lot. Perhaps we do it too much through misguided motives, such as inflicting our own culture on the rest of the world, and in so doing waste too much of our blood and too much of our treasure overseas. These Chinese and Japanese people aren’t out to destroy or bankrupt us. We’re the greatest market for the products they need to sell because post-Maoist China has no unemployment insurance or welfare, and Japan has about half what the people need for any kind of life. The Chinese and Japanese are trying to stay fed and hoping for a better life for their kids. We have to understand that when we feel threatened by their products, we’re not threatened by the people who make the products but by the middlemen who bring it here without regard to the conditions of the people who make it, or to the imposition on American manufacturers. Flag-waving may convince people who don’t like to think that some countries hate us because of our “freedom.” Patriotism should convince us to be friends with everybody, but to put the interests of our own country – not the Americans who lobby Congress – at the top of the priority list. We should love our government as long as it acts in the best interests of the country – perhaps meaning the environment – and of the people, perhaps meaning the self-supporters who try to take care of their own, just as people do in China and Japan. “To love your country is not just about loving the government. The people, the country, and the government are all separate entities.” The person who said that was not an embattled American who dared to criticize the war in Iraq or the United States government’s blatant favoritism in world affairs in front of the wrong audience. The speaker was Lixin Fan, a Chinese filmmaker whose award-winning slice-of-life movie, “Last Train Home,” was recently shown on PBS. Fan was responding to a question from a flag-waving Chinese university student who had obviously been nurtured on a steady diet of state-approved nationalism and gagged on Fan’s honest look at what life is like for Chinese who don’t get into the university. The question was: “Why did you want to make a film that causes your own country to lose face?” Actually, I think the fact that Fan was allowed to make and show his film in China allows China to save face, because any country that allows this kind of cinematic honesty has taken a giant step out of the stifling age of government controlled media and has started to breathe fresh air. The Russians did this in the great Sergei Bondarchuk film, “War and Peace,” which captured the spirit of Leo Tolstoi’s epic novel so faithfully that they show Prince Andrei’s soul rising up and leaving his body. When I saw that film on PBS 30 years ago, I knew Stalin-style communism with its anti-Christian obsession was finished in Russia, and a little later it was. “Last Train Home” could mark the end of Maoist-style communism, the Chinese state’s frantic bashing of the United States and Japan to explain China’s economic woes, and the beginning of a benign world role for a nation of more than a billion diligent, intelligent people. The film is the story of the 130 million Chinese migrant workers who leave their farms and take the train to the city because there are no jobs in the countryside. In the city, they hope to save for their old age or support their elders and kids. Specifically, “Last Train Home” is the story of a husband and wife and their daughter Qin and pre-teen son Yang, and the grandmother who takes care of the kids while the mother and father are working 1,000 miles away. The man and his wife live in an apartment about the size of a single room and work 14-hour days sewing clothing that was once made in America. When the Chinese workers get sick, they don’t see a doctor. They eat herbs and try to sleep more. The daughter and son live with Grandma and do farm work. The daughter’s favorite family member was her grandfather, now deceased, and she continues to burn “spirit money” and talk to him at his grave. Mao didn’t encourage Buddhism and the Chinese still don’t encourage it in Tibet, which is probably a taboo topic in Chinese movies, but Lixin Fan was honest enough to show that his particular family is still religious. Across the board, a third of all Chinese are now said to be recent converts to Christianity, which is rapidly expanding in China. The main event of the family’s life is the annual train ride that brings them all together if they can find room on the trains, which are technically efficient but overcrowded and subject to extreme delays. One annual trip leaves the Flag-waving v. patriotism Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: As a senior on a fixed income living in Wyckoff, I have long been concerned about property taxes. In his three years on the township committee, I have seen Brian Scanlan’s commitment to austerity that these difficult times require. When it comes to municipal budgets, Committeeman Scanlan, deputy chair of the Finance Committee, has been a true conservative. Despite spikes in mandated payments to Trenton for public employee benefits, we have had only an average 1.2 percent annual increase in municipal expenses the last three years. This has been achieved by reducing the number of municipal employees by retirements and attrition, and increasing shared services. Committee Scanlan will be my choice on Nov. 8, and I encourage other Wyckoff voters to re-elect Committeeman Scanlan because of his experience, integrity, and proven commitment to common-sense conservative values for our town. George H. Pitts Wyckoff Applauds Scanlan’s conservative values Dear Editor: Tom Madigan and Doug Christie are the best candidates for Wyckoff Township Committee. I was raised in Wyckoff, moved away after college, and now my husband Tim and I are so thrilled to be living back home. We are most familiar with the current issues in town and are confident that Tom and Doug have the proven lead- Urges support for Madigan and Christie ership and vision towards making positive differences on behalf of all residents. Their involvement with local government, youth athletics, our school systems, and religious and charitable organizations, reflect their significant level of commitment and passion for representing own town. Doug Christie has put his life on the line serving the Wyckoff Volunteer Fire Department for 25 years, where he is also chaplain. My husband is a battalion chief in Jersey City, so we genuinely appreciate the courageous efforts Doug and his fellow volunteer firefighters put forth on our behalf, for the safety of all Wyckoff residents. In addition to this, Doug currently chairs the zoning board and chaired the recent committee that updated the Wyckoff Master Plan. Tom Madigan is a current township committee member, serving as liaison to the Ramapo Indian Hills Board where he was a member for 12 years, as well as the environmental commission and Green Team. His commitment to the youth in town extends to parks and recreation where he was a key advocate for open space, recreational athletics, and passive recreation on the Wyckoff Master Plan Committee. I also commend Tom and Mary who have hosted four children from overseas while they were in the United States to receive life saving open heart surgery as part of Rotary’s “Gift of Life” program. Tom Madigan and Doug Christie have strong conservative family values, and are motivated role models with only one goal: striving to improve Wyckoff for residents of all ages. I urge all Wyckoff voters to elect the Madigan and Christie Team, for they deserve our support and our votes on Nov. 8. Susan Foy Wyckoff