Quite by chance, I watched the documentary, "Last Train Home,' last night. It happened to pop up on television (yah PBS!) as I was watching a baseball game.  I was riveted the whole way through.

It is a documentary that follows a family that struggles with social and economic change in China.  The parents hail from the Siquan countryside and have left their son and daughter (two kids!) with the elderly grandparents and gone off to work in grimy and growing Guangzhou.  The film begins as they return home at Spring Festival.  By this point, they have been living in this manner for about a dozen years.  The grandfather has died, the grandmother raises the kids by herself, and the kids have only seen their parents a few days each year.  The 17 year-old daughter is hankering to get out of the village and give up on stultifying school and is thoroughly estranged from her parents.  That is the central tension of the film: the parents make extraordinary personal sacrifices, working in dingy factories for low wages and living in cramped dormitories, so that they can send money home to make life better for their children.  The children, however, experience this as loss, and in their anger and resentment see the parents as thinking more about money than about the human bonds of the family.  A sad story…

lots of thoughts crossed my mind as I watched.  A Confucian analysis, drawing on Mencius and his emphasis on providing material subsistence to farmers so that they can live with dignity with their families, came immediately to mind: all the things that are not happening for this Siquan family.  There is little dignity for anyone in this film; all have been broken down and alienated by the impersonal forces of modernization.  

But a Daoist reading is what I want to briefly offer here – largely because I am now reading the Daodejing wtih my class and it is fresh in my mind.

The parents leave the village and head to the city in search of a better material lives for themselves and their families.  They are discontent with isloated, simple, limited village life.  And that, a Daoist might suggest, is the beginning of their problems.  They are striving, competing, contending, all in order to advance themselves materially.  But their ultimately goal – family happiness – is thwarted by their very efforts to attain it.  This brings passage 24 to mind:

Stretch on to tiptoes and you never stand firm.  Hurry long strides and you never travel far.

Keep up self-reflection and you'll never be enlightened.

Keep up self-definition and you'll never be apparent.

Keep up self-promotion and you'll never be proverbial.

Keep up self-esteem and you'll never be perennial.

Travelers of the Way call such striving too much food and useless baggage.  Things may not all despise such striving, but a master of Way stays clear of it.

I imagine, then, that a Daoist sage would have told the parents to stay in the village, find contentment in the simpler life.  That would have given them a better chance to preserve their family….

Many of my students are uncomfortable with the DDJ.  They find it too impractical, too unrealistic.  This morning a young man suggested that the text seemed to deny a very basic human impulse to work to improve one's life.  Indeed, that impulse has fueled incredible social change in China in the past thirty years, and not all of that change is as sad as the story of "Last Train Home."  The aspiration for improvement has yielded better lives – if measured in contentment and longevity and health – for many, many people.  But, as the DDJ warns, that same aspiration has had quite the opposite effects for many others.  Perhaps we shouldn't take the text too literally.  It is not saying that we should never try to improve our circumstances; wuwei does not mean "do nothing at all."  Rather, the text may be telling us to beware of letting our desires and expectations get the best of us.  If we press too hard, force things in excessive ways, we are setting ourselves up for frustration.  That's what happened to the family in "Last Train Home:" to better the family they split the family and they ended up with… a split family.