Watched The Children of Huangshi/《黄石的孩子》 last night. Well, I needed a break from everything else, and lzh was out with friends, and I’ve been wanting to watch it.
Don’t bother.
It’s a terrible film. There are so many things wrong with it it’s hard to know where to start.
Well, Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh do decent jobs, but that’s about it.
So I’ll forget about the general crapness of the film and focus on the really, really, massively, collossally huge liberties taken with the facts in this film:
Huangshi/黄石? The original school was at Shuangshipu/双石铺, Shaanxi/陕西.
And how did Rewi Alley get replaced by some junkie maybe-nurse/doctor/surgeon? Here and here (scroll down) you will get more accurate versions of the story of Hogg, Alley and the Bailie School. From the NZ Edge article:
In 1942, together with Oxford-educated English teacher George Hogg, they retreated to the remote Gobi desert in China’s north-west to set up a technical school, initially in Shuangshipu and then in isolated Shandan (1944) to distance themselves as far as possible from suspicious Guomintang spies. Hogg would act as headmaster while Alley would travel around China raising funds, quelling political opposition, recruiting teachers and creating co-ops to work alongside the school.
And from that Brits at their Best article:
At some point Hogg met New Zealand philanthropist Rewi Alley who was trying to set up schools for orphan Chinese boys. Hogg had learned the language, and he decided to help. He organized and helped to run one of the schools, Shuangshipu in Shaanxi province, in north-central China, far from the coast. He had a flair for teaching, and he taught the young Chinese boys with great success until the Japanese invaded China.
Alright, so the inclusiong of “Gobi Desert” does introduce some inaccuracy to the NZ Edge piece. Call it “hyperbole” which wasn’t strictly necessary but is there to hype it up, as NZ Edge likes to hype New Zealand and New Zealanders. Anyway, we can conclude: The real story of George Hogg did not involve some junkie fake nurse/doctor/surgeon Hollywood love interest sending him off to Yellow Stone, but a Kiwi communist recruiting him to run a school while he ran around China and the world raising funds and recruiting teachers.
And wait a minute- The Silk Road ran through Gansu’s Hexi Corridor because it lies between the Qilian Shan and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to the south and the Badain Jaran Desert to the north. It has rivers and water and many villages, towns and cities. So what’s with the high desert and masses of sand and sand dunes at the end of the film? It’s an arid, area, sure, like all of northern and western China, but there’s not much in this Baidu image search that looks like the extreme sandy dryness shown in the end of this terrible film. Still, at least they did manage to get Hogg and his boys moving to the right town this time- Shandan/山丹, Gansu/甘肃.
And what was that silly whirlwind thing that hit as they were changing the tire on a truck? Was that their attempt at a sandstorm? And why the hell did they feel the need to have Hogg injure his hand then? He contracted tetanus after he injured his foot playing basketball at the school in Shandan. That’s no less dramatic than their silly contrived whirlwind-caused accident.
To sum up: Don’t bother with this film. Apart from just plain being crap (the phrase “made for TV” is the first to spring to mind when thinking how to describe the quality), it plays very fast and very loose with the facts. A pity, really, considering George Hogg was a real hero whose real story deserves to be remembered.
