XiXi

"Beginning of the friendship"
In the culture where XiXi and I come from, it is believed that each human being is born like a rock, each with its own edges and corners. And all these unique sharpness and roughness, would eventually create clashes between this person and the society. So an ideal passage of life is to gradually remove all the edges, like a stone being ground while traveling down the rivers.
This painful grinding is considered meaningful, because in the end, the society may stay in harmony, and no one would get hurt.
As I grew up and became an adult woman in my late 20s, I had the secret feeling that there were thousands of monsters, elves, and strange creatures living inside me. They were all those edges that I failed to remove – they came to life and had been locked up deep inside me. I would imagine them having so much fun, in a parallel universe, where I would have the courage to let them out, to get to know them.
They are the thousands of possibilities of who I could become. But I never dare try to find out.
When I saw XiXi for the very first time on the streets of Berlin, I felt a big earthquake from the bottom of my heart. Suddenly I felt all those monsters,elves, and strange creatures inside me become more real than ever. I see them on XiXi’s face and she is not hiding any of them. Instead, she has fun with them all. I was both terrified and fascinated. I felt this strong urge to get to know her.
Soon after our initial encounter, XiXi returned to France to stay closer to her 5 year-old daughter Nina. And I returned to Taiwan with a hard disk entrusted by her, which contains a huge collection of video diaries from the past decade of her life. We started corresponding with each other between France and Taiwan in various forms -- writing, photography, drawings, and videos.
This was how this film and our friendship began.
"A Transgenerational Journey"
Through telling the story shared between XIXI and I, the film addresses the broader experiences that are shared across generations of women. On one hand, in encountering XiXi, I discover the story of three generations of Chinese women; XiXi’s mother, Peach Blossom, whose dream to be an artist perished in the totalitarian regime and has internalized censorship even in her innermost private life. Then there is XiXi, who was born right after the Tiananmen Incident and grew up in the 90s when China was burning with consumerism and nationalism. She eventually sought to liberate herself from her native community through migration. Finally, Nina, who was born in China and now leads life as a third culture child in France, is growing up in between very different cultures and ideologies of each of her parents.
As the friendship between XiXi and I deepens, I slowly realize that my attachment for XiXi originates from my sorrow for my grandmother, Orchid. Since I was little, Orchid shared with me her regret of not being able to fulfill her own dream. Her personality seemed so deviant from the stereotype of a traditional woman from her generation, but nevertheless, she made efforts to conceal her “edges” and obey the conventional values. However, growing up, I could always sense her silent anger and repressed emotions occupying every corner of our family house.

After grandma’s passing, I became obsessed with the opacity of her personality. I want to understand her inner world, while knowing that she was gone and I had lost the chance. The act of trying to understand XiXi, for me, is also an act of grieving. I want to be there to see XiXi succeed, as much as I want to see my grandmother’s dream come true.
I often wonder, if grandma had a chance to make different life choices, would she still choose the same – to become a mother and to have a family? Sometimes, I felt haunted by a sense of irrational guilt – were we, her children and grandchildren, the cause of her not being able to pursue her own dreams? Carrying these personal questions, I observed the powerful relationship between XiXi and Nina, witnessing the choices they made. Through mirroring XiXi’s family story and mine, I hope the film offers an intimate space for reflection on the practice of freedom, love and responsibility.
By weaving together XiXi’s video diaries and my voice over contemplation, diving deeper into the memories and experiences that hinder me and XiXi from living our lives, the film is an effort to give a tender look at the vulnerability that one might experience in exercising agency. We make a sincere attempt to investigate, and challenge inherited beliefs, creating a space for dialogue on the political questions of society’s acceptable values and how all these affect the innermost part of a person’s life. By creating this reflective distance, the film explores hopes and challenges of making one’s own path.