If you want to detach from cyberspace and dive into real life...
Streaming television has been a boon for documentaries. Actually, credit Sheila Nevins at HBO, she nurtured the trend and now Netflix and other outlets have maxed it out.
Used to be you had to go to the theatre to see documentaries. Of course there were some on PBS, but their number was de minimis, as was the breadth of their subjects. Used to be a special treat. You read about a doc and you went to see it and then you were part of the discussion, as it wove its way through the public. The best example? "Capturing the Friedmans." I remember leaving the theatre with more questions than answers, needing to discuss it, thinking about it for days. And then there was "Sherman's March," which I loved, and is recognized as one of the greats, but most people still haven't seen it. Then again, you've got to appreciate the journey of a young man unsure about love searching for direction and his personal truth. And that's what appeals to me most. The interior. What are people thinking. I must say, when I scan the landscape I don't find many people I can identify with, I'm always looking to make connection.
Not that I have any children, never mind ones adopted from China.
That's the story of "Found." Three Chinese children, cousins, adopted at birth, in search of their story.
The three are so normal. Not that they don't experience racism. But they always wonder...where do they come from? When the doctor asks about familial diseases there's only a question mark, but now there's DNA testing.
I haven't done it. I'm unafraid of finding half-siblings, my father wasn't that kind of guy. And my older sister looks like my father and my younger sister and I look just like my mother so there's no doubt about our biological lineage. It's just that...I don't really want to make contact with any found relatives. Does that make me a bad person? Maybe it's growing up in a female dominated extended family, being the only boy. All grown up I can now see I could have said no, but I never did. I remember spending Thanksgiving with my mother's brother's family in Stamford on a rainy day, wearing an itchy turtleneck, staring out the window. Who was I gonna talk to? Then again, in my family, you hewed the line. Not that it was narrowly rigid, but when my parents laid down restrictions, insisted on behaviors, you obeyed or paid the price, which started out as the hand and then evolved to the belt and then the hairbrush.
So, you've got three Chinese girls in different situations. One, raised as Jewish going to a Jewish school. Another the daughter of a single parent. Another the daughter of divorced parents. In Seattle/Phoenix, Oklahoma and Nashville. And on one level all teenagers are the same, on another every family is different. So you've got these girls deposited in life situations they had no part in choosing and that's the world they live in. Strange.
Not that they're all not happy with their families. Then again, what else do they know?
So, they go in search of their roots.
They employ Liu Hao in Beijing to excavate their story.
Hao is the star of the film. As one teen immediately says upon seeing her, she is beautiful. But she's dedicated to being a genealogist. In America, if you're beautiful, you're supposed to be an actress, or an influencer. But Liu is college educated and loves her job, doing her best to make connections.
Liu spreads the word, seeding pictures into the landscape, and then waits to see what comes back. She gets responses from families that gave up their girls under the one child per family law. And when she goes to visit them, the interest and then pain they express...whew! Can you imagine giving up your baby at birth? Who then lives in an orphanage in some cases over a year waiting for adoption?
Yes, Liu also researches where the babies were left and what orphanages they were in, and even the "aunties" that took care of them.
So on one hand you've got the DNA search.
On another the contradiction between the girls' modern lives in the U.S. and their parents' less than modern ones in China, and...
There are so many differences. One of the Chinese women predicts that all the adopted girls will have long hair, which they do, that's the American way. But not in China, most of the women have short-cropped hair.
And in the U.S. today China has been demonized. Yet so many of the products we use, like our computers, are manufactured there. To see the footage of cities and rural areas is utterly fascinating. These are people, just like you and me, speaking a different language, having a different life, but at the core the same. Makes me want to go. Then again, I want to go everywhere and meet everyone.
So the girls venture to China...
This is not a Netflix extravaganza, this is a movie, just a tad longer than an hour and a half. And "Found" is not sensationalistic, like "Tiger King." No, "Found" is about regular life. In reality, the three Chinese girls just want to be happy Americans. But I resonated with Liu Hao the most. How much can she be making being a genealogist, not much, but she loves it! If you're educated today in America, you're expected to pursue the money. Wasn't like that when I went to college, my parents didn't care what I studied as long as I passed. College was about broadening your horizons, it was not a finishing school preparing you for the working world.
But today if you don't go for the bucks you can quickly fall behind, and you don't want to live in America without bucks, you want that profession, otherwise... It's the lower, uneducated classes who are taking risks, making music, going on reality television shows...sure, some wealthy, educated people participate too, but it's a lark, not everything if it doesn't work out, and it almost never does, they get back on track while those of the lower classes fall back into...unfulfilling, low-paid jobs and maybe drink and do drugs to numb the pain.
The longer you live, the more you realize so much of what you've been told is b.s. Like achievement, moving up the ladder. At the end of the day there is no summation, life is not a test, you don't get a grade, in truth you grade yourself, and the sooner you wake up to this the happier you will be.
Liu Hao loves talking to the people. Getting their stories. Those who abandoned their children.
That's what I love best, getting people's stories.
And there are plenty of stories in "Found."
I really dug it.
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