Flavors of Youth is a Chinese–Japanese animated co-production released in August 2018. Its greatest promise lay in the fact that the animation production stage was entrusted to Japan’s CoMix Wave Films. The studio had worked on many of Makoto Shinkai’s films, and the quality of its artwork—particularly its ability to render settings faithfully—is breathtaking. The promotional video certainly caught the eye when it appeared. I, at least, had some hopes for it.
The film consists of three segments, each telling the story of a protagonist’s youth, in Hunan, Guangzhou, and Shanghai respectively. The stories unfold independently; judged by the merits of their plots, I would say they fall along something very like an exponential curve. But the box-office figures and Douban ratings show just how little the broad masses were buying it. The Beijing News headline, “Flavors of Youth: A Misbegotten Hybrid Portrait of Youth from a Chinese–Japanese Co-production”, seems a fair enough way to sum it up. Regrettably, the film still fails to solve the problem of how to speak to Chinese audiences and tell China’s stories well.
1. Ideas of “Romance” in the Modern Era
Since the film includes young love, before discussing it directly I would like to begin with the question of the origins of modern Chinese ideas of “romance,” and from there turn to the relationship between physical space and social life.
Modern ideas of “romance” are social conceptions of “romance.” “Romance” has several meanings: it can be a form of social action, but it must first and foremost be a social relationship recognized by society; when this relationship comes into being, “romantic partners” also come into being, in interpersonal relations and in terms of identity. The problem, however, is that in premodern China—as a general rule, in mainstream society—“romance” was not among the socially acceptable relationships between men and women. There was no widespread, socially acceptable form of relationship between “waiting in the inner quarters to be married” and “becoming someone’s wife.”
Of course, we cannot know whether “love” existed between the impoverished scholar traveling to the capital for the examinations and the young woman who spent a night of passion with him. From a psychological perspective, perhaps we can discuss some “feeling of affection” common to past and present. But even if it existed, viewed in terms of social relationships and social action, the “romance” and “romantic relationships” familiar to us today are entirely modern things—it is hard to imagine someone in premodern times introducing the woman beside him by saying, “This is my girlfriend.” Credit for first bringing “romantic relationships” into existence and advocating them belongs to Shanghai’s “progressive women” at the turn of the twentieth century. There were many reasons this phenomenon emerged. Though it is certainly not wrong, at the level of ideas, to see it as yet another result of “European and American influences,” we must not overlook the enormous effect of quietly changing physical space (understood in contrast to the world of ideas, and thus including institutional elements).
It is not hard to see that “free love”—the freedom to choose and pursue a romantic partner—is especially often associated with students. With the advent of the modern era, large numbers of new-style schools appeared in Shanghai, while “parks” and “lodgings” began to appear in both the foreign concessions and the Chinese-administered districts. Schools provided the physical and social space in which men and women could acceptably “be in the same room”; parks and lodgings offered places for “romantic relationships” to develop. Men and women sharing the identity of “student” spent several years in the same school space, while the spread of modern education also supplied “romance” with “young men and women of the right age.” In this sense, perhaps student romance deemed “too early” was precisely the earliest version of “romance” (laughs).
The conditions that first make a new practice possible come to seem self-evident once it is widespread. This is why I find the romantic scenes in period films and television dramas rather hard to watch. To apply, as a matter of course, the familiar modern sequence of “attraction—dating and romance (this part may repeat several times)—marriage and family” to people of the past is simply romantic fantasy projected backward. Rather than searching for elusive common ground between past and present, we would do better to put ourselves in their circumstances and ask: what conditions make a particular action or feeling possible? I have come to feel strongly that what we can imagine in the world of ideas is deeply constrained by physical space, especially where social life is concerned.
As it happens, Li Haoling, director of the third story, Love in Shanghai, also said in an interview that his impressions and feelings about first love resembled those he held toward shikumen, the old-style Shanghai housing in which he had lived. In those cramped homes and buildings, neighbors gathered to talk and laugh, scarcely distinguishable from family. He had thought these “family members” would always stay together and look out for one another, but as time passed everyone moved away, to distant places and brand-new apartments. That change resembled the coming together and parting of first love. The three characters’ relationships in this story are not simply school friendships and the romantic feelings that develop out of those friendships. We cannot overlook the story’s shikumen setting: this distinctive space, now unfamiliar to people, and the intimate relationships among its neighbors. (In contemporary urban discourse, such relationships among people who know one another well are often stigmatized as nothing more than petty, calculating attitudes.) From the 1990s onward, this space and these relationships gradually disappeared, taking his and her story with them.
As cramped dwellings gave way to spacious new apartments, social ties in the city grew thinner too. In this film, director Li wanted to depict shikumen architecture in animation so that people could feel the warm atmosphere of many different lives mingling in that space—an atmosphere that had become a memory.
2. The Discovery and Reproduction of Landscape
For this film, telling China’s stories well might mean faithfully rendering our lives through art—chiefly our lives when we were young. Though the three stories differ in their narrative power, judged in terms of “faithful rendering,” none can be said to have “become detached from the work and everyday life of the masses.” From rural Hunan in the first story to Shanghai’s shikumen in the third, what they show is, more or less, our “everyday life.” Why, then, are so many people crying “It left me cold” in the bullet comments scrolling across the screen and in the comment sections? Has the animation faithfully rendered our “everyday life”?
But this question itself contains an enormous problem: what is our “everyday life”? In Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Karatani Kōjin discusses “the discovery of landscape”: “landscape” in the world of ideas is not given in advance, but discovered by writers—or, put another way, it has undergone a process of symbolization. Landscape is not naturally “just there”; a subject has to work to uncover it. When we think about young people’s lives in Japan, describing their “everyday life” is easy. “Trains,” “(prettier) school uniforms,” “school cultural festivals,” and so on compose a rich yet clearly defined “everyday landscape.” As foreigners, perhaps we have Japan’s cultural workers in animation, comics, games, and novels—the “discoverers of landscape”—to thank for all this.
Sometimes these processes of symbolization do more than produce “landscapes” in the world of ideas: they also “intrude” into how people construct their own ways of life in the real world. Take the symbolic construction of Vienna by America’s Hollywood culture industry. Not only did it lead people around the world to construct a Hollywood version of Vienna in their minds; after several decades, even Vienna itself, in the real world, came to resemble Hollywood’s imagined Vienna more closely. This “landscape” supplied by others had reached the level of cultural hegemony.
But then again, apart from deliberate processes of symbolization, the uniformity of the physical space in which Japanese social life unfolds may be a precondition. From Kyushu to Hokkaido, in metropolises and small cities alike, the lives of Japanese people of the same age look much the same. Across time, too, everyday life differs between generations, of course, but no unbridgeable chasm separates them. It thus becomes possible to distill a pattern of “everyday life,” of “young people’s lives,” that evokes a shared response in most people. Even for somewhat distinctive groups, such as people living along shopping streets, there are works devoted to depicting their “everyday life” (Tamako Market, for example). Their “everyday life” is incorporated into the cluster of signs called “Japanese everyday life.”
But we cannot say what “everyday life for young Chinese people” is. Do students at Shanghai High School, students at Hengshui High School, and students at an ordinary high school in an ordinary prefecture-level city share an “everyday life” that can be rendered in signs? Is the distance between the “memories of youth” of people in Beijing and people in Sichuan as great as the physical distance between the two places? This may not be the result of cultural workers’ impoverished imaginations, nor need we agonize over and condemn the failings of some “education system.” From the standpoint of social life/physical space, the country today may still be a “fragmented” country. Subways and light rail have yet to spread throughout its cities; milk tea and coffee remain the preferences of a minority. The only “landscape” we have—that of baggy school uniforms—seems hardly fit for polite company; the sight of the whole country preparing for battle in the gaokao, the university entrance examination, seems altogether too brutal; and for most ordinary high-school students, romance exists only in their hormones. Between divisions in public opinion and hesitation among creators, our “everyday life” has miscarried.
Under these circumstances, asking an animated film to portray “everyday life for young Chinese people”—or even, as mentioned in the interview, longing and Asian culture capable of evoking shared feeling—may itself be an impossible task. Perhaps we can already glimpse this in the film’s very composition: three independent stories made by three directors from different regions. Reconciling the work’s own diversity with a sense of unity is difficult enough, let alone overcoming the “fragmentation” of audiences and of social landscapes/ideas outside the work. Even with the Japanese team’s painstaking efforts—they “made repeated trips to China for location research, striving to perfect every detail, from the layout of spaces and the way buildings were drawn down to how plants grew … To convey how truly delicious the rice noodles were, they had to eat thirty or forty bowls a day”—I fear that “everyday life for young Chinese people” would still be difficult to present. This is not because the production team failed to take its work seriously, but because other notes are sounding beyond the work itself. It is understandable that, in the eyes of many viewers, Flavors of Youth proved unequal to the task.
Let us stop this talk that sounds like an accusation. This is not an accusation, but an attempt to point out the enormous differences in people’s lived experience across generations and places, which leave artistic and literary production addressed to everyone (or to young people) in something of a predicament: even now, we do not know just what this “everyday life” is that we possess and long to reproduce. When it comes to animation depicting everyday life, we have grown accustomed to standing outside the shop window, “admiring” imported wares in the “Japanese taste.” Do we actually have the capacity, in this “fragmented”—or, put another way, diverse and differentiated—lifeworld, to discover a “landscape” distinctively our own, the “everyday life of Chinese high-school students”? Let us wait and see.
Editor’s Note
I, your editor, helped write parts of this article too, you know (laughs).
Thanks again to front-end coder @YdPro_ for helping with the cover image.
Sources of the Directors’ Interviews Cited
- Newtype, September 2018 issue
- Anim-Babblers, behind-the-scenes interview on Flavors of Youth