The family history that lies beneath

In a talk following the screening of her first feature documentary film, May the Soil Be Everywhere, at the recent Houston Asian American Pacific Islander Film Festival, director Zhao Yehui discussed how she discovered a family history, and how that shaped the film's development.

Zhao's grandmother migrated from a village to a small town, her mother moved to a big city, and she moved to the US — so she had in mind to explore the story of migration across the generations of women.

The journey took her to an abandoned village tucked deep in the mountainous Loess Plateau in Central China. There, she discovered their ancestral home carved out of a hillside built by her great-grandfather.

The film ended up being about tracing family roots, the change of time and landscape, and along the way, a journey to renew herself.

Zhao, an artist, filmmaker and adjunct professor who teaches film, media and performance arts at New York's Hunter College, came to the US to study in 2015.

In her initial years in the US, Zhao put in a lot of effort to assimilate and acculturate herself.

"Part of that process also involves othering myself. So there is a certain sense of self that I give up," she said. By making this film, she intended to find strength by being back with her family and the land.

During initial interviews with her grandma by phone from New York during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhao first heard of her great-grandfather, who didn't even leave behind a photo of himself.

"I became very interested in this idea of searching for somebody who doesn't exist in the visual imagery," Zhao said. "I'm thinking about what other elements I can bring to illustrate a person who doesn't exist in imagery. That's how the story started."

A significant portion of the film concerns the search for and return to the ancestral cave dwelling that Zhao's great-grandfather had built in a rural mountain valley.

The dwelling had been abandoned for over five decades.

With help from local residents, traversing hills, and bashing through bushes to make a path along the way, Zhao finally found the site.

The roof had collapsed the previous summer from rainstorms, and although the inside was inaccessible, the dwelling's facade remained largely intact. The scene moved her.

"It's just built so beautifully," Zhao said. "I drew this arc tracing the cave and did a very improvised performance of deep listening. That was not planned at all. That happened spontaneously at the moment."

Beautiful memory

Her grandma has beautiful memories of the cave dwelling where she lived until the age of 15. She spoke fondly of fruit trees in the yard — the scent of the flowers, the sweet taste of the fruit.

The cave sparked a family discussion. "How come nobody ever shared about this story that we have this cave my great-grandfather built in the wilderness?"

Her mother replied: "Our family story is not interesting."

But Zhao said her family story was interesting that everyone's family story was interesting. Despite the lack of drama — nobody got killed, nobody's life got turned upside down — Zhao said the filming process led her to feel regenerated.

"I felt this deeper connection with them. I felt like I would get to know more and now have a different perspective."

Near the end, Zhao's family was paying tribute to her great-grandfather by his tomb. Nearby, a high-speed railway loomed overhead.

This reflected Zhao's critical thinking on urban development all over the world, another theme her film explored.

"We're experiencing lots of urban supremacy. We see ourselves being further and further from the earth because of the apartment buildings," she said.

"I wanted to talk about this relationship between people and land and how we can still find strength in our intimate connection with earth."

She later brought her family back to the cave, including her then 88-year-old grandmother, reuniting with family roots deeply connected to the land.

Zhao's film, made with a grant from the International Documentary Association, debuted last year at True/False film festival. It was featured at various events and received a special mention jury award at DokuFest in Kosovo.

Zhao found the practice of oral history that's part of her film very beautiful.

"People have experienced so many changes throughout their lives. They might not remember the years and dates correctly, their personal stories might not directly fit into the grand history narratives, their memories might deviate a little from truth, but their stories represented their true experiences."