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Yao explains to a wealthy couple in Taiwan how they can change their nationality to preserve their wealth, “investing” in another country in order to buy citizenship to a place that has a taxation system that is more advantageous to their circumstances. But the people he’s talking to remark on his accent and after learning he came from Malaysia jokingly tell him that he passes himself off as Taiwanese quite well with the implication being he’s deceived them in some way, while it’s ironic that someone who’s immigrated to Taiwan is helping them “emigrate” from it.
This seems to upset Yao a little bit. Just as it does when he goes to donate blood with some Taiwanese friends, but is refused because he comes from a “high-risk area”. He points out that they might not reject someone from Europe or America in the same way as someone from South East Asia, while this very denial of his blood seems to suggest that it’s not possible for him to ever be “Taiwanese” no matter no long he might have lived there. Any children he might have would not really be either. Lau Kek-huat’s The Waves Will Carry Us (人生海海, rénshēnghǎihǎi) jumps back over a hundred years to ask what really is a “homeland” and what meaning there is in this world of borders and documentation that take questions of identity and belonging out of the individual’s hands.
Yao came from Malaysia, but as a member of the ethnic Chinese community, he isn’t completely accepted there either. His grandfather came as a child from China, but when independence was granted, he was excluded from citizenship applications because he did not speak Malay and risked losing his land and farm as an undocumented person. He had come there with his uncle who dreamed of untold riches in South East Asia, but found only hard work and dire conditions. Before they left, their relatives had performed a ritual which taught them never to become “barbarians” or risk losing their way home. Quan and his uncle keep their hair in pigtails despite the mocking of those around them and are discouraged from eating the local durian fruit which becomes a favourite of Yao’s father.
Yet when government officers march into his father’s funeral for which his sister has splashed out on a traditional Taoist burial suit, he learns his father secretly converted to Islam and must be laid to rest in the Muslim burial ground having undergone an Islamic funeral. As he says to his brother Cai who is an activist protesting the corrupt government, it is easier to be a Muslim in this society. You can get cars and loans more easily, not to mention have multiple wives. The government officer looks at him with similar suspicion to the Taiwanese couple, claiming that he understands the “Chinese mindset,” and is sick of people who convert to Islam for purely cynical reasons and never practise the religion. This is what you get, he seems to say as he rejects Yao’s attempts to bribe him and confiscates his father’s body.
It turns out that the reason may not have been so cynical after all, but nevertheless the family is forced through the farce of burying a doll in order to complete the Taoist funeral rites without which they cannot really lay their father to rest. Yao’s and Cai’s mad decision to exhume him from the Muslim burial ground is then an attempt to bring him “home,” though the concept is one that’s in other ways constantly shifting. Yao’s niece asks her mother where Yao’s “home” is now, though the answer they come up with is only that home is wherever he is. That the body ends up getting lost is an indication of its statelessness but also a restoration of freedom in being uncoupled from the notion of national identity.
Still, young Quan wondered if the stars here were the same as they were back home or if they’d travelled so far the ancestors could no longer protect them. Everyone must find a way to survive, Yao’s father had told him, though his brother Cai may think he’s coward for going to Taiwan rather than staying in Malaysia and trying to make things better like he is with the protest movement. The irony is that their father died on Independence Day draped in a Malaysian flag, while they later use it as a bandana to cover their faces when confronting the police as they try to rescue their father’s body only to enter another kind of in between space, if one in which they are freer to claim their own identity.
The Waves Will Carry Us screened as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 