“Happiness is not about what you eat or what you wear but mutual understanding” according to Luan, a Chinese construction manager, in Pascale Appora-Gnekindy & Sun Ningyi’s documentary Eat Bitter. Mutual understanding is perhaps something he’s striving for in his working life in the Central African Republic which is as the opening titles state one of the poorest places on Earth. As China deepens its economic investment in Africa, Luan is one of many who’ve travelled overseas in search of higher salaries to provide better lives for their families.
His struggles are mirrored in those of Boa, a local man who works a sand diver gathering the raw materials that Luan needs for his construction work. Boa’s wife has recently left him with their two children whom he can barely support, though as it later turns out that may partly be because he had conceived a child with another woman whom he subsequently tries to marry only to see the relationship fail when she regards him as unkind and can no longer live with him. Luan’s status as a migrant worker has also placed a strain on his family life. Having left when his son was a teenager, he worries that he wasn’t there to effectively parent him at an important age which has contributed to the difficulties his wife is currently facing in her relationship with him. Luan and Yuzhen talk every day on the phone and she generally seems upbeat but later makes an attempt on her life in the depths of her loneliness being separated from her husband and estranged from her son.
The film’s title comes from a phrase that Luan utters close to its conclusion that one must eat bitter before tasting sweet, meaning that in order to find happiness one must endure hardship. But then the hardships that he and Boa are facing are obviously very different. Luan is here to build to a bank, a slick and modern building that symbolises a new future for an otherwise impoverished country which might be one reason the president wants to come in person to inaugurate it with an election looming along with the rise of a new militia threatening civil war. While working on the project, Luan complains that the local workers are slow in comparison to the speed and efficiency common in China while it’s clear that health and safety concerns are almost non-existent. A large group of men standing on a skinny girder joke that they’ll die if they fall but no one is wearing helmets or other safety gear. At one point it’s suggested that they were provided but the workers opted not to use them. In any case, a local worker is eventually killed due to a fall on site causing Luan to reflect that he should have made helmets mandatory and has perhaps failed in his duty of care to the casual workers he employs.
Boa says his job is dangerous too and that he’s caused himself injury due to being preoccupied with his complicated domestic situation. His dream is to buy a canoe and go into business for himself, something which his current boss supports and even offers to help him with even if the sand diving business appears to be semi-legal and precarious. The authorities soon close down the site where Boa and the other men were gathering sand and gravel stating that they want to redevelop it but when the boss returns sometime later he discovers that nothing has been done and wonders why they had to be moved on.
Later Luan and his wife attend the opening of a new apartment building for a banquet hosted by his hitherto unseen boss Madame He but it seems unlikely that many of the local residents would be able to afford to live in a place like this even if like the bank it is intended as symbol of what the Central African Republic could become rather than what it is now. Asked for his opinion on the Chinese, Boa states that he feels they’ve got a raw deal. The Chinese are just like white people, he remarks, they say they’ve come to help but they earn a lot more money and the terms of the deal are disadvantageous to men like him. Perhaps this is an ironic inversion of the mutual understanding Luan was talking about though admittedly more in reference to his now much happier relationship with his wife who has finally agreed to relocate in order to be with him. In any case, it’s true that both men are intent on building a mutually beneficial future even if it’s one where the scales are very much tipped.
Eat Bitter screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.
Original trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 