Through the undue course of "Mang Shan", Xumei(Lu Huang) makes so many wrong moves in her numerous endeavors to flee her agrarian confines, a western audience may start to wonder about the filmmaker's disposition towards women. College-educated and urban, nevertheless, Xumei allows herself to be outsmarted by these unschooled peasants with a naivety that strains the film's credibility as a feminist treatise, or an anti-communist manifesto. Masquerading as scouts for a pharmaceutical company, the young woman and her older male colleague who sells the cash-strapped college grad to the indigent farming family, inspires Decheng to ask Xumei, "How could you have believed those guys?" Since the seemingly kind schoolteacher turns out to be complicit towards the girl's forced detainment, this inquiry can be construed as a subtle mocking of his intellectual superior, whom he envies, having flunked his college entrance exams after graduation. This provincialism man; at one point, confesses to Xumei that he had never seen a train. In spite of her vaunted worldliness, in spite of her time spent on trains, however, this modern woman finds herself on equal terms with the rustic man; the very outcome that Mao Tse Tsung envisioned when he implemented his Great Leap Forward plan onto Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. Over and over again, Xumei exhibits a counter-intuitive nature about her desperate predicament that's so alarmingly pronounced, questions about the filmmaker's attitudes towards women and higher-education need to be raised.
For starters, the dawning that everybody within her adopted farming village is aligned against bought women from departing their regimented lives, crosses Xumei's mind with an extended deliberation that borders on mild mental retardation. After all, her own "mother-in-law" participated in the rape preliminaries for that first night she spent with Degui, the rapist, her "husband"; a sure indicator that the social norms of civilization don't apply among these people. Befriending men, if not for the especial purpose of accruing money from sex, lacks the proper psychological motivation, which makes Xumei's friendship with Decheng somewhat unlikely. Given the context, the counterbalancing effects of romantic love plays out like a fallacy, because it suggests that the enslaved woman's bond with the farmer is merely an arranged marriage. Even worse, Xumei hands over letters to the postman without any consciousness of her husband's whereabouts when the exchanges are made. At the very least, she should look over her shoulder, since the correspondences to her father is a prelude for escape. Over time, despite having no indication that the letters had ever reached its destination, Xumei unceasingly acts without prudence by her continuing trust of the civil servant. Finally, a boy that Xumei tutors, sees what we already surmised, that the postman, like the village chief, like the other "handmaids"(echoes of the Margaret Atwood novel abounds), like the schoolteacher, are all in on the conspiracy. It's beyond belief that a college-educated woman could be this dense, but the mortified look on Xumei's face, upon learning the fate of her letters, indicates that she believed her written transmissions were being sent. If escaping on foot proved to be difficult(Why doesn't she escape during the night? Why does she stay near the road?), a duplicitous postman should come to her as no surprise.
Late in the film, Xumei becomes a schoolteacher herself; she oversees a group of young boys in her home. If "Mang Shan" truly sided with the concept of a free China, and free women, the film would have Xumei teaching these future men something a little more useful than mathematics.
For starters, the dawning that everybody within her adopted farming village is aligned against bought women from departing their regimented lives, crosses Xumei's mind with an extended deliberation that borders on mild mental retardation. After all, her own "mother-in-law" participated in the rape preliminaries for that first night she spent with Degui, the rapist, her "husband"; a sure indicator that the social norms of civilization don't apply among these people. Befriending men, if not for the especial purpose of accruing money from sex, lacks the proper psychological motivation, which makes Xumei's friendship with Decheng somewhat unlikely. Given the context, the counterbalancing effects of romantic love plays out like a fallacy, because it suggests that the enslaved woman's bond with the farmer is merely an arranged marriage. Even worse, Xumei hands over letters to the postman without any consciousness of her husband's whereabouts when the exchanges are made. At the very least, she should look over her shoulder, since the correspondences to her father is a prelude for escape. Over time, despite having no indication that the letters had ever reached its destination, Xumei unceasingly acts without prudence by her continuing trust of the civil servant. Finally, a boy that Xumei tutors, sees what we already surmised, that the postman, like the village chief, like the other "handmaids"(echoes of the Margaret Atwood novel abounds), like the schoolteacher, are all in on the conspiracy. It's beyond belief that a college-educated woman could be this dense, but the mortified look on Xumei's face, upon learning the fate of her letters, indicates that she believed her written transmissions were being sent. If escaping on foot proved to be difficult(Why doesn't she escape during the night? Why does she stay near the road?), a duplicitous postman should come to her as no surprise.
Late in the film, Xumei becomes a schoolteacher herself; she oversees a group of young boys in her home. If "Mang Shan" truly sided with the concept of a free China, and free women, the film would have Xumei teaching these future men something a little more useful than mathematics.