Abstract
This chapter discusses three 2005 films made by independent directors: Gu Changwei’s Peacock, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shanghai Dreams, and Li Shaohong’s Stolen Life. A central character in the three movies is a young daughter who is alienated from her family, especially her working-class parents. The parents find it difficult to understand their children who have grown up under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “reform and openness,” which has transformed a “puritan” Maoist socialist China into a country infested with all the malignant ills of new Chinese capitalism. In such a postsocialist family drama, the female protagonist is drawn into a traumatic conflict with her working-class father, who seems to embody a repressive old socialist regime in an economic and moral decline. The chapter then analyzes the three films in terms of “postsocialist trauma,” a psychological and emotional trauma that a working-class Chinese family has to endure to survive new Chinese capitalism.
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