2022

The Boat, The Train, The Road

Essay Film (42 mins)

“Will the ocean remember?”

A family running a noodle business, a prominent cultural ambassador in prison for ivory smuggling, and a Buddhist temple housing local orphans in Dar es Salaam. Through these three personal trajectories, artist LI Yuchen reflects on China’s evolving relation with Tanzania.

“The Boat, The Train, The Road” is a journey through the lens of Li, as she traverses the Tanzanian landscape and encounters three imprints of Chinese migration with their stories spanning different decades and contexts. These personal accounts complicate the big narratives surrounding China such as an anti-colonization ally or a neo-colonial rising power.

Both a meditation on the universal question of “Where do we belong?” and a personal quest to understand cultural identity, this essay film blends historical materials with Li’s intimate gaze from the present. Li stands as a witness to these encounters and relates them to her own experiences of being a woman of color in Europe, yet being perceived as white in Tanzania.