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Capsule Synopsis
Filmmaker John Helde sets out to understand his father Tom's remarkable childhood as a white American growing up in 1930's China. Navigating his father's reticence, he tracks down Tom's China-born peers, a unique community of Americans who grew up with a foot in two cultures. But when cancer intervenes, John's hope for his father to return to the home he left behind fades - and John's ensuing solo journey across modern China, guided by new friends, becomes an exploration of what "home" really means.
Synopsis
Made in China is a personal story exploring themes of identity, sons and fathers, and the yearning to understand where we come from. In 2002, I sit down with my father to try to understand his childhood as a white American growing up in 1930's China. His past is a mystery to me - why did he never talk about it? Why has he never gone back? Beginning with my father's remarkable birth on a remote Sichuan mountaintop, Made in China uncovers the stories of China-born Americans who grew up with a foot in two cultures, in a home that was never what their parents called "home."
Along the way, my father and I begin to find a way to talk to each other and we grow closer than we've ever been. I propose a trip to China - thinking that if we find the places he long ago left behind, we'll share in this past together. But his death cuts short our plans, and China falls to me alone. My solo journey across the country - from modern Shanghai to industrial Changsha to a rugged mountain in Western Sichuan - becomes a journey through a state of mind. Guided by new friends, the search for my father's past becomes an exploration of the meaning of home, of what lasts, and what doesn't.
Director's Statement
Maybe it’s because my own 1970’s suburban upbringing was so completely un-eventful by contrast - we never even moved once - that I became so fascinated with my father’s childhood as a white American boy in China. Or maybe it’s because he didn’t talk about those years. So many of us grow quickly tired of our parents’ well-worn stories; but in my case I was well into adulthood before I realized just how much there was to know.
My father Tom was, in fact, the family storyteller. A history professor, he understood the importance of delivery; he also loved a good laugh. But he rarely entertained us with stories of his childhood. It wasn’t until I was well into my thirties that I opened a book called Golden Inches, the journals of Grace Service. Grace and her husband Bob were close friends of my grandparents George and Ruth Helde, and they all made Chengdu, Sichuan their home in the early 1920’s, as Bob and George worked to establish a YMCA there. Inside the book, I found a photo of George and Ruth on the road to Chengdu, accompanied by a brace of smiling Chinese. I also found Grace’s heart-wrenching story of my father’s birth on Bailuding, a remote Sichuan mountain: my grandmother Ruth died there at the family’s summer home three days after she delivered my father.
Seeing the story in print, the dramatic circumstances of my father’s first moments fully hit me. The idea of this special place - a place deep in China, where my father burst on the scene, losing his mother in the process - lodged itself in my consciousness. Then I came across a stash of photos I’d never seen - my father as a boy in China, calmly holding the cook’s hand on the porch, playing with his dog, exploring the marketplace, journeying up the Yangtze. The pictures felt like a window into another world. I realized I knew virtually nothing about my father’s childhood. I also was beginning to realize how little I knew him.
Made in China sprang from the urge to uncover this story, a story that was much more personal than anything I’d done. But when I started filming, and digging into my father’s past, I found that such things do not come naturally to either him or me. Talking - especially about things not usually talked about - was not the most comfortable activity for us; and although I thought we should go back to the country he left in 1935, he seemed content to leave the past in the past. Suggestions from my dad led me to some of his childhood peers, and I traveled around interviewing them, looking for answers to the big questions of the story: What did it mean to grow up in a country so different from your parents’ "home" country? How did it feel to "return" to an America you hardly knew? What do you call "home" anyway? In their entirely unsurprising domestic surroundings, these aging Americans recounted a childhood far removed from what we think of as "American," often detouring into fluent Mandarin.
When my father died of cancer in December, 2003, just a year or so after I began shooting, I couldn’t let the project end there. Going to China, even if on my own, felt like a way to linger in the connection we had formed, and to continue to explore the meaning of "home." I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to find his past in twenty-first century Shanghai, Changsha, and Chengdu; and I wanted to make it to Bailuding, his mountain birthplace - to see this mythical summit as real, and, hopefully, in some small way, close a circle.
-- John Helde, writer/director
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