Made in China

In order to understand more about his father, Seattle film-editor-turned-director John Helde set out to make a film about Americans raised in China. Born in Sichuan, Tom Helde grew up in Changsha, but left the country in 1935 when he was 15, and rarely spoke about his experiences to his son. John starts off by interviewing his dad and other Americans who lived in pre-Mao China (John's grandfather, George, was part of a wave of Westerners who swept in between the wars, in his case to direct a YMCA program). Fellow transplant Sydney Thomson Brown says, “If you live in another culture…you always see the world differently, and you see your own world differently.” BJ Elder wrote a book, The Oriole's Song: An American Girlhood in Wartime China, about her Chinese childhood, and had long forgotten—like Tom Helde—some of the particulars about her childhood (writing the book was “like recovering from amnesia.”). Deciding to travel to China, John asks his father to accompany him, but the latter demurs, preferring to remember China before modernization, a decision made even more final after Tom is diagnosed with lung cancer. But Tom gives John his blessing, after which the filmmaker sets out to locate the places in China where his father used to live; some remain, while others have been lost to time. Although the director incorporates occasional newsreel footage into the story—which serves to explain why Americans left China in the 1930s and ‘40s— Helde emphasizes the personal over the political, so history takes a backseat here to relationships. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)