Walking Up the Yangtze

                I recognized elements of de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” as I watched Up the Yangtze.  Primarily I saw de Certeau’s idea of the “voyeur” and the “walker”.  A voyeur is elevated and “put at a distance” (1343).  I saw the tourists in the documentary as being voyeurs.  There is a distance put between them and the Chinese culture that they seemingly want to experience.  The walkers, “whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it”, are the Chinese people in the movie who go about their business day by day without really taking a look around them (1344).  They are part of the city, but they don’t recognize other people besides themselves.  There were different economic classes present in the movie, but even the Chinese people themselves did not fully realize what conditions Yu Shui lived in.  Neither group of people is completely aware of their surroundings even though they think they know and understand what they see.  Therefore neither group is completely useful in creating an operational city concept.  If the two groups combined, they’d create a people that is able to be a part of the current culture as well as view the surroundings in order to be aware of the cultures around them.

                De Certeau would see Chang as presenting a China that “constructs the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable” (1344).    The tourists would be the readers.  The workers on the cruise ship are making a complex city more understandable to the tourists who are only there for a small amount of time.  It’s difficult to capture the essence of a city that has a long history when you only have a few days to find the essence.  The tourists are surprised by how modern the city is, because they associate China with an ancientness only presented to them in books.  The workers on the cruise ship play into that representation of China by allowing the tourists to try on ancient costume.