Documentary director Wang Xiuyue follows a family of women trafficked to China from Myanmar as they seek autonomy and romance
A woman squats on the side of the street next to a fortune-teller who reads her palm. Her name is Larry and she claims to hail from Yunnan province in southwestern China, born to a mother who was already burdened with too many children to remember her birth year, so the clairvoyant can’t work out her fortune based on that. Still, the deep lines on Larry’s palm seem to reveal something. “I see your marriage isn’t going well,” the fortune-teller says.
While this might be far too often the reality for many rural women, the seer’s words ring particularly true for Larry. After all, she had just lied to this man. She does not come from Yunnan. She was born in Myanmar and wound up trafficked to a Chinese man in Shandong province as a “wife.”
This scene comes from a documentary, The Women from Myanmar, whose director Wang Xiuyue narrates today’s episode. Wang is a native of Shandong himself. Sheer coincidence guided him to fellow local Cao Haijiang, Larry’s husband. His documentary is a result of this fateful encounter and the ensuing four years during which Wang followed Larry and her family, shooting scenes from their life and documenting in the process the lives of these illegal female migrants who floated like a duckweed from the highlands of northern Myanmar. The whole story began with a fraudulent wedding in the fall of 2016.
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