going home for the holidays is an understatement when it comes to the zhang family, one of hundreds of millions of chinese migrant worker families, who go to desperate lengths to travel extraordinary distances during their sole vacation week, the chinese new year. the arithmetic alone of the largest human migration in the world is cause for awe. however, lixin fan paints a much more impressionistic picture of the emotional/psychological despair caused in the absence of parenthood (as it belongs to children and parents alike). while separated by thousands of miles, the greater distance between the zhang family is an opinion of the significance of sacrifice.
as the parents see it, their absence from the home is to better the potential futures of their son and daughter who unlike most rural children attend school full time. more than anything they would prefer to see their children not follow in their factory-job footsteps. as the children see it, they grow up in an environment where their only parental figure is their grandmother in addition to the income of their parents which doesn't even relieve them of their labourious existence. a life without the support of their parents feels like a life confined and imprisoned. an obvious reaction to this structure would be, as qin (daughter) does, to rebel and explore the freedom of independency.
her choice: to drop out of highschool a year early and pursue a factory job sewing jeans. at first qin appreciates her new found freedom and even finds a certain pride in her work. in one scene, qin and her roommate go shopping at a local mall and search for the brand of jeans they have put all their hard work into only to find that the department store doesn't carry them. as the exterior shots of qin's factory suggest, the mounds of denim they toil in are shipped and sold to a foreign market. nevertheless, this hardly phases qin who in her own search for affirmation gets a barbie-styled haircut that all the tourists share. in a less than positive appraisal, the haircut proves to be not quite what qin had anticipated. her search for expression/individuality comes up short. while she may be too stuborn to admit it to herself, a lonliness (the ghost of her parents support) pervades her new life.
in an attempt to convince qin to change her mind and go back to school, her parents pick qin up for their annual migration back home. she laughs and scoffs in a childlike-wonder while her parents cautiously wait among the masses for a single train ticket. waiting days on end is commonplace and qin's mother tries to instill the value of this painstaking wait. upon arrival back home, the zhang family is even more dysfunctional. in an extreme insult to the dignity and honour of her father, qin uses the word "fuck" and is physically punished for it. for further emphasis fan keeps in a shot of qin breaking the fourth wall - addressing the audience that this is the "real" her. the surface of the film, like the tear in the family unit, has finally ripped. while last train home certainly points to the disconnection of family and loss of generation, it imparts a sense of immediacy and need for action. the longer the common peasant worker in china continues to sew mindlessly, the greater chance that the unity of country/family will go past the point of being able to be mended.
