On the outskirts of an isolated village in Southern China, surrounded by mountains, a woman meets a married schoolteacher for a tryst in a pasture, and during her dazed walk home finds a glowing stone. The sky parts, a dark form passes across the sun, and the woman falls down. Not many scenes later, the village has become a UFO theme park, transformed by American dollars and adorned with flags and sculptures. A marching band proclaims that it celebrates the future. In the film, based on her novel of the same name, Xiaolu Guo takes post-Mao China as her protagonist. The film satirizes both China’s embrace of commercialism and its government’s paranoia about the unknown or “sensitive.”
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Guo, now based in London, grew up in a small Chinese fishing village but wants to underscore that although China is the main character, the themes of the story are not particular to China. A good story resonates with anyone, she says, regardless of culture. We’re all taking part in the march toward homes where UFO landing pads have replaced water and dirt, and, Guo writes, “no one, no matter how unimportant they might seem, is immune from the big economic machine rolling over our lives.” The sense of powerlessness that often accompanies globalization appears across Guo’s work, but there’s nothing subtle about her critique here.