Studies in Documentary Film
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Feminist activism in the first person: an analysis of
Nanfu Wang's Hooligan Sparrow (2016)
Gina Marchetti
To cite this article: Gina Marchetti (2020) Feminist activism in the first person: an analysis
of Nanfu Wang's Hooligan�Sparrow (2016), Studies in Documentary Film, 14:1, 30-49, DOI:
10.1080/17503280.2020.1720090
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720090
Published online: 03 Feb 2020.
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STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
2020, VOL. 14, NO. 1, 30–49
https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720090
Feminist activism in the first person: an analysis of Nanfu
Wang’s Hooligan Sparrow (2016)
Gina Marchetti
Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
ABSTRACT
Hooligan Sparrow (2016) serves as a first-person account of the
director Nanfu Wang’s struggle to produce a film deemed
politically sensitive in mainland China, including her encounters
with various official and undercover security forces attempting to
suppress feminist activist Ye Haiyan (Hooligan Sparrow)’s quest for
justice for underage victims of sexual abuse in China. This article
explores the roots of Wang’s approach to feminist, first-person
documentary practice, its value for understanding women’s
activism in China and the implications of Wang’s decision to
address her audience in English rather than Chinese. The
significance of the nature of the first-person address to a
viewership outside of China becomes an integral part of this
examination of the encounter between personal filmmaking and
transnational feminist activism. The construction of the woman
filmmaker as a protagonist in feminist documentary practice
intersects with the role of first-person narration within ‘accented’
and diasporic filmmaking traditions in Hooligan Sparrow. The
political implications of including the filmmaker as a narrator in
telling the stories of others and the ways in which transnational
feminist connections arise through stories told by women within
and outside the People’s Republic of China complicate the politics
of first-person documentary filmmaking for women in Asia.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 7 January 2020
Accepted 10 January 2020
KEYWORDS
Chinese women;
transnational feminism;
sexual violence; media
activism; feminist
documentary; diasporic
cinema
In her 2014 documentary Citizenfour, Laura Poitras does more than narrate the drama of
whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s quest for asylum. She places herself within the story as
an investigative filmmaker who must go to extreme measures to guarantee her own as well
as her subject’s security. The address of the film shifts as the director’s story becomes inextricably intertwined with Snowden’s plight. Documentarist Nanfu Wang takes on a similar
role in her film Hooligan Sparrow (2016). Ostensibly a portrait of Chinese feminist activist
and performance artist, Ye Haiyan (a.k.a. Hooligan Sparrow), the film also serves as a firstperson account of Wang’s own struggle to produce the film, including her encounters with
various official and undercover security forces attempting to suppress Ye’s story and her
feminist activities on behalf of underage victims of sexual abuse in China.
This article explores the roots of Wang’s approach to feminist, first-person documentary practice, its value for understanding women’s activism in China and the implications
of Wang’s decision to address her audience in English rather than Chinese. The
CONTACT Gina Marchetti
marchett@hku.hk
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
31
significance of the nature of the first-person address to a viewership outside of China
becomes an integral part of this examination of the encounter between personal filmmaking and transnational feminist activism. The construction of the woman filmmaker as a
protagonist in feminist documentary practice intersects with the role of first-person narration within ‘accented’ and diasporic filmmaking traditions in Hooligan Sparrow. The
political implications of including the filmmaker as a narrator in telling the stories of
others and the ways in which transnational feminist connections come about through
stories told by women within and outside the People’s Republic of China complicate
the politics of first-person documentary filmmaking for women in Asia and throughout
the Asian diaspora.
The filmmaker and the state
Hooligan Sparrow begins with Nanfu Wang introducing herself and her camera as she
addresses her viewers in the past tense with a promise to show events that happened
before her camera was taken from her by the Chinese authorities [Figure 1]. Wang
speaks in English to an international community of viewers: ‘What follows is the story I
captured before they took the camera from me.’ Thus, the first story told in Hooligan
Sparrow involves a woman filmmaker’s attempt to shoot politically sensitive footage in
the People’s Republic of China. She details how she hides an audio recorder under her
skirt in order to capture her final interview with public security before leaving China,
and this audio exchange introduces the initial focus of her project on feminist activist
Ye Haiyan.
Born into rural poverty in 1975, Ye first came to public attention when she began to
blog under the name of ‘Hooligan Sparrow’ in 2005.1 Having worked at the edges of
China’s sex industry in massage parlors and karaoke bars, Ye befriended prostitutes,
some suffering from HIV/AIDS, who were frequently abused by their customers and
Figure 1. Nanfu Wang introduces herself and her camera.
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G. MARCHETTI
harassed by the police and other government officials. Advocating for these sex workers’
rights, she established the China Women’s Rights Workshop in 2011. Taking her campaign further, Ye offered free sex to migrant workers as a way to bring attention to her
cause, blogging about her experiences on the Chinese Internet platform Weibo.2
After settling in the United States, Nanfu Wang returned to her native China to make a
documentary about Ye and her campaign advocating for the rights of sex workers. She
learned about Ye through the Internet and realized she had quite a lot in common with
the activist. Like Ye, Wang grew up poor in rural China and struggled to educate
herself after her father passed away when she was twelve years old. She eventually attended
Ohio University in 2011 and, later, New York University, where she met her husband,
Michael Shade, who serves as the co-producer of Hooligan Sparrow. In fact, Wang was
attracted to the documentary mode because of its potential for involving viewers emotionally in social justice issues such as the woeful predicament of Chinese sex workers that Ye
highlighted in her own activism and artistic oeuvre.3
However, Hooligan Sparrow did not turn out to be about prostitutes as Wang had
initially planned. When she arrived in China, Wang caught Ye at the precise moment
the activist threw herself into the highly publicized case of six schoolgirls, between the
ages of eleven and fourteen, trafficked by their school principal Chen Zaipeng in collusion
with Feng Xiaosong of the Wanning Municipal Housing Authority in Hainan Province.
Although reluctant at first to allow Wang to film her, Ye eventually met with Wang
and welcomed her into her inner circle of feminist activists dedicated to seeking justice
for these young victims of sexual misconduct.
However, when Ye asks Wang to help out with her camera in Hainan, it is not to investigate the rape case. Rather, the camera records personal statements from the activists –
human rights lawyer Wang Yu, and supporters, Wang Jianfen, Shan Lihua and Jia
Lingmin – in which they introduce themselves and state that, if they die in detention,
they did not commit suicide. The director films herself making a similar statement. At
this point, the film shifts from being primarily about Ye’s campaign against underage
rape to focusing on the challenges faced by mainland Chinese dissidents in dealing with
state authorities. These women fear for their lives because of their feminist activism and
the film spotlights the government’s abuse of their fundamental human rights.
As the film evolves from a biographical portrait of Ye to an exposé of the
treatment of feminist activists in China, it increasingly becomes an autobiographical
account of the transformation of the filmmaker from an observer to an activist and an
onscreen participant in the film. Wang remarks on this personal transformation in an
interview:
In the process, I realized “wait a minute, this is like activist thinking, am I an activist?” I
started thinking about what an “activist” was. If you say an “activist” is someone who witnessed or experienced something and then couldn’t stay passive anymore and had to take
some action, then I would say yes – I am an activist. (A. Kao 2017)
Shocked by what she witnesses, Wang uses the camera as a therapeutic confidante as well
as a means of recording Ye’s political activities. As the director states in an interview:
… I kept a video diary, almost like a therapy session to channel my feelings … I felt comfortable and safe when I was filming. Sometimes I felt like, as long as I capture it on camera I
have power. It’s my way of fighting back. I feel like I win somehow. (Landreth 2016)
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
33
The feminist activists share her optimism and use the media to advocate for justice for the
young rape victims. An image of Ye holding up a sign reading, ‘Hey Principal: Get a room
with me and leave the kids alone,’ goes viral on the Internet and brings immediate retaliation [Figure 2]. Ye ends up in detention, where filming is forbidden, and Wang switches to
her ‘special’ microcamera-glasses in order to grab some contraband, candid footage of the
prison exterior.
As these scenes featuring Wang’s struggle to make her film indicate, Hooligan Sparrow
says more about Nanfu Wang as a filmmaker and Ye as a provocateur than about the girls
raped in Hainan. While Wang’s project began as a portrait of a feminist artist, it quickly
became a film about the exploitation of underage women and the political movement that
rose up to agitate for justice. However, Hooligan Sparrow pushes the boundaries of the
form once again when the focus shifts from the crime victims to the plight of the activists,
who struggle to secure their own fundamental rights to free speech, assembly, and peaceful
protest. The film functions as a palimpsest in which these layers of biography, political
advocacy, and documentation of human rights abuses become intertwined with Wang’s
first-person account as witness and victim of political intimidation.4
Therefore, the film can be judged as successful or not on several levels: (1) as an effort to
write Chinese artist-activist Ye Haiyan into the history of feminist performance and intermedia arts; (2) as a document of a specific political campaign to seek justice for the Hainan
victims of statutory rape and uncover corrupt practices that make an intervention on a
national scale necessary; (3) as an exposé of abuses that impede female activists from exercising their rights of opinion, assembly, and freedom of movement guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); and (4) as a self-portrait of the transformation
of a filmmaker from feminist biographer to human rights activist.
At the border between the social movement and the human rights documentary, Hooligan Sparrow draws viewers outside of China into the daily travails of feminist activists,
Figure 2. An image of Sparrow holding up a sign reading, Hey Principal: Get a room with me and leave
the kids alone, went viral.
34
G. MARCHETTI
their families and their supporters. It provides a platform for reflecting on the role of feminism in local and national social movements as well as in women’s claims to basic human
rights globally. The film navigates the territory at the porous borders that cordon off local
politics from national and international concerns. Moreover, as a transnational documentary, it serves to express and address the needs of people living within diaspora. As Dina
Iordanova points out in ‘Choosing the Transnational,’ the ‘ranks of “transplanted” and
“hyphenated” people’ are growing. She argues:
Adopting a transnational approach, at first without reflecting much on it and later on more
consciously, enabled me to identify problems that were not particularly noticed, name them,
and pursue them. What troubled me and touched me was all happening along with the
fluctuation in social landscapes that were at the limits of the national; it was much better
felt when one sees it from outside, in flux. … Cinema was one of the few contemporary
art forms that was capable of showing the consequences of whatever was wrong with humankind, and of taking the concern to wider audiences, far beyond those immediately affected.
(Iordanova 2016)
In ‘Concepts of Transnational Cinema Revisited,’ Song Hwee Lim points to China as a key
player in twenty-first century commercial co-productions that attempt to captivate global
audiences; however, he also observes that the existence of transnational Chinese-language
cinema in the various forms of new wave, eco-critical, and poor cinemas underscores the
urgency of examining the politics of contemporary film beyond the nation. (Lim 2019)
In the case of women within the Chinese diaspora, transnational feminist filmmakers –
Sinophone, Anglophone, and beyond – speak to conditions within China from outside its
borders. This distance answers the need to create diasporic feminist networks that enable
the comparatively free expression of ideas actively suppressed within the People’s Republic
of China through digital means (e.g. firewalls, trolls) as well as more directly through
incarceration, physical threats, and other forms of intimidation. The use of a bilingual
first-person address in Hooligan Sparrow merits closer scrutiny to further understanding
of the role personal documentary plays in transnational feminist activism.
First person, second language
Several of the self-reflexive, first-person techniques Wang employs in Hooligan Sparrow
bear some similarities to stylistic choices made by other Chinese women documentarists,5
who have studied in Europe, Canada, or the United States, and serve as examples of the
‘accented’ documentary forms Hamid Naficy (2001) describes as characteristic of exilic
and diasporic cinema.6 These bilingual films address their viewers in English or a combination of Mandarin, other Chinese dialects and English, and chart a course between observational biography and autobiographical self-reflection.7
Documentary, through first-person feminism, becomes activist filmmaking, and when
coupled with a cross-cultural perspective and a multilingual address this activism extends
beyond the borders of the nation to contribute to a transnational feminism that Grewal
and Kaplan (1994) describe in their book, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
Transnational Feminist Practices. The subtitle of Lingzhen Wang’s (2011) anthology,
Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts, notes the crucial role these crossborder networks play in the careers of Chinese women filmmakers. She draws on
Grewal and Kaplan’s call for a transnational feminist practice in order to ‘scatter’ the
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
35
hegemony exerted by Euro-American feminism in theory and political discourse. In her
introduction to the book, Lingzhen Wang turns to legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s
(1991) notion of ‘intersectionality’ for inspiration in order to bring together a critique
of gender, race, class, and ethnicity and couples it with a third world feminist interrogation
of colonial patriarchy:
If intersectionality theory has helped transform feminist discourse from a universal, singleaxis framework to a dynamic, interconnected multiaxis movement within the United States,
third-world feminism has emphasized cultural specificity and historical differences in feminist research in a global context and repositioned the center of feminist discourse beyond the
Western-oriented paradigm. (Wang 2011, 12)
Transnational women filmmakers such as Nanfu Wang participate in this feminist
project of creating media networks linking women in China with the rest of the
world. As Patricia White (2015) demonstrates in her book, Women’s Cinema, World
Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, the rise of festivals devoted to women
filmmakers, women’s participation in the expansion of film education, as well as the
links they have forged with women associated with local, national and international
film movements have facilitated the growth of feminist filmmaking globally. These
transnational networks allow Hooligan Sparrow to circulate and speak to viewers
outside of the Chinese-speaking world as well as connect Sinophone viewers living
outside of China.
Michelle Citron (1999), Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (1999), and Julia Lesage,
among many other feminist film theorists, have addressed the issue of the relationship
between first-person filmmaking and women’s agitation for political change. In
‘Women’s Fragmented Consciousness in Feminist Experimental Autobiographical
Video,’ Lesage (1999), for example, calls for a more expansive use of women’s firstperson experimental documentaries as calls for action:
… the most effective social action results when progressive organizers and their agendas take
into consideration the ways that their constituencies live within many roles, participate in
contradictory discourses, and have different needs at different moments of their daily lives.
(335)
Feminist scholar and documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming exemplifies this negotiation
between provocative artistic practice and feminist activism in the People’s Republic of
China. She appears briefly in Hooligan Sparrow as one of the feminist activists photographed naked in support of Ye’s cause [Figure 3], and she provides a useful point of comparison to Wang as an American-based filmmaker (Lau 2013).
One of Ai’s first film projects involved documenting a performance of the Vagina
Monologues (2004) in China. Inspired by reading the play during a research exchange
in the United States, Ai translated the first-person accounts to fit the circumstances
faced by women in the People’s Republic. In addition to making documentaries on
HIV in rural China, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and on human rights activists, Ai codirected Garden in Heaven (2007) with Hu Jie. This film chronicles the date rape and subsequent death of an elementary school teacher, Huang Jing, in Hunan Province. The documentary follows the victim’s mother’s quest for justice when the police initially fail to take
action to investigate the cause of Huang’s demise, and her male co-director’s initial reluctance to accept the fact of the rape also forms part of the film’s narrative (Chang and Qian
36
G. MARCHETTI
Figure 3. Ai Xiaoming poses nude in support of Ye Haiyan’s campaign for justice for the abused girls in
Hainan.
2011, 69).8 Like Wang, Ai encountered unexpected barriers to making her film about
sexual violence in China and both have faced harassment by the police attempting to suppress their films.
However, Wang’s ability to move between China and New York City as well as her
extensive transnational network distinguishes her film from Ai’s oeuvre. In fact, Wang’s
film may have more in common with documentaries made by and about Ai Weiwei,
who also appears in Hooligan Sparrow and has a close association with both Ai Xiaoming
and Ye Haiyan as well as the New York art scene (Yu 2015). Ai Weiwei’s collaboration
with cinematographer Zhao Zhao, Disturbing the Peace (Lao ma ti hua, 2009), and
Alison Klayman’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012), for example, highlight some of the
same issues that surface in Hooligan Sparrow. Wang’s New York base and network extending from the NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts to Sundance places her in a privileged position, like Ai Weiwei, to comment on the situation in China from outside its borders that
neither Ai Xiaoming nor Ye Haiyan enjoys.
To craft her first-person address to her international viewers, Wang collaborated with
prolific documentary filmmaker Mark Monroe.9 Her creative producer, Peter Lucas, who
teaches at New York University, served as a fellow at the Sundance Institute while working
on Hooligan Sparrow, and the film had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival the following year. Hooligan Sparrow’s executive producers Andy Cohen and Alison Klayman
were both involved with the documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. As a consequence of
these connections, Hooligan Sparrow, moving from Sundance to PBS’ POV series and
Netflix, exists at a confluence of American public broadcasting, US indie cinema, feminist
filmmaking practices and diasporic documentary movements. This path allows Wang’s
film to enter into conversation with transnational feminism in a differently accented
fashion.
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
37
Addressing the viewer in English
Nanfu Wang performs a particular role as translator as well as participant in Hooligan
Sparrow. In the ways in which she presents herself and her subjects, Wang bridges the
gap between the two major emphases in documentary film practice that Bill Nichols
(2001) identifies as the ‘social issue’ and the ‘personal portrait’ documentary (166–167).
To accomplish this, Wang balances her participation in Ye’s feminist political activities
with moments of reflection on her own circumstances as an increasingly committed
and besieged human rights filmmaker. Thus, she performs two different roles in Hooligan
Sparrow: as an activist speaking in Chinese and as a first-person filmmaker expressing
herself in English.
Communicating in two languages with a single voice, Wang embodies a split perspective, and she narrates the story of Ye’s activism in a way that parallels the increasing danger
she faces as a filmmaker under police surveillance. A scene in which Wang, holed up in
Shanghai, addresses the camera in English, as she plans her next rendezvous with Ye, provides a telling example. Afraid to contact her family, Wang whispers into her camera’s
microphone as she crouches away from any windows in the dimly illuminated office.
The intimacy of the connection between the camera and the anxious filmmaker as well
as the use of English creates a virtual bond between Wang and her viewers outside of
China whom she addresses as witnesses to the power of the state. Wang talks about the
risks her friend, also questioned by the police, takes on her behalf and expresses her
worry about sending her footage back to the United States via Federal Express. Deciding
to take a bus rather than a train to meet up with Ye, Wang also verbalizes fear about her
personal security as well as the safety of her footage.
As this scene plays out, English connects the filmmaker through first-person address to
her eventual destination outside of China, where she will complete and screen her documentary. Thus, Wang demonstrates her ability to translate Chinese feminists’ concerns
into a vernacular understood within international film circles. The successful international
distribution, exhibition, and critical reception of the film indicates that Wang made that
connection viable. Ironically, the United States, Wang’s adopted home, has never signed
onto the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child featured as a key part of the activists’
intervention in Hainan. However, international standards remain central to understanding the reasons why feminist activists operate in the ways they do to agitate for justice in
mainland China.
Ye’s initial protest in Hainan highlights aspects of Chinese laws that contravene the
UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child and point to broader issues of corruption,
violence against women and the role of the state in suppressing investigations of crimes
against women and girls. A montage of newscasts provides the initial details of the
case. After six Wanning No. 2 Elementary School girls did not show up at school,
parents reported them missing. Surveillance footage shows some girls being led
down a hotel corridor; however, the police claim the children did not engage in any
sexual activity [Figure 4]. One of the parents circulates a cell phone image of bloodstained underpants, and the story changes as a result [Figure 5]. The principal
claims he paid the girls for sex, since rape means life in prison or the death penalty,
while paying a child prostitute for her services carries only five to fifteen years at
the time of the incident.
38
G. MARCHETTI
Figure 4. Nanfu Wang comments on surveillance footage that appears to contradict police claims.
Flaws in the legal system necessitate the intervention of activists from outside
of Hainan. Fear in the community because of the corruption of the police and their powerful patrons makes a purely local intervention impractical. The feminists keep track of patterns of abuse on a national scale in order to map the extent of the problem across
provinces. For example, the activists discuss a case involving the sexual assault of a
minor in Sichuan Province: The director of the Archival Bureau in Sichuan province
lay naked on top of a seven-year-old girl. The girl cried for help. When her mother
came in, the official slapped her and said, ‘If you say a word, I’ll kill you. I’m just
Figure 5. The bloody underwear produced as visual evidence.
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
39
playing with your daughter, so what?’ The loophole in the Child Prostitution Law provides
a sinister haven for government officials, and local criminal justice systems protect culpable officials by manipulating the charges against them as well as intimidating the parents
of their victims to silence them.
Bypassing the local justice system, victims and their advocates often go beyond provincial authorities. In fact, stretching back into China’s dynastic history, people without
power could bypass corrupt officials, protesting publicly and petitioning to the highest
authorities in the capital. After 1949, this continued. The 1989 Tian’anmen demonstrations serve as one example of the violent response these public protests can provoke
from the government. However, activists such as Ye still exercise the option to go directly
to the public through street protests, media interviews, and the Internet [Figure 6]. Ye also
makes use of tactics popularized during the Mao era, particularly big character posters. In
addition to holding these posters up in front of the school, Ye moves her cohort of fellow
activists to one of Hainan’s famous beaches for Nanfu Wang to film them holding up
posters with their key slogans: ‘Protest against the Education Department. End loopholes
in child rape laws. Strictly punish molesters. To remain silent is to be an accomplice to the
perverts on campus.’ Although the women address a camera that will bring their demands
to an international audience, the form of the protest links their calls for women’s emancipation to an earlier era. When Ye holds up a poster that reads, ‘All China Women’s Federation is a farce. China’s Women’s Rights are dead,’ the sentiment goes far beyond the
outrage over statutory rape to a much broader indictment of the Chinese Communist
Party’s failure to recognize the legitimacy of political organizing outside of governmentsanctioned institutions.
Outside activists, then, balance this tendency to cover up sex crimes with highly visible
Internet tactics to shine a light on the issue. Without access to an independent judicial
system and press outside of the direct control of the one-party state, citizens search for
Figure 6. Screenshots of online first-person activism.
40
G. MARCHETTI
justice beyond the confines of the government (local and national) through communication channels beyond the digital firewall and through agitprop gallery installations,
viral photos and provocative performance art protests. While the efficacy of these transnational attempts to expose abuses in mainland China may be limited, appeals to international standards of justice can supplement local political movements for progressive
social change. While individual victims sadly may never see their day in court, the
ability of filmmakers to expose endemic corruption to the world can have a salutary
effect as feminists move within and beyond the Chinese diaspora.
As the concluding segment of the film shows, the activists’ efforts achieve mixed
results and it is impossible to say conclusively whether the outcome would have been
different without the intervention and subsequent online furor. The principal and the
official who pimped the girls in Hainan go to prison; however, nothing happens to
those who engaged in the cover-up by harassing the victims’ families, lawyers, and
their feminist supporters. Without the efforts of the feminist activists, though, the perpetrators may never have gone to prison and the public may have believed that the girls
prostituted themselves.
Because of the precedence of the Party and lack of an established ‘rule of law,’ the exercise of justice in these cases is piecemeal. Broader reforms such as the 2015 Family Violence Law attempt to address similar issues, but these measures compete in the
international press with the suppression of women’s voices of dissent such as the arrest
of the Feminist Five – Li Maizi (also known as Li Tingting) Wei Tingting, Wu Rongrong,
Wang Man and Zheng Churan – on Women’s Day, March 8, earlier that same year for
planning demonstrations against sexual violence on public transportation. Since Ye’s
public shaming of Hainan’s judicial system likely helped indirectly to put child traffickers
behind bars, the timing of the law answering one of the demands of the Feminist Five for
legal measures to curb violence against women may not be purely coincidental. While it is
difficult to gauge whether the international attention given to the Feminist Five10 or Ye
Haiyan through English-language media helped these efforts or not, films such as Hooligan Sparrow do play a role in keeping women’s rights on the global agenda.
The filmmaker as babysitter
The faces of the violated girls never appear on screen and the film only shows evidence of
the crime committed against them through a photo of bloody underwear. Narrated in the
third not the first person, their story is mediated through the words of a father, lawyer,
media announcers, and the activists. However, their generation does not remain voiceless
in the film. Ye’s daughter, Yaxin, serves as the representative of the concerns of Chinese
girls, since she is around the same age as the Hainan rape victims. When Nanfu Wang first
meets her outside a prison facility in Bobai, Yaxin waits with Ye’s boyfriend, Haobo Ling,
for her mother to be released from detention. Attempting to look through a crack in the
massive metal door of the prison, Yaxin remarks: ‘So this is what a detention center looks
like. It’s just like a school! So terrible.’
With Ye in detention, Wang becomes Yaxin’s putative babysitter and the girl opens up
to the documentarist in several intimate scenes. In one instance, Yaxin does her homework
seated on a pink plastic stool. She yawns while writing an autobiographical essay about an
‘unforgettable encounter.’ She narrates an interview she gave to a journalist associated with
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
41
Southern Wind Magazine and complains about how the journalist’s account distorted
what she said: ‘It read like fiction … At that moment my great image of journalists was
shattered. Just like my image of the police.’ A clear parallel exists between Yaxin’s and
Wang’s first-person accounts of their political awakenings connected to their dissatisfaction with the news media. In interviews, Nanfu Wang has mentioned her own frustration
with the limitations of journalism as one of the reasons for her interest in becoming a
documentary filmmaker. For Wang, the documentary allows her to explore issues involving women’s sexuality more freely by enabling her to take advantage of the autonomy of
first-person accounts to express her uncensored perspective.
Similar to Hooligan Sparrow, Chai Jing’s TED-talk-style monologue Under the Dome
(2015), which deals with China’s environmental crisis, also uses a first-person account
to push beyond the constraints of traditional journalism. Rather than disguise empathy
behind a façade of objective reportage, Under the Dome and Hooligan Sparrow highlight women’s personal relationship to the issues they address. In Under the Dome,
for example, Chai Jing determines to educate the public about the dangers of pollution
because her daughter suffered from a fetal tumor. These films emphasize the importance of thinking through personal relationships and Wang’s intimacy with Ye’s
family draws her into a kinship with her subjects that goes beyond the journalist’s distanced perspective.
As she films Ye’s daughter, Wang learns more about herself as an activist through her
interactions with Yaxin, who typically gazes into the camera lens as she addresses Wang,
confronting the filmmaker with an often disarming candor. For example, Yaxin wears a
Guy Fawkes mask on the back of her head while watching James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2005) on her computer.11 The film and the mask connect Yaxin to a wider Internet
community associated with anti-establishment politics, the exposure of state corruption,
and youthful rebellion. Wang identifies increasingly with her young charge’s sense of
rebellion and attitude toward the authorities. However, even though her mother’s activism
and tense relationship with mass media professionals have made Yaxin politically precocious, Wang also portrays her as a typical child, who enjoys playing outdoors, singing
karaoke and dressing up.
Ye and Yaxin appear to have a close relationship, and, as a mother, Ye says she felt she
had to become involved in the plight of the Hainan schoolgirls because she put herself in
their mothers’ place, sympathizing with the rage they must feel. However, she also is fully
aware of the toll her activism takes on her daughter: ‘I don’t care what happens to me but I
cannot forgive myself for the harm I inflict on my family and my child.’ Throughout the
film, Yaxin courageously supports her mother and accepts the hardships that come with
being the daughter of a dissident. Ye relates one of their conversations: ‘I told my daughter
that in the worst case scenario, we’d be sleeping on the streets. She said to me, “Mom, I’m
fine with sleeping on the streets as long as it’s safe.”’
The last segment Wang films with Ye and Yaxin occurs in the Ye Family Village, where
the activist and her daughter have taken refuge away from the authorities’ harassment. Ye
comments on her own view of her daughter accompanied by family photographs:
My daughter has been living with me since she was born. I often tell her that we share joys
and sorrows. She may have experienced more than other kids would have. I try to let her
learn about our society. She turned out to be much smarter and more sensible than I
thought she was.
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The segment ends with Yaxin pushing a picture of her mother as a bride toward the
camera laughing.
Filmmaker Wang sees these issues reflected back to her as the filmmaker’s family comes
under scrutiny because of her political ties to Ye. The activist’s incarceration for thirteen
days and the Internet campaign to free Ye provide a turning point, since the filmmaker’s
parents call and inform her that government security have paid them a visit. As Wang continues to film in restricted areas, she becomes increasingly guarded about her own activities, suspicious of some of Ye’s supporters, and even more protective of her camera
equipment.
Increasingly, Wang’s situation resembles Ye’s outlaw status.12 Wang’s parents, friends,
and professional acquaintances all fall victim to police scrutiny. The questions the
filmmaker posed to Ye about the impact of her activities on her family now become
part of Wang’s story as well. Just as family sentiments propel women into activism
through empathy with victims, personal relations can make political participation difficult.
First-person politics and transnational feminism
At one point in Hooligan Sparrow, Ye’s daughter Yaxin looks directly into Wang’s camera
and asks, ‘How many people will see this film?’ For Yaxin, as a member of the Internet
generation, the reach of a documentary film may be computed differently and she casually
turns her back on the camera in a dismissive gesture. The Internet brings Ye’s activities
and the ongoing issues concerning violence against women and girls to the attention of
China’s netizens, but feature documentaries such as Hooligan Sparrow that reflect on
the suppression of these activities remain largely out of public circulation in mainland
China. In fact, Ye expressed relief that Hooligan Sparrow did not receive a nomination
for an Academy Award, since she feared the international publicity would draw more
opprobrium from government authorities about her own activities and focus less attention
on perpetrators of sexual violence against women (South China Morning Post 2017). The
balancing act between having an impact on China’s treatment of victims of sexual assault
and making human rights abuses involving feminist activists known to the world community puts Wang in an awkward position as a filmmaker.
Arguably, the low point for mother and daughter in the film comes when they find
themselves abandoned with their possessions – boxes, refrigerator and electric fan –
dumped on a highway [Figure 7]. A supporter, Huang, captures that moment in a
photograph. In an odd twist, that still image becomes the basis for Ai Weiwei’s
gallery installation featuring a physical recreation of their possessions as part of the
New York avant-garde art scene. Ye and her daughter’s despair in China metamorphoses into an aesthetic experience of a distant political reality for a mother and daughter who view the exhibit in New York [Figure 8]. A common sisterly bond may connect
these museum visitors with the women in China or they may see the difficulties these
Chinese women face as alien and remote from their own concerns as women in the
United States [Figure 9]. Nanfu Wang’s depiction of the scene in her film takes on a
surreal quality as she wanders through the gallery considering her own difficulties in
getting images out of China.
This scene also points to contradictions at the heart of Wang’s film as a cultural object
rooted in China that circulates abroad, since it highlights the transformation of pain and
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
43
Figure 7. Photographer Huang’s photo of Ye and her daughter with their possessions abandoned on
the side of the road.
oppression into articles of aesthetic contemplation and consumption. In an interview
about the reception of the film by Chinese viewers living outside of China, Wang mentions
three critiques she encountered. The first chastises her for contributing to a negative view
of China at a point in time when considerable prejudice against the nation and its people
exists. The second censures her for using the film to further her own career since ‘politically-themed films are the ones that mostly win international awards’ (Zeng and Tan 2019,
132). The third defends the Chinese government’s position that allowing for independent
Figure 8. New Yorkers at Ai Weiwei’s exhibition about Ye Haiyan.
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G. MARCHETTI
Figure 9. Nanfu Wang at the exhibition recreating Huang’s photos of Sparrow and her daughter.
voices of dissent would ‘see China plunge into wars and people’s livelihoods become
difficult’ (Zeng and Tan 2019, 132). For Wang, the need to find an avenue for dissent outweighs the suspicion that her film contributes to the exploitation of her subjects in order to
further her own career ambitions. While seeing the objects marking Ye’s homelessness
transported to the New York art world makes Wang uneasy, institutions such as Sundance
that encourage filmmakers to cultivate a particular, personal voice to engage in ‘highstakes’ documentary production do not receive the same type of critical self-reflection
in Hooligan Sparrow.13
In fact, in her film, Wang justifies her role as witness, linking herself as the director with
amateur photographer Huang and celebrated artist Ai through the closing line of the film
in which Wang relates a conversation with Huang over an inverted copy of the highway
photograph: ‘He told me when you are repressed and defenseless the only thing you can do
is document the atrocities.’ Indeed, the US-based Wang does that; however, activism goes
beyond documentation, and the efficacy of her agitprop strategies remains moot. Wang
takes the circuitous route of making a documentary in English partially to avoid
Chinese censorship, while hoping media attention, festival screenings and accolades
from abroad will create an Internet buzz throughout the Chinese diaspora and spill
over into mainland China to stimulate local interest in the film and its subject matter.
The tactic points to the combined pressure of international censure, national networks
of activists and local pressure to change. As the recent case of Jiu-liang Wang’s Plastic
China (2016) that likely contributed to the Chinese government’s decision to stop accepting imports of plastic waste shows, documentary activism can contribute to positive
change, but there is no guarantee (E. Kao 2017).
Chinese women filmmakers, however, continue to struggle with what they can and
cannot say to the world about issues relating to gender and sexuality on screen. The
privacy needed to protect sexual assault victims from further trauma vies with the need
to confront a government inclined to sweep the problem of systemic abuse under the
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
45
rug. What Hooligan Sparrow has to say about the growth of Wang’s own awareness of
herself within the larger drama of the politics of gender and sexuality in China as she
travels outside the country’s borders serves as a first-person account of the frustrations
as well as the hopes of diasporic women filmmakers. Through their documentary practice,
these female filmmakers attempt to make a difference in their countries of origin by positioning themselves as transnational feminist activists.
As these struggles continue, first-person accounts remain vital. A statement made in an
interview Wang did with Antonia Blythe in 2016 speaks eloquently to the #MeToo Movement of 2017–18, especially in the United States:
I feel really grateful that the story has so much response and exposure, especially in the
current time in the US. It saddens me to see now the country that I lived in here is going
through such difficult times as well and how relevant everything is – the right to protest,
the right to information, the right to know. It’s very interesting. (Blythe 2016)
The conversations continue to strengthen feminist political connections across borders.
The case at the heart of Hooligan Sparrow inspired another filmmaker, Vivian Qu, to
make a feature film, Angels Wear White (2017), about the sexual assault of underage
schoolgirls in a beach resort area of China, which was the only film directed by a
woman in official competition at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. The injustice
at the heart of China’s sex-gender system14 continues to reverberate across global screens
in conversation with feminist critiques of violence against women in other parts of the
world.
Within the global cinematic landscape, Hooligan Sparrow serves as more than a portrait
of a single, charismatic activist or an intrepid female filmmaker, it provides an example of
the ways in which first-person documentary draws on the personal experiences of the
filmmaker to create an opening for cross-cultural political dialogue extending beyond
national borders. As Wang’s film travels, telling her own story as a filmmaker as well as
the stories of Ye, her activist comrades, Ye’s daughter and the girls abused in China, it
highlights the importance of harnessing the authority of the filmmaker as both witness
and victim to testify to injustice.
Wang’s film is not autobiographical in the traditional sense. It does not chronicle the
trials and tribulations of her own family, for example. However, this does not make Hooligan Sparrow an outlier within documentary film practice. In fact, Wang keeps good
company within international documentary circles. As Alisa Lebow (2012) points out:
… the ‘I’ is always social, always already in relation, and when it speaks … in the first person,
it may appear to be in the first person singular ‘I’ but ontologically speaking, it is always in
effect, the first person plural ‘we’ … Despite the fact that we believe it to express our individuality, it nonetheless also expresses our commonality, our plurality, our interrelatedness
with a group, a mass, a sociality, if not a society. (3)
What may be most compelling about Hooligan Sparrow is the way in which the first
person singular and plural change throughout the course of the film from a focus on
the feminist arts community to the wider women’s movement in China as well as the
broader network of artists and activists working at the intersection of gender and geopolitics agitating for human rights.
Nanfu Wang dares to insert herself as a woman filmmaker into the larger story of feminism inside and beyond the borders of China, and she compels her viewers to make the
46
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necessary transnational connections between women in Asia and the rest of the world.
Wang’s first-person use of the camera as a mirror points to Hooligan Sparrow’s particular
significance to other feminists within the Chinese diaspora. The transnational circulation
of the film speaks to Chinese women who, like Wang, cross national borders and use the
privilege of their position outside the nation-state to agitate for reforms. The personal
remains political with women’s first-person testimony serving as a vital part of ongoing
efforts for constructive social change globally.
Notes
1. Ye is profiled as ‘Person of the Week’ in the China Digital Times: https://chinadigitaltimes.
net/2018/03/person-of-the-week-ye-haiyan/. See Rudolph (2018).
2. Ye may be best characterized as an advocate for full sexual citizenship for women in
China. For the defining features of sexual citizenship, see Weeks (1998).
3. Wang’s sophomore documentary feature, I Am Another You (2018), about an American
drifter, Dylan Olsen, also includes a dialogic exchange between the filmmaker and her
subject. Born in China (2019), however, takes a more personal turn as Wang looks at the
impact of China’s one-child policy on her own family.
4. At a screening of his documentary, We Have Boots, on 23 April 2019, at the University of
Hong Kong, Evans Chan articulated the difference between the ‘social movement’ documentary, which chronicles and often tacitly supports a particular political action such as the 2014
Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, with the ‘human rights’ documentary, which examines
the suppression of political dissent by the state apparatus through the police, courts, prison,
legislature, and other means.
5. Some examples include Zhang Weimin, House of Spirit (2001); Joanne Cheng, Golden Lotus:
The Legacy of Bound Feet (2006); Angie Chen, One Tree Three Lives (2012); S. Louisa Wei,
Golden Gate Girls (2013). Like Hooligan Sparrow, all of these films portray ethnic Chinese
women writers, filmmakers, and artists through the lens of transnational female filmmakers
educated in the United States or Canada. For more on Asian American women’s documentaries, see Roan (2016).
6. For more on the importance of looking at connections between documentaries and transnational cinemas, see Hess and Zimmermann (1997).
7. For a thoughtful consideration of first-person women’s filmmaking in China, see Yu (2014).
For an example of accented cinema practice, see Yu (2009). For background on Chinese
documentary filmmaking, see Berry, Xinyu, and Rofel (2010), Braester (2010), Chu (2007),
Pickowicz and Zhang (2017), and Robinson (2013).
8. For more on Ai’s feminist filmmaking practices, see Zhang and Xiaoming (2017), and Thornham (2008).
9. Best known for The Cove (2009), an exposé of the brutal killing of dolphins in Japan.
10. For a critical examination of the depiction of Chinese feminism in Anglophone media, see
Ristivojević (2019).
11. For more on how Guy Fawkes became the face of anti-establishment rebellion in postmodern
era, see C. C. (2014).
12. The Guardian published a scene not included in the film that highlights Wang’s growing
paranoia surrounding government surveillance, see Wang (2016).
13. The Sundance application materials define ‘stakes’ as follows: Stakes describes what is at risk
in the story or situation you are trying to tell. High stakes means there is a lot to win or lose,
and that fundamental change might occur depending on the outcome (Sundance Institute,
2013).
14. Many books outline the particular challenges faced by women in mainland China in the postMao era. See, for example, Hong Fincher (2014), Rofel (2007), and Yang (1998), additionally,
for a feminist consideration of women in transnational Chinese spaces.
STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
47
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
Portions of the research for this article were funded by the General Research Fund, Research Grants
Council, Hong Kong, 2019-21 (HKU 17612818).
Notes on contributor
Gina Marchetti teaches courses in film, gender and sexuality, critical theory and cultural studies at
the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Romance and the ‘Yellow Peril’: Race, Sex and
Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (University of California Press, 1993), From Tian’anmen
to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (Temple University Press, 2006), The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema (Temple
University Press, 2012), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s INFERNAL AFFAIRS – The Trilogy (Hong
Kong University Press, 2007), and Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018). Visit the website https://hkwomenfilmmakers.wordpress.com/ for
more information about her current work on Hong Kong women filmmakers since 1997.
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