[found] documentary reflections

I used to tease my mom for enjoying documentaries so much. They were, aside from the occasional reality TV show, her go-to forms of film entertainment. We laughed about how she chooses to indulge in them while I would only watch them if I were forced to so for a class. But like mother like daughter, I'm discovering that my enjoyment in documentaries is being kindled as well.

I watched Found recently. There is something about the rawness of these unadorned footages that is quietly moving and eminently intimate. In the words of Zach Loveall fromThe Michigan Daily,"Sometimes all you need for a captivating story is a camera pointed at a person going through an important event, no embellishment is required." With all dramatic effects and extravagant filters set aside, the plain telling of another's narrative and the undecorated depiction of reality is sufficient as art. Perhaps at the end of the day art does imitate life and life in its raw simplicity and wild complexity, is sufficient as art.

In the documentary, three adopted American girls (Lily, Sadie, and Chloe) who are related by blood found each other through an online platform. Together, they embarked on an unravelling of their lost history by connecting with Liu Hao, a genealogist who takes on the task of helping the girls search for their biological parents. Eventually, they travelled across the world together to reconnect with the place that they were born in.

Spoiler alert, none of them did find their biological parents in the end. But it is the in-between pilgrimage — the intricate emotional journeys and small reconstruction of the inner worlds that the individuals went through — that felt more important.

Over the past year I have grown increasingly curious about Asian diaspora. How we originated from the same place but come to be dispersed across a myriad of different locations — what becomes of us as we depart from our motherland?

Right on the cusp of me finishing elementary school, my family left China. The years I have spent on either lands each occupy about half of my life and my growing pains spread out almost evenly across these two distinct geographical locations. My overall impression of the cities remained honey-dipped with childhood simplicity, until my revisit last year. Coinciding with the eruption of the pandemic, I lingered long enough on this familiar-yet-strange homeland so I could no longer remain as an observer of the rushing crowd but to join as a participant. A cultural re-shock was encountered, in an, Oh, there is so much more beyond the parameters of what I have defined to be normal, kinda way.

The cultural tapestry and the rush of crowds felt familar, but I was a stranger wandering among the recognizable streets. It felt like parallel universes, a myriad of passengers capturing alternative lives that I could have possibly been living instead. In moments like these I experienced a fraction of what the girls might have felt — a wonderment at the arbitrariness of fate and the butterfly-effect process that has shaped us into who we are.

I wonder if they feel a longing for a motherland that is in their blood but not their memory, a curiosity for an entirely different life that they might have otherwise known. I wonder how it felt for them to walk through the completely foreign streets and know — this could have been home.

To what extent do our experiences become a part of who we are us? Our world views are invariably shaped by everywhere we’ve ever been and everything we’ve ever walked through. Perhaps every geographical space I have temprorarily resided continues to inhabit inside a part of me. Each one of us nevertheless remains as a story in the writing, unbounded by the geography nor circumstances within our past.

I wonder if I might have ended up alright, even if the dominoes did not tumble in the exact alignment that led me to where I am today. But despite how seemingly arbitrary life is, perhaps all of it unfolded just as it was meant to.

At one scene, the father of Chen receives the news that Lily is not actually biologically related to them. He tries to look away from the camera nonchalently, but the camera nevertheless captured a glimpse of the uncontainable sorrow spilling over at the edge of his eyes. While the girls reconcile with the bittersweet sentiments of retracing to their history of being abandoned, the other side of the story portray the biological parents who unwillingly gave up the children they held dear to.

Larger societal forces like socioeconomic statuses and the Once Child Policy in China have the power of completely rewriting the tragectory of an individual's plotline. I recall a book I have read, Little Fires Everywhere, where a story of a mother and her abandoned-then-adopted child is captured. In a scene, Mrs. Richardson considers the complicated situation faced by Bebe Chow, an immigrant mother fighting over the custody of her child, and how she should respond if she was to be confronted with it. Unable to conjure up a neat solution, she decides instead that it is something that she would not have let happened to her in the first place, simply by making better choices along the way. Yet as the omniscient readers understand at that point, it is not possibly as simple as that. The world is far from perfectible and we find ourselves in the nebulous gap between the polarities of right and wrong. Sometimes the only choices that remain before us are ones that invariably lead to heartache, in one way or the other.

Desipte the magnitude of these inevitable forces, hearing from the other side of the story nevertheless brings one a sense of solace. In the scenes to follow, Chen sister pours jugs of honey for the girls to take home as the most down-to-earth gesture of amiability that their family could offer. After departure, Lily reflects upon the moment in realization that perhaps her parents were just as unwilling to give her up as Chen family and their daughter.

I'm invited to ponder upon numerous more things:

The invisible and irreplaceable ways others in our lives has shaped us — the way the nannies tenderly cared for the adoptees during their earliest days.

The power technology has to enable possibilities and rekindle lost connections — how the girls found each other in the first place through web platforms.

The way we resonate with the narrative of another — how Liu Hao ponders upon her own poignant history with the One Child Policy and systemic sexism to empathize with the experience of the girls.

The fact that an individual is not reduced one happenstance — how the girls, with their vibrantly distinct personalities and the loving relationships that surround them, are not defined by their experience of being adopted.

The family that we found in one another — how the adoptive parents cherish and nurture their daughters in a way that eclipses the definitions of biological bond.

In truth, I have never been one to binge TV shows nor watch an excessive amount of movies, mainly because it takes quite a bit of emotional energy to immerse myself into a story. In other words, I can't help but put to paper what is lingering on my mind after I watch something. This generally makes me watch a lot less because it's kinda a lot of work.

But it seems worthwhile to be doing this anyway — capturing what — so here are my scattered reflections after watching the documentary Found.

At the end of the day, the intricate workings of the world that we have constructed and the world that we inhabit will continue to be a subject of fascination for me. I appreciate anything that allows me to glimpse into a hue on the spectrums of human experience that I might not have otherwise known.