Unsettling the Spatial in Identity Construction: Mediating Homecoming from Homeless Shanghai to Dystopian Dongbei in The Postmodern Life of My Aunt

Since China’s economic transformation of the 1990s, Dongbei has been suffering a slowing economy and decreasing population. Many Dongbei natives have migrated to other cities for a pursuit of better opportunities for life. Dongbei has often existed in the narratives in the recent past as a forgotten place in globalized China. Drawing on cruel optimism and critical dystopia theories, this chapter brings a close spatial analysis to both Shanghai and Dongbei, and the journey from the cosmopolitan centre Shanghai to a deteriorating city Anshan in Dongbei in Yima de hou xiandai shenghuo (The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, Ann Hui, 2006). Through examining the strategic spatialization of Yima’s hope and despair, this chapter argues that unsettling the spatial allows Yima to reconsider her identity and subjectivity in the postmodern world. The identity is negotiated and constructed through competing discourses of optimism where present is considered as ongoing and pessimism whose present is considered as stagnant. The film challenges the concept of time and progress that is paramount to postmodern identity. Yima resists the conventional imagery projected onto the centre/periphery divide in postmodern narratives thereby reclaiming a new postmodern identity defined by unsettled spatialisation as the temporal ‘other.’