What does it mean to become diasporic?

Responding to One Day Summer Collapses into Autumn by Jinling Wu

Li Bai’s poem《靜夜思》 “Quiet Night Thoughts” enters at the credits of Jinling Wu’s One Day Summer Collapses into Autumn. 《靜夜思》 is ubiquitous for those of us who are Chinese; painfully canonical in the diaspora. It is often the first poem taught to students, as six-year-olds learn of the melancholia that comes with a longing to return home when you are unable to. 

Recited by our protagonist Lee’s daughter, the poem captures the spirit of Wu’s film. Clinical neuroscientist Lee has just immigrated to Scotland, leaving behind a failed marriage and his daughter. The film follows him on his first day in Edinburgh; an empty flat greets Lee as he makes a stilted phone call to his ex-wife, he drifts through interactions with colleagues, helps a student with her cafe order. What comes across throughout the film is Lee’s love for his daughter, a melancholic thing he carries through the sharp newness of his surroundings. Wu’s film asks: How does one deal with the painful process by which home becomes a figment of the imagination? What does it mean to become diasporic?

Watching One Day Summer Collapses Into Autumn, it’s the silence which suggests the movement towards diaspora. Silence for me means a few things: the absence of noise, but also the emptiness of a space or denial of context. And how silent and grey Edinburgh is here. We are not experiencing Edinburgh as a city, but as the pathway into whiteness. We see this in the soulless lines of the city, the dull white of Lee’s home and workspace. In the abrasive and yet impersonal purple of the sofa, as the white orientation officer tells Lee that “it’s a very friendly city here.” But the silence means much. In the silence of the film’s late-capitalist aesthetics, Lee exists in Edinburgh primarily – and perhaps only – as a worker. In the unspoken strangeness of tea with milk or the implicit “we’re not racist” that follows the orientation officer’s friendliness, he becomes racialised too. Such designations are Lee’s first step into diaspora, as he is spoken for in unfamiliar terms.

To be a member of the diaspora is to be part of a shared history with people you will possibly never know. Thus, Lee’s narrative is necessarily placed in relation to its legacy – both the short history of Chinese-British immigration, and the long history of labour and how it estranges people from their homes. Watching Lee in autumnal Edinburgh, I am reminded of the Chinese legacy of labour migration and its ties to the British. First to the colonies of British Malaya and the United States, as indentured labour on stolen land. Then in the 1950s and 60s, a flush of immigration to the United Kingdom which brought my family to the UK. Maybe it’s because the film is set in autumn that I make this connection. 1958, autumn, the time my great grandfather stepped off a ship in Southampton. He said it was cold on his way to Chinatown, that he stopped in Trafalgar Square to look at the pigeons and the lions. It was probably a quiet grey day, if not because of the pigeons, then because of what London is like in autumn. Or maybe I just crave an association and will use any reason to build a shared history.

We might, then, imagine One Day Summer Collapses Into Autumn as a retelling of Li Bai’s poem. The poem describes a single moment; a person gazes up into the full moon, and has to glance away, overwhelmed by thoughts of home. An identical moment is captured at the end of Wu’s film, as Lee ruminates after a brief call with his daughter and to-be ex-wife at the end of the day.  In Li Bai’s poem, duty to the empire eclipses connections to one’s home. In the film, the nuclear family is a divorce paper away from dissolving, no longer a home for Lee to return to. But where《靜夜思》appeals to ethical duty, this film makes it clear that what is reified now are not ideals, but capital. Prospect theory puts money and love in the same narrative of risk, weighs its odds and finds that money is needed to ensure that love can sustain its existence.

What One Day Summer Collapses Into Autumn brings to the table is the feeling of becoming diasporic in Britain. It is an exploration of what it is to become racialised as whiteness announces itself as your normal, and the quiet violence of that process. My favourite scene in this film is one I find a little awkward, when Lee helps a Chinese student order at a cafe and tells her in Cantonese that “the tea is different here”. There is something in the vulnerability of the situation which prompts Lee to overshare about his daughter. It beautifully fractures the fluidity of the film. I love it because I have been there, have run my mouth countless times with strangers in Cantonese.

It is a social faux pas you make which points to the strangeness that is becoming diasporic, as your language is made foreign and your preferences unintelligible. It is a moment of collective understanding, even as your shared referent is gone or changed.