The story began with a circulated case.The kind of violence that is most easily erased among countless forms of violence and lost to silence.
Two women arrived. Zhu, from Beijing, camera in hand, scanning the surroundings; Weng, the local, exhibiting a kind of lazy detachment and constant absent-mindedness, often complaining about chasing questions that never lead anywhere. They claimed they were following a lead, intent on investigating that one incident everyone found too elusive to articulate.
The outcome?
A failure, of course, as they themselves admit.
The whole endeavor felt like balancing on the crossbeam of a giant seesaw—you could only truly see things from your own position. The lens kept catching on peripheral descriptions and tiny curiosities. They filmed the swaying shadows in the town square; the steam rising from the distillery workshop.
Like being trapped in a loop, the North China Plain rejected their detective script. The camera and notebook quickly veered off their planned track, leaving them in a stalemate, with only rumors that could no longer be pieced together and archives that could no longer be traced: the medicine stashed in the cowshed, the boat and underwater Great Wall in the reservoir, the mud balls in the straw hut, the leftover coal slag. They also collect mahjong tiles, woodblock printing molds, food boxes, scale weights, and other relics etched with the traces of time, piecing together stories from the not-so-distant past with an almost archaeological gaze. The voice of a female announcer echoed, unquestionable: "Beijing is just a distant point, and the Imperial Palace is even smaller than a point."
Finally, they arrived today, in this very room. Even the ducks in the river know: this is just another winter. The stage has been dismantled; only stories remain, and outside the stories, life carries on.
The resulting narrative isn't quite a detective film or a documentary, but a collection of gossip about daily practice. It observes those who occupy the crevices, those "without a proper place," and their art of "poaching" a living using time, opportunity, and cunning. The duo’s work ultimately became a reluctant retrieval: one seeking discomfort in the distance between Beijing and Hebei, the other looking for a personal echo in the stories and objects of her home province. What they filmed and wrote down is not the truth found in archives and cabinets, but the absurd, muddled, and half-true rumors—the kind you, I, and he, in back kitchens, over drinks, or on the field paths, are all willing to chew on and pass around—about how they manage to survive.
People say that yes — it really did happen.