This film invites you to listen to personal accounts from 21 popo (elderly women) in my home village in Southeast China. Topics include childhood, marriage, political movements, the supernatural, and more. These fragmented narrations are interwoven according to emotional affect such as fear, pity, joy, bafflement, and self-demeaning. Everyday life goes on. Cuijuan popo wanders through the changing landscape. Lefen popo is busy with sutra chanting meetings. The village has much to say if its observers give up concepts of young and old, past and present, historic and mundane.
Yu Shuang was born in 1997 in Zhejiang, China. Shuang graduated from Duke University in the USA with a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. She started to participate in Caochangdi Workstation‘s “Folk Memory Project” in winter, 2019 and has been conducting interviews about personal memories and filming the everyday life of her home village, Huangpotan village since.