Nanfu Wang directed and produced the award-winning documentary
Hooligan Sparrow. She was born in 1985 in a village outside Fengcheng city, Jiangxi province, roughly halfway between Hong Kong and Shanghai in southeast China. Her mother and father were farmers who earned extra money as substitute teachers. Busy caring for other farmers’ children, “They didn’t have time to take care of me,” said Wang during a recent interview in New York, where she has lived since 2012.
The highest level of education available in her village was elementary school, which she started at age four. “When I was nine years old, my father sent me to boarding school 60 miles away in the city,” said Wang. When she was 11 years old, her father died and the family couldn’t afford to keep her in school. Her mother encouraged her to learn a trade to support her eight-year-old brother. “My family wanted him to have an education, college, in the future,” said Wang. But she took heart from her late
Not since
Iron and Silk premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991 has a movie based on a memoir about teachers on the front lines of U.S.-China relations come to the big screen. Director Shirley Sun’s mostly-English-language film adaptation of Mark Salzman’s 1986 book in which the author played himself grossed just over $350,000 and was never released in China. It was a film ahead of its time.
What was then a trickle of mutual interest between China and the U.S. is now a matter of daily fascination. Like Salzman, longtime
New Yorker writer Peter Hessler captured his time trying to shape young minds at a teacher’s college in China’s interior.