There is a lot about director Yung Chang’s documentary China
Heavyweight that reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel TheGreat Gatsby, and that’s a good thing, because The Great Gatsby is my
favorite book and if Baz Luhrmann screws it up this winter with his big-screen
adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire, I will
find that Australian sentimentalist and I will punch him in the face. But
perhaps that’s not necessarily the point of China Heavyweight, which focuses on
punching and boxing, yes, but moreso on the sad futility of dreams. It’s a
simultaneously invigorating and depressing work from Chang, one which looks
closely at how the Western style of dreaming big can inspire Chinese
youth—perhaps to their detriment.
Boxing was banned in China in 1959 by the Communist establishment because they thought it was too American and too violent; the ban was lifted about 30 years later, allowing boxers like Qi Moxiang to swiftly move up the ranks. As a young boxer, Qi became one of the best in the entire country, but losing a key bout around the time of his father’s death seemingly led to his retirement. Now, at 38 (still young enough that his mother hopes he can just get married already and leave boxing behind), Qi works with mentor Zhao Zhong, who runs a boxing program for youth in China’s Sichuan Province, specifically Huili County. Zhao, with his long hair and goatee, spends a lot of time talking about the parallels and comparisons between boxing and Confucianism; Qi, with his Manchester United track jacket and gelled hair, has a charismatic smile and laugh lines that seem to draw the youngsters in.
And oof, what they're signing up for seems brutal. If you thought the training scenes in boxing classics like Rocky and the recent The Fighter were intense, there's something frightening about those in China Heavyweight: kids getting kicked in the stomach, spinning around gyms until they collapse, rolling around on their heads, consistently on the brink of exhaustion. To say "it doesn't look fun" would be putting things mildly.
But while Qi and Zhao work with a number of different promising students—many of whom wear basketball jerseys for NBA teams like Boston and Sacramento—two 19-year-olds stand out specifically. There’s Miao Yunfei, who dreams of becoming a “boxing king” like Mike Tyson and whose skeptical mother resents that he abandoned high marks at school to fight, and He Zhongli, quieter and less bombastic but equally committed. Both of them want to leave their rural lives behind, instead hoping to travel the world—as best friends, they’re supportive of each other even as their paths bump against each other competitively. Perhaps they're so close because they’re each trapped by the expectations of their parents, whose reaction to their dreams can be summed up by Miao’s mother’s scoffing, “I’ll feel very sorry if your life’s ruined.” Jeez, thanks.
Whereas Miao's mother's bitching seems mostly logical (she worries, mainly, about how he's going to make enough money to eat), He's parents can't stand the bruises on their son or the danger he's putting himself in. Neither set of 'rents seems to care too much about Miao's or He's happiness; that responsibility seems to lie only on Qi's shoulders.
Qi knows, however, that both boys can't be successful, and he has his doubts about each. He doesn't want them to go professional too early, he thinks they both need more training, he worries they're reaching outside of their limits. And yet at the same time, Qi himself decides to come back into the sport with a World Boxing Council championship event, attempting to reclaim the glory of his youth. Who can blame him? He still lives at home with his mother.
What Fitzgerald stressed so hard in The Great Gatsby, though, is that some dreams are not for everyone, and recreating the past doesn't always work out the way you expected. Spoiler! Gatsby doesn't get the girl. Narrator Nick Carraway realizes that perhaps the glitz and glamour of New York City can't fully overshadow its greed and corruption. Similar, of course, is what Tyler Durden so eloquently told his Fight Club followers, that "We've all been raised on television to believe one day that we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't," and that kind of hard truth comes to everyone in China Heavyweight. No one gets what they want. Nothing ends up like they planned. And that kind of staggering disappointment is, sadly enough, reality—it’s what makes China Heavyweight a great documentary and an ultimate bummer at the same time. Tears running down these kids’ cheeks and a broken man grasping at a victory that’s just a bit out of reach, that kind of heavy shit will stick with you.
Nevertheless, China Heavyweight isn't flawless. Though the narrative flows well, there isn't always a clear sense of time, so how many days, weeks or months have passed from one scene to the next isn't obvious. It's a challenge to get a grasp of everyone's names, because the subtitles in the beginning don't explicitly spell them out (sorry, I know that's an elitist first-world problem). And the documentary loses a bit of its steam in the middle as it delves into the Chinese government's bureaucratic response to the surge of interest in boxing, which seems just like a bunch of talking heads yapping at each other. Perhaps that was Chang's point, but it's still unexciting.
Overall, however, China Heavyweight is an intriguing look at how our confident Western belief that we're all special, all deserve to excel, and all will end up as No. 1 at something doesn't translate so well, not necessarily adapting to other cultures as much as we'd like to think. Does that make it useless to dream? Nope. But that not-so-gentle realization of our own smallness does make China Heavyweight a thought-provoking work, a documentary with as much brain as it has brawn.
