Drifting Boat: In Perpetual Search of the Lost Home

Opening with a grandmother-granddaughter at a beach, Drifting Boat contends on the one hand with the unceasing desire to regain the childhood home and on the other, with the permanent disconnect in an alien land. To do this, the film brings the drama down to a domestic level: an old Chinese woman, whose family blends increasingly into America, while she looks back by looking forward to the dream of returning to the mainland. 

Set on New Year’s Eve, Olivia Luying Wang’s 20-minute film showcases this dual desire to connect and to leave through Yingzi (Sarah Gu) and her biracial granddaughter, Wei-Wei (Cassidy Chang-Johnson). News of a friend’s death suddenly brings fresh urgency to Yingzi’s hope to return to China. The linear plot regularly slows down in tune with Yingzi’s thoughts. The pull of the mainland, and all that she has left behind, takes Yingzi away from the present in which, her son (Ke Shi), his wife (Alice, played by Alden McDonald) and daughter have gathered to celebrate the new year. Wei-Wei contrasts with Yingzi’s own child self (Bianca Shang) through a flashback set in mainland China, and thus, creates the image of the new times, apathetic and really rather unrelated to the old times. Time goes on, it appears to lament. Childhoods regenerate, and all that was past become irrelevant. 

A certain tension exists between Yingzi and Wei-Wei and Alice on a domestic level based on cultural differences that at times threatens to derail the balance with the narrative’s focus on Yingzi’s longing for her home. Yingzi does not care for Alice’s interference in the cooking. Wei-Wei’s rudimentary Chinese is a reminder of Yingzi’s continuing loss, but it is also a reconfiguration of Yingzi the person into Yingzi the (increasingly obsolete) grandmother. 

Yet in the final scenes, a kind of reconciliation begins to develop. Wei-Wei shows interest in Yingzi’s past, thus partially resolving for Yingzi the simmering familial conflict. The film returns to the shores of the opening shot. While a paper boat set on the water drowns somewhere in the strong waves, Yingzi remains. A drifting figure searching for the shores of home across the water. 

Watch Drifting Boat Short Film Trailer