The Herdsman

In 1980 a wealthy Chinese American businessman comes back to look for the son he left behind three decades earlier. He finds Xu Lingjun on the grasslands of the northwest, where a father in business abroad had been enough to get him labelled a rightist and pushed into life as a herdsman. What made those years bearable was his marriage to Xiuzhi, and more recently his rehabilitation by the Party. When the two meet in Beijing and the father offers him a job at his chemical company in San Francisco, the son answers by telling the story of his own life. Adapted from a novel by Zhang Xianliang, it was Xie Jin’s return to the Maoist excesses he had attacked in The Legend of Tianyun Mountain, this time through male melodrama, and it played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1983.