Teach A Man To Sell Fish …

My research on 1980s Guangzhou led me to the discovery of a 1984 Chinese film called Yamaha Fish Stall (雅马哈鱼档). It’s a story about a trio of young people who start a fish stall in early 1980s Guangzhou, just as economic reforms were encouraging many people to start their own businesses (although judging by the way the main character, Ah Long, dresses and some of the hilariously bad English subtitles on the DVD, you would swear there’s a “Guangzhou Gigolo” subtext running through the movie). The film was a big hit, in part because it was an accurate depiction of early 1980s Guangzhou, and in part because it advocated for the economic reform policies and showed the results that could come from them.

Unfortunately, I was only able to find little fragments of the film online, and there’s no English subtitles in any of them. If you are interested in getting a glimpse what life was like in my hometown during the early years of my childhood, as well as a chance to keel over laughing at the unintentionally dirty subtitles (we’re not entirely sure about the “unintentional” part), I’d suggest buying the DVD.

The thing that led me to the film in the first place was an interview in one of my books with the author of the short novel upon which the movie was based. In it, he discusses the inspiration for the characters, the societal changes that were going on when the novel was written, and the impact of the film. Here’s a translated excerpt:

Yamaha Fish Stall was created against the background of the rapid development of Guangzhou’s private enterprises after economic reform and opening up.

After the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party, Guangzhou was a step ahead in reforms. Guangzhou’s private enterprises began developing very rapidly. My deepest impression was that Guangzhou’s streets were lined with peddlers selling T-shirts, socks, umbrellas, shoes. There were many peddlers. Even though the streets seemed very messy, they also conveyed a very vibrant feeling.

You couldn’t see this kind of scene before. Guangzhou may be the land of fish and rice, yet you couldn’t buy fish here. Back then, each family had several fish stamps per year, and still it wasn’t guaranteed that you would be able to buy fish. Even if there were any for you to buy, it was salt-water fish or dried fish. Back then, you would be thrilled to be able to just buy a couple dace. …

After reforms and opening up, control on fish prices were loosened up and you could buy fish anytime. At the time I was living in the dormitories of Guangzhou People’s Hospital on Bailing Road. Next to the dorm there was a market, where people sold fish, roast geese, and there was a hair salon. It was all very bright and colorful. Among all those stalls, the most interesting was the fish stall, because the stall owner rode a motorcycle. On the back of the motorcycle was a water tank, which he used to transport fish to the stall. I still remember that his motorcycle wasn’t a name brand like Yamaha, but rather a brand made in Chongqing. By today’s standards, that fish stall couldn’t be simpler. It was just a simple piece of colorful tarp with bamboo poles on the sides and a fish hanging from it as advertising. The fish was still alive and kept flapping its tail. This showed that society was slowly changing. Overall, society as a whole was beginning to become vibrant, and people’s state of mind was vastly improved as well. …

The inspiration for the main character Ah Long was one of my students. … One day I was walking along the street when suddenly someone tapped my shoulder from behind. I turned around and looked, and it was one of my students from back when I was teaching in high school. This student didn’t look like any special and didn’t carry himself well. He said, “Mr. Zhang, I haven’t seen you in a long time.” I asked him what he was doing now. He said, “I’m doing pretty well. Let me take you out for dimsum.” I tried to decline, but he said, “Mr. Zhang, you have to go. Let me take you to the Eastern Hotel for dimsum.” In 1983, the Eastern Hotel was not somewhere that ordinary citizens could go, and to be honest I hadn’t been there. So I asked him whether he had struck it rich. He told me this: “I’m living like a human being now.” That had a big impact on me, so I went with him to the Eastern Hotel for dimsum. We talked over tea, and it was then that he told me he had started his own private business.

I was this student’s home-room teacher. He used to have a problem: His conduct wasn’t very clean, his performance wasn’t good, and he didn’t do well in school. But I still was very attentive toward him. I asked him what kind of work he was doing now, and he said he was selling fish. He said he could make up to 300-some yuan a month selling fish. Good heavens! At that time my salary was just 80-some yuan, and his income was four times mine. He said he was very grateful for my kindness toward him in the past, so that’s why he wanted to treat me to dimsum. He told me some of his life experiences. At the time I thought, “This wayward kid has found a proper path, become a private entrepreneur selling fish, found a career, and found a pretty good situation for himself. To use his own words, he was living like a human being now. So I was very touched.

Actually, he represented the majority of the people who were starting private businesses. These young people’s way of thinking isn’t too high. To use my student’s words, for them this is scrounging a living. But human beings — if you can give them work, a legitimate job — generally will strive upward. Human beings can change. People don’t want to do improper, immoral things; it’s only when they have no other way out. The problem was that our society didn’t provide such a platform. That’s why once the economic reforms and opening up were implemented, many people changed.

… 

Before I wrote Yamaha Fish Stall, I had already published a lot of work. … Because I was publishing a lot of fiction at the time, my work was often published in the newspapers. … Although there were a lot of people submitting their work, my submissions still were often published, such as essays, short stories, one-act plays. … I drew upon my real-life inspirations and wrote Yamaha Fish Stall as a short novel.

Yamaha refers to the motorcycle, with a equipment box on the back. My thinking is relatively liberated. Even now I think my thinking was even ahead of the young people at the time. Liberation of thought is very important to a writer. So why use Yamaha? I was thinking: One, this name sounds good, very unusual, very strong. Second, Yamaha motorcycles is a foreign business. In our reforms and opening up, what we are doing is bringing in things from outside. Later, when we were making the movie, a well-known veteran editor reviewed the script and said the title won’t work. But I insisted that it would. I said you can edit the story, but the title cannot change. So in the end they kept the title. …

The draft of the novel was about 6,000 characters, and I submitted it to the Yangcheng Evening News. A well-known editor at the newspaper wrote me a letter after he read it and asked me to go to his office to discuss it with him in person. He said this story was about a fresh topic and full of life. However, the Yangcheng Evening News only had four pages for submitted content, and to run the entire 6,000-some characters would take up an entire page. So he suggested that I shorten the draft. I asked if it would be possible to run it on an entire page. He said, “You’re not famous. How can we give you an entire page?” … He suggested I condense the story to 3,000 characters. But I felt if I took out that much, the story would lose its flavor. He gave me a few days to think it over. A few days later, he wrote me a very long letter. I was so moved; he was such a dutiful editor. His handwriting was very neat, and he wrote about six or seven pages. His letter said that my view was correct, that to turn 6,000 characters to 3,000 will leave only the skeleton, without flesh or blood, without meaning. He suggested I turn this into a medium-length novel and submitted to the publishing house, otherwise such a good subject would be wasted.

After returning to campus, I collaborated with one of my students and turned Yamaha Fish Stall into a medium-length novel and submitted it to Flower City magazine. Later this novel received the inaugural Flower City Literary Award, and Flower City magazine’s readership base was very large. An executive from Pearl River Films saw this novel and said it was very good.

At the time, Zhang Liang was a nationally known directory. When he saw this novel, he said I should turn it into a movie script because they would like to make it into a movie. Later, Pearl River Films put us up in their guest house to let us turn the novel into a script. We stayed for about a month, and the script was approved after only one round. It went very smoothly.

Zhang Liang’s thinking was very liberated, very innovative, and he embraced new things. He suggested that this movie should be as authentic as possible, so we should use real independent shopkeepers as actors. … Only the main character Ah Long and one other role used professional actors; everyone else was an amateur.

In using amateur actors, I felt Zhang Liang was very brave, very bold. This was no simple matter. What if they didn’t do a good job and ruined the film? So everyone was still a little worried at the time. These amateur actors received one week of training. During the shooting, usually the director showed them how to do something, and then they just went along by feel, and in the process, they showed their authenticity.

…

After Yamaha Fish Stall was released, most people’s reaction was pretty good. They held a film festival at Beijing at the time, and we showed this movie at Beijing University. It played nonstop from 7 p.m. one night to 6 a.m. the next morning. After the movie, many of the leading figures and famous directors on the Beijing movie scene, about 200-some people, all stood up and applauded for a long time. … They said they had never seen a movie so full of life..This movie reflected our lives, our time. This story, these things were happening in Guangzhou. At that time Beijing had not yet had such scenes. Upon seeing this movie, they said it was as if they could smell the stench of Guangzhou’s fish. They joked that it would be great when you can smell that in Beijing as well. More importantly, the movie let them experience something — economic reforms and opening up. Back then the slogan was there, but there still weren’t many tangibles and the people didn’t have a deep impression of reforms and opening up. But movies are imitative, and this movie gave people a strong experience. At the film festival, Beijing University students said, “Guangzhou’s present is our future. We love this kind of life.”

…

Later this movie was even selected as one of the 100 most influential movies in the history of Chinese cinematography. … Why? Because it was very representative. It was the first movie to reflect reforms and opening up and acted like a mile marker. Looking at it today, this film also had another special quality — it reflected the lives of the Cantonese people during reforms and opening up in the early 80s. … To understand life in Guangzhou in the 80s, to understand their attitudes toward life, you have to watch Yamaha Fish Stall.

…

Of course, there were dissenting opinions about the film at the time. Some said this movie was about money, and what is money? It’s the source of all evil, and that this was a revisionist film. This showed that at the time people’s way of thinking hadn’t changed completely yet. I felt that such opinions were normal at the time, because people’s views were still relatively traditional.

For a piece of work to be able to illicit such a big reaction from the audience and leave a deep impression, it’s because of one of two reasons: One, it really is a classic, such as War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, and such. Second, some work can’t qualify as classics, but they were created at certain key turning points in history and carried a big message. Yamaha Fish Stall became such a hit because it was created at such a turning point — the key moment in China’s shift from planned planned economy to market economy.