Homecoming Myanmar

Abstract

This chapter highlights Taipei-based, Chinese-Burmese filmmaker Midi Z, whose ‘homecoming’ oeuvre includes three fictional films and two documentaries shot at Myanmar’s most (in)famous high-quality jade deposit, Hpakant in northern Myanmar. Reframing precarity from the theoretical framings in sociology and biopolitical theories, I first argue that Midi has explored how the disenfranchised diasporic Chinese subjects gamble on gaining access to other possibilities in life. My focus then shifts to City of Jade (Feicui zhicheng, 2016). Leveraging the notion of ‘risk-taking’ at both the textual and inter-textual levels, with an emphasis on the gendered perspective, I survey how Midi has leveraged a personal, subjective point of view to interweave the struggles of the Zhao family (particularly his brother’s) with those of the male labourers on location.