Grasslands as transitional spaces of play: Mongol children’s reimagination of the world in cinematic representation

ABSTRACT

This article examines children’s geographies in cinematic representation. It argues that cinematic landscape that intimates what D. W. Winnicott conceives as ‘transitional space’ contributes to a cinematic rendering of the otherness of childhood. Taking the Chinese movie Mongolian Ping-Pong (2005, dir. Ning Hao) as a case study, this article illustrates how the cinematic space of the grasslands is transformed into multiple transitional spaces of play for the Mongol child protagonists owing to the filmmaker’s employment of cinematic landscape, while a ping-pong ball discovered by one of the children becomes their ‘transitional object’. In transitional spaces, the children safely and creatively manipulate cultural resources of diverse scales to understand the social-cultural identity of the ball. Consequently, their unique vision of the world unfolds. The filmmaker’s cinematic treatment reveals his celebration of the children’s creativity. He sympathises that they cannot escape from acculturation once they start formal schooling in a Han-dominated society.

KEYWORDS:

• Transition
• otherness
• film
• ethnicity
• representation
• children’s geographies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Yi Zheng, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Ayxem Eli, Tracey Skelton, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on previous drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Besides the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, there are the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Altogether, there are 55 non-Han ethnic groups in China. They comprise less than ten per cent of the nation’s population but take up over 60 per cent of its territory, mostly in the north, south, and west (Wang 2004).

2 From the late 1970s to 2016, China implemented the single-child family policy. Although rural families could apply for a second child and ethnic minorities could enjoy even looser regulations, ethnic minorities seemed to refrain from having too many children because of the government’s successful propaganda on the benefit of fewer children (Yu 2008). Urga (1991, dir. Nikita Mikhalkov), a Russia/France coproduction set in Inner Mongolia, touches on this issue.

3 ‘Lama’ is a term in Tibetan Buddhism, referring to a spiritual leader or by extension any respectable monk. As the majority of Mongols have converted to Tibetan Buddhism since the 16th century, lamas enjoy high social-cultural status in Mongolian communities (Na 2006).

4 This and other English translations of dialogue in this article come from the English-Chinese bilingual subtitles of the movie. This translation hints at the potential confusion between the ‘ball’ and the ‘game’. In standard Chinese, both the sport of table tennis and the ball used in the sport are known as ‘ping-pong qiu’. Confusion can occur when linguistic translation is involved. It is possible that in Mongolian (the characters speak Mongolian in the movie), there are different words for ‘ball’ and ‘sport’, like in English. Thus, the children’s confusion is understandable.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded externally by the Australian Research Council (ARC) [ARC project number FT110100007] (Migration and Mobility).