Up the Yangtze 6.5

This was one of those documentaries where you wonder, how did the filmmaker know to pick this person to cover, and then, how did the filmmaker get access to film this scene – in this case, when the personnel manager fires Jerry, the arrogant loner who is talented but doesn’t fit the Chinese team model. You are left with two thoughts: one, how self-sufficient and satisfactory seems the life of the Chinese farmer before he is displaced by the Three Gorges Dam and “modernized”; and two, how silly the Western (Canadian, I hope) tourists appear and how little they can understand of the China they see. As we had just returned from two weeks in Brazil when we saw this movie, the latter point particularly struck home.