Enculturation in a Disappearing Culture.

Upon viewing Up the Yangtze, our class was encouraged to think about how enculturation played a part in the film. I feel that the process of Cindy's enculturation was interrupted just as it was beginning. The farming culture she grew up in vanished before her eyes, soaked up by capitalist China's dam, leaving viewers to ask, what is she to be encultured into now?

Cindy has lived with her mother, father, and siblings, seeming to have little interaction with those outside her immediate family. Although she has attended school, she does not seem to have learned the same things as others her age. We are shown video material of other girls on the boat that they and Cindy work on, who refer to her hyegine and characeteristics in almost rude ways. However, viewers sense that the girls know Cindy is different from them not only in her appearance but also in how she deals with her problems in her job and in that, the girls have an understanding of the situation they all play a part in.

Cindy has not learned the skills for what she is now having to do. While she was going to school, she was able to perform the tasks her parents needed her to do. However, when her family learned that they would be displaced by the rising waters, they were thrown into disarray. The parents had no plan as to what to do without their plot of farm-land and the shelter that they owned on it. The girls on the boat note that Cindy does not know how to talk to people or to ask for things. This is true, Cindy has been raised by parents who must scrimp to make sure their children have basic care. Coming from this sort of environment, Cindy is not used to one in which she may just ask for things.

The fast paced way in which Cindy's life is changing leads viewers to believe that she may be able to become involved and even comfortable in the commercial culture of China, and viewers may hope that this happens quickly if she is to survive and help her family as well.