Family Reunion -- Mallozzi films her long-lost Chinese relatives

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December 02, 1999

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HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

By Ken Gewertz
Gazette Staff

Camera in hand, Julie Mallozzi '92 is flanked by the statues outside the Harvard-Yenching Library. Mallozzi is the producer and director of a new documentary film that tells the story of her journey to China. Photo by Kris Snibbe

Julie Mallozzi’s ’92 first full-length documentary film, Once Removed, tells the story of a prominent, highly educated Chinese family and what happened to its members over the course of a tumultuous half-century.

But it is also the story of Mallozzi herself and the improbable tie that connects her with the subjects of her documentary. The first story is the one she wanted to tell. The second story she has told reluctantly, and only out of necessity.

"When I was making the film, people kept saying to me, ‘It’s really a search for your identity and your roots,’ but I said, ‘No. I’m more interested in them and their stories.’ But I had to set the scene. The audience needs to know who I am."

Mallozzi’s maternal grandfather, Wang Shou-Jing, was an important scientist under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime. In 1946 Wang came to the United States to work in the Chinese embassy and brought his family with him, including Mallozzi’s mother, Judy, then 8.

Three years later, when the Communists took over China, the Wang family became exiles. Young Judy Wang grew up and went to Radcliffe, where she fell in love with Philip Mallozzi, a Harvard student. After graduating in 1960, they married and Philip went on to a successful career as a physicist. Their daughter Julie was born in 1970.

When Julie Mallozzi was 7, her father made a life-changing decision. He was at the top of his profession, having just developed a new kind of laser. But rather than pursue further scientific breakthroughs, he decided to fulfill a more deep-seated family tradition of running his own business.

He moved his family to rural Ohio to manage Olentangy Caverns, a roadside tourist attraction. As a child, Mallozzi spent her summers helping her parents guide tourists through the caverns and run a related operation, Ohio Frontierland.

"After my grandparent s died when I was about 13, we lost touch with our Chinese relatives," she said. "Even my mother forgot most of the Chinese she knew."

Following in her parents’ footsteps, Mallozzi attended Harvard, where she concentrated in visual and environmental studies (VES). She learned filmmaking from Robb Moss, the Rudolph Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking, known for his films The Tourist, Riverdogs, and other documentaries. She now works in VES as a teaching assistant.

In 1995 Mallozzi traveled to China armed with a video camera she bought second-hand from a professional wedding videographer. Her plan was to make a film about the Chinese side of her family. Her links with China may have faded, but a few family stories survived, and Mallozzi was determined to learn about and, hopefully, film the reality behind them.

One of these stories involved her great uncle Fei Gong, a prominent scholar and university professor who criticized the Nationalist regime in the early 1940s. The government, threatened by the growing Communist movement as well as the invading Japanese, would not tolerate dissent from its citizens. Fei Gong was persecuted by Nationalist agents, but he refused to be silenced. Eventually, he was kidnapped, jailed, and finally murdered.

Mallozzi wrote to Fei Gong’s daughter, telling her of her plans to make a film about the history of the family. The daughter wrote back, enclosing a 30-page biography of her father, which made the gripping story all the more real.

Life on Film
One of the most poignant moments in Mallozzi’s Once Removed is when Fei Gong’s daughter hauls out an official "martyr’s certificate," issued by the Communist government. Fei Gong died at the hands of the Nationalists, and so the Communists, their enemies, summarily canonized him.

What is ironic is that had Fei Gong lived, he might easily have suffered persecution during the Cultural Revolution. This was the fate that be fell several of Mallozzi’s great aunts and uncles, accomplished scientists who speak in the film about the years lost sweeping floors or languishing in prison, their obvious pain expressed as quiet regret.

In order to film Fei Gong’s story, Mallozzi traveled to Chongqing in western China. She conducted on-camera interviews with university students and found that they still knew about him. She also interviewed one of Fei Gong’s original supporters – an old man dying of lung cancer in a nursing home – who speaks passionately about Fei Gong’s idealistic pursuit of truth.

Mallozzi’s relatives in Shanghai were initially worried about her making the trip to Chongqing. They warned her that she might be kidnapped and sold as a peasant’s wife. Eventually they relented but insisted on sending Mallozzi’s young Chinese cousin Mimi as a companion.

In the film, we see Mimi, a spirited, sharp-tongued young woman, pestering Mallozzi to let her use the camera and urging her to climb a high, rickety scaffold. During a fruitless search for the chemical pool where Fei Gong’s body was supposedly dissolved, Mimi shrugs her shoulders and scoffs, "I’m beginning to think this history isn’t true."

Throughout the film, Mallozzi remains true to her decision not to let the documentary become a vehicle for self-revelation. Her narration is spare and neutral in tone. "I didn’t want to impose emotions on the people I interviewed," she said. As a result, their stories of suffering stand out all the more vividly.

Even when she reports on her own feelings, she does so imagistically, describing dreams she had while visiting China. "I had nightmares practically every night I was there," she said. "I kept a list of them in my editing room and used a few that seemed to work as part of the narration."

Mallozzi said she doubts whether she would have been able to finish the film if not for the support given by VES and by her mentors on the faculty. "Some of them watched it over and over again," she said.

She said that, on the whole, she is happy with the film in its present form. "But I learned so much in editing it that I would have shot it differently if I had it to do over again. I feel it was like my Ph.D. dissertation."

Once Removedwill receive its world premiere tonight, Thursday, Dec. 2, at 6 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), 465 Huntington Ave., Boston. Mallozzi will be present to introduce the film. The film will also be shown Sunday, Dec. 5, at 2 p.m.; Saturday, Dec. 11, at noon; Saturday, Dec. 18, at 2:15 p.m.; and Sunday, Dec. 19, at noon. For further information, call the MFA at (617) 369-3770.