My Dear Miss Blatch

A filmmaker’s discovery of his great grandmother’s century-old letters inspires a journey to China to find the missing half of the conversation. My Dear Miss Blatch is a feature length documentary currently in development, and was awarded by a US Department of State Fulbright Scholarship to China in the field of history.

In this scene select, Eric (filmmaker) tracks down his great grandmother’s classmate’s grandson (Zhonghua) on the outskirts of Guangzhou, the largest megacity in the world. Together with a local historian, they explore the Hu family’s deteriorating home and archives. While proud of the intergenerational legacy that he inherited, Zhonghua, now 80 years old, faces a crossroads as he is no longer able to carry the torch himself.

Photographs:

Synopsis:

Hu Dongchao engineered hundreds of miles of China’s earliest railroads and left behind many tangible legacies from his life, but when I stumble upon a dusty box of his century-old letters in my attic, I discover a fragment of history that may soon vanish entirely. These letters, sent to my great grandmother Nora Stanton Blatch when they were Cornell University classmates in 1905, are a spark of inspiration that lead me to travel to China to uncover the story that these two extraordinary individuals shared.

Hu’s gracefully handwritten letters from 1906 draw me in with their firsthand depictions of the crisis gripping his country and the promise of its then nascent railroad system. The Chinese government commissioned Hu to carve the Sichuan-Hankou Railroad through the vast mountains encircling Sichuan Province. Hu needed all the trained engineers he could muster -- after all, the Chinese have a saying, “The road to Sichuan is more difficult than the road to heaven.” He saw great potential in Nora, who outperformed most of her all-male classmates and graduated to become the first female civil engineer in the United States. Hu was looking not just to modernize his country technologically, but also socially and politically, and on that front Nora had another appeal -- she was an active suffragist and women’s rights organizer.

Just after graduation in 1905, ambitious 22-year-old Nora received Hu’s invitation to join his engineering team in China. “The reason why I asked you to go over is this: in the first place there is a big field for civil engineers because railroads are being built in all directions in China now; in the second place, I am proud of a woman engineer who is a classmate of mine.” Hu knew that Nora was going to become the first female civil engineer in the United States. Nora ultimately declined Hu’s invitation, but the completion of Hu’s assignment would soon be frustrated by problems much bigger than recruiting engineers.

Sichuanese people are known for a temperament as spicy as their cuisine, so the abrupt nationalization of their locally financed Sichuan-Hankou railroad sparked a chain reaction of rebellions that culminated in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution which toppled the government and brought an end to two thousand years of dynastic rule in China. This major turning point thrust Hu Dongchao and fellow engineers into the center of Chinese history and into years of tumult. It would be another century before this famously difficult railroad was finished in 2012.

Without Nora’s half of their correspondence, I’m left with so many burning questions. Eager to learn more, I set out from New York to the sultry southern Chinese megacity Guangzhou, to track down her letters and complete the conversation. Through a little sleuthing and a lot of luck, I learn that Hu’s descendants still live in his classic home in the historic Huangpu Village. The Hu Family Ancestral Hall sits just across the street and the nearby Huangpu Village Cultural Museum features a statue Hu.

My first phone call with 80-year-old Zhonghua, Hu’s grandson, doesn’t go so smoothly. “Hello, my great grandmother is your grandfather’s classmate...” I say in non-native-accented Mandarin, to which he replies in his own Cantonese-accented Mandarin, “No thanks,” and promptly hangs up. I send him a photograph of his grandfather that he had never seen before, which I found in the Cornell University archives. He realizes I’m for real, and admits he had originally thought I was a scammer. These interstitial moments of encountering cultural boundaries and miscommunication appear throughout the documentary to humanize characters and ground my adventure in humility.

We finally meet in person and Zhonghua is intrigued by his grandfather’s letters, but the joy of our new camaraderie turns into dismay when he reveals that the vast majority all of his grandfather’s records - including my great grandmother’s half of the letters - were destroyed in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, at his own hands. During the hysteria of the time, anyone associated with Americans could be branded a “counter-revolutionary” or a “capitalist roader,” which could justify a death sentence. With historical preservation pitted against self-preservation, I understand his decision. Sorting through the tattered pages of what remains from Hu’s personal writings, I’m overwhelmed with grief at what has already been lost and begin to fear that this could one day happen to Nora’s legacy. (this scene is portrayed in my work sample).

Zhonghua hung this newly found, handsome graduation photo above the ancestral shrine in his old home. It’s deeply fulfilling for me to help the Hu family recover a small piece of their own history, and I now recognize that investigating history is hardly just a past-tense endeavor. While Zhonghua can’t recall seeing this photo of his grandfather before, he vividly remembers seeing Nora’s photo from when he was 9 years old, because, in his words, it was so strange that a white western woman had a Japanese hairdo. This is no figment of an aging imagination. His grandfather’s letters ask Nora for two photographs, one to keep for himself and one to send home to his friends and family. Zhonghua is still sharp, and I’m grappling with a living history now.

One line from Hu’s letters still sticks with me - “The social as well as the political conditions of China now are quite different from that which the Americans and Europeans heard from visitors, books or newspapers. The Chinese pursue a different civilization from yours.” I am struck by the feeling that this quote is just as true in 2019 as it was in 1906. This documentary will use Hu’s experience as a lens to understand the civilization that China pursues today.

Looking back, finding these letters in my attic feels like throwing a snowflake off the top of a snow-packed mountain. The avalanche that formed has taken on a life of its own. After returning from China in 2015, the Cornell University archivists helping me conduct research tip off the Alumni Communications Department about Nora’s forgotten story. They add a small blurb to the alumni newsletter about how the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) rejected Nora’s membership application in 1916 purely because she was a woman. This newsletter makes its way to the President of the ASCE, who happens to be a Cornell alum. Mortified by this historic injustice 99 years earlier, without hesitation he posthumously elects Nora to ASCE fellow status, their highest honor.

Back in China, as I cultivate a new relationship with 80-year-old Hu Zhonghua, we plan out a durable preservation of Hu Dongchao’s legacy. Having recently moved to a generic highrise apartment through a government-sponsored relocation arrangement, he reluctantly leaves behind his home of four generations that now languishes under neglect. At the same time, other historic buildings throughout Huangpu Village are being raised and replaced with ugly modern architecture that more closely resemble prisons than a home. By following my collaboration with Zhonghua to reverse the tides of destructive urbanization, this film grabs the opportunity to spread appreciation for protecting the architectural heritage.

Each wave of this seemingly unstoppable avalanche, to continue with the metaphor, makes a chapter of this documentary, and each has its own distinct film aesthetics. The deeply intimate process of building a relationship with Hu Zhonghua, for example, is seen from a first-person perspective with me behind the camera, often breaking the 4th wall with my voice. The celebration of Nora the Tunnel Boring Machine, on the other hand, uses a more conventional documentary style inspired by the History Channel’s Modern Marvels and includes computer graphics to depict the technical details of engineering project. This eclectic approach to a documentary is inspired by 306 Hollywood, which mobilizes a dozen genres to tell a story that is both real and magical.

What better way to celebrate intergenerational legacies than to realize what the earlier generations dreamed of but never got to experience for themselves? Nora never got to travel to China and Hu never got to ride the Sichuan-Hankou Railroad. In 1953, almost a half century after she met Hu, Nora wrote in her unpublished memoirs, “If I had gone to China and survived, I would have no doubt become a writer for everything blew up at that point... I would have been sitting with my Cornell diploma on a hill in Sichuan, not speaking a word of Chinese. I always wanted to go, but there was the war, and after the war always a question of time and money. Now here I am at 74, with sufficient of both.” Traveling to China and riding the Sichuan-Hankou railroad has been the greatest journey of my life, and I feel incredibly motivated to share this story.