An Animated Portrait of Life with the Ghosts of Children

In the countryside of China’s Anhui Province, where Weijia Ma’s father grew up, much of life centered on the ponds. There, women washed vegetables and did laundry; little kids played in the water, swimming and catching fish. Ma grew up in a small nearby city and returned every year for the Chinese New Year and the Qingming Festival, a spring day when people honor their dead loved ones, to see her family and to sweep the graves of their ancestors. The water was also where life disappeared: old villagers told her stories about unwanted little girls being abandoned by rivers and ponds.

In her film “Step Into the River,” the thirty-one-year-old animation artist vividly re-creates a village not unlike the one from her childhood memories, possessed of rustic beauty and evoking a poetic, but not distant, past: a yard with line-dried laundry; a goldfish-shaped kite flying high in the sky; the sound of squeaking branches as wind passes through a field. But the two little girls at the center of the story have dark memories of the early events that have shaped their childhoods. One of them, born after the death of a brother, is strong-willed and outspoken; the other, rescued by her adoptive father after her biological parents left her to drown, is shy and reserved. Both of them find themselves drawn to the water. By the director’s choice, the characters in the film speak unaccented Mandarin. “I didn’t place this story in a specific location,” Ma told me during a recent interview, “because this village could be anywhere.”

Ma is fond of the river as an image and as a metaphor. To her, a river signifies the loss of a link to one’s home town and, with it, the erosion of a people’s kinship with a land. She quoted the philosopher Heraclitus—“No man ever steps to the same river twice”—to explain how a river can represent a state of flux. One might think of a river as a fixed location, Ma explained, “but it’s ever changing.” She likens contemporary China to a river: “In some ways, there are values and cultures that are constant, but at the same time the environment we live in is changing faster than we can catch up.” In a fast-changing world, a river also functions as “a container of history,” Ma said. This expression reminds me of the Chinese literary tradition of huaigu, in which people visit historic sites and contemplate the past. “You can stand there and think about things that happened before. To think about the disappeared girls . . . they may be nameless and forgotten, but they existed once.”

In the mid-nineteen-nineties, when Ma was six or seven, a relative let a little-mentioned fact slip: before she was born, her parents had a son, who died young. Ma sensed that this was an unwelcome topic in her family and didn’t ask or think about it much. But she suspects that the idea took root in her subconscious. She felt the urge to live up to her late brother—tragic loss often leaves behind an aura of perfection—and she felt she had to be a “satisfactory replacement.”

In the countryside where Ma’s father grew up, people spoke of deceased infants with mysticism and fear, as if they were there to haunt the living. Ma’s film addresses this dynamic, which she sees as a coping mechanism: “The loss of children is too painful to accept.” Some of Ma’s friends have proposed that the souls of infants who were abandoned and then died must have become vengeful ghosts. Ma, however, has a different instinct: “I don’t think they knew what hate is. I think they were full of kindness.”