On the anniversary of Hai Zi’s death in 2016, a group of young people from Beijing went to Shanhaiguan to commemorate Hai Zi. I went with them to cover and report. They came from different places, reciting Hai Zi's poems on railway sleepers, hoping to find a spiritual outlet. It was then that I realized Hai Zi was actually from my own town. I also discovered that so many years after his death, many people are still commemorating him.

After I resigned in 2018 and returned home, I visited Hai Zi's former residence. There I met Hai Zi's mother Cao Caizhu, who was then 84 years old. She is tiny, with a kind smile. As we chatted, she suddenly read a poem by Hai Zi and tried to understand them in her way. She and this space touched me.

Hai Zi grew up in rural areas and his parents were both farmers. The names “Hai Zi’s former residence” and “Hai Zi’s mother” are symptomatic of the cult of Chinese literati and contemporary tourism. However, it is usually difficult to see the mother of a deceased celebrity still living in the former residence, receiving masses of visitors in memory of his son, which inevitably brings sorrow to the mother. I was curious as to how she, after 30 years, dealt with the loss of her son and her own life. I tried to understand her, just as I tried to understand my parents to achieve a certain form of dialogue.

I grew up loving stories, novels and films. I started creating poetry and performance art while working, and was exposed to a lot of great independent documentaries and directors. I looked forward to possibilities of film. In August 2018, I quitted, stopped renting an apartment and became an independent artist, which infuriated my parents. I was then making a film about me and my family and returned home frequently to shoot. I had no income and often fell out ferociously with my parents. I couldn't explain what I was doing, and they couldn't understand, either. 

Hai Zi went to Peking University at the age of 15, left home and started writing poetry in college. He was 26 years old when he died, the same age as mine back then. Hai Zi's mother had never read any of Hai Zi's poems before his death and did not even know that “Hai Zi” was her son “Zha Haisheng.” When I saw Hai Zi's mother reading Hai Zi's poems and interpreting them in her own way, I was touched. It occurred to me that my parents would probably never read my poems, nor would they be able to understand them. It was as if there were a thick wall between us, it was so strong that it didn't seem to go away. I felt I had to film Haizi's mother and the 'Haizi residence' where she lived.

During the shoot, my identity as a filmmaker, poet and former media journalist was in flux. Most of the time I was just objectively documenting the life of the poet's mother, but as I became more and more involved in this space, my instincts as a media journalist emerged. Given that we are situated in a society that is rapidly developing materially without any attention to people’s mental states, I started to observe people around her: visitors of varied backgrounds and purposes, the government and the media who are using Hai Zi's fame to develop local cultural tourism, and the poet’s family working in the Hai Zi Cultural Park. All of these things fascinated me greatly and prompted me to think about the poet's mother and this space in varied dimensions.

Initially I considered writing an essay to record my feelings about the space, but I found it difficult to convey what I wanted to do at the time with texts only. Film as a medium is efficient in that it could bring the scene I see directly to the viewer. Thus I returned to the residence several times and started to shoot in November 2018. Now it is in the editing stage.