Xiaodi is a documentary about a Chinese trans teenage girl’s multiple escape attempts from conversion therapy.
Xiaodi herself is so impressive. She has a dead-centre strength, a ‘live free or die’ attitude. She narrates her story in the film through interviews and visits the sites of her escapes. She even stands outsides the conversion camp and shouts insults over the walls to the instructor who beat her. Her defiance puts you in awe.
Also interviewed in the film is Xiaodi’s mum. Her mother fully participated in the transphobia towards her, committing her to the conversion camp and even returning her after her first escape attempt. Now, after it is clear Xiaodi would rather die than be broken by them, she has come to accept her daughter. But the relationship is strained by the damage done. Her mum sits knees tight together, handbag on lap, giving her version of events, as Xiaodi sits off to the side, out of focus, all attention on her phone. She only perks up to correct her mother when her attempts to minimise the abuse and trauma Xiaodi suffered strays into actual falsehood. “We didn’t know,” her mother says about the beatings at the conversion camp. “You did,” Xiaodi says, saying how she brought it up on their first visit to see her.
The betrayal sits between them. Her mother has accepted Xiaodi only as the last option, and her support for her transition is overdue and begrudging. Xiaodi is giving her mother the space to make amends, but tolerates no comfortable lies between them. The film does a good job of striking a difficult balance in its portrayal of her mother. It would be easy to paint her as simply monstrous, given the suffering her actions caused Xiaodi, but it eschews being so reductive. Neither does it forgive her, as though to throw up your hands and shrug, how could she have known? It holds her to account for bad choices she’s made, which caused real harm, and that she should have known better. And yet, it is the eternal issue of mothers raising daughters under patriarchy, in preparing them for the way the world will try to break and bend them, being the very conduit for that breaking and bending. It is an intergenerational pattern that can only be broken when you stand together and fight. And Xiaodi has a bravery for that, and for giving her mother a second chance to stand by her side while she does so.
A really interesting documentary about an extraordinary young girl.