Train questions

Zhou Yu’s Train, 2002 dir. Sun Zhou

  1. What does Zhou Yu want? What larger issues are brought to light by way of her indecisiveness and dilemma between two men in love with her? 周渔到底想要什么?她在两个不同的爱她的男人之间徘徊不定,说明了什么更大的文化问题?
  1. Why does she at one time slap Chen Qing’s face after he tells her not to push him to publish his poetry? How do you compare his attitude to poetry to Professor Jiang’s to music in Together? 周渔为什么打了陈清一个嘴巴?她对陈清有什么不满意?陈清对诗歌的态度跟《和你在一起》中姜老师对音乐的态度有没有可比性?
  1. Which of the two men more represents success in the post-socialist China? Why does Zhou Yu find that none of them is good enough for her? 她的两个男人谁代表后社会主义时代的个人成功?为什么周渔觉得对她来说两个人都不是很理想?
  1. The title highlights Zhou Yu’s travels rather than her male lovers; in what way do her travels define her as a person more than the men she enjoys spending time with? She hopes something happens in her travels; what happens? 电影的标题突出了周渔在两个男朋友之间的往返奔波;很明显她的旅途比她的目的地还要重要。她对爱情的追求给她带来了什么?
  1. What qualities attract Zhou Yu to Zhang Qiang the veterinarian and what qualifies Chen Qing as her lover? To what extent are the identities of the two men products and results of seismic social change in China moving from a spiritual culture to a material one? 对周渔来说,陈清和张强代表了什么品质?中国社会从一个精神文明到物质文明的转型给两个男人带来了什么命运和机遇?
  1. Why is Zhou Yu attracted to Chen Qing? Is it his poetry (in which she is a goddess and personifies beauty and art) or his identity as a poet whose uses of language give meaning to a world that is recalcitrant and indifferent to human existence? 周渔为什么觉得陈清更有吸引力?陈清的诗歌还是陈清本人给这个冰冷的现实社会带来意义和目的?
  1. Something is real because we choose to value it; by that token, is Zhou Yu delusional or real taking frequent trips of several hundred miles between Chongyang (in Hubei Province) and Sanming (in Fujian Province) to see Chen Qing, which the train conductor says only merchants and businessmen do for money? Explain. “说有就有,说无就没有了”。如此说来,周渔是疯子还是正常人,常常从福建三明坐火车去河北的重阳去看陈清?机车张说只有商人才这么跑来跑去。
  1. One of the preconditions for art is the dissatisfaction on the part of the artist with the real world in which people make a living by doing such meaningless things as castrating pigs; to what extent is this true in the case of Chen Qing? What does he do, where does he go after being demoted from being a librarian? 对某些人来说,对现实的不满是艺术家的创作灵感。如此说来,周渔是否很明智去鼓励陈清发表自己的诗变成一个成功的诗人?
  1. What does Zhou Yu do to make a living? How does her job influence her choices in life? Why does she break the vase that Zhang Qiang wants to purchase from her, refusing his money and ownership? Who owns her at the end when she dies in an accident? 周渔靠什么为生?她的工作给她的生活带来什么样的影响?在火车上她为什么把一个张强要买的花瓶砸碎了?死时她是自由的吗?
  1. What does Zhang Qiang say when Zhou Yu asks him to read her palm and tell her fortune? What does she do when told that something is unreal when one ceases to believe in it? 当周渔让张强给她看手相算命的时候,张强说了什么?张强告诉她信则有,不信则无之后,她做了什么?
  1. Create a psycho-narration (no less than 100 words) for this clip, either as (1) Chen Qing, (2) Zhou Yu, or (3) third-person omniscient narrator “granting readers the most access to characters’ thoughts and feelings.  … The base word omni means “all,” and scient means “knowing,” so omniscient roughly translates to “all knowing.”