I Play Extras in the Modern World to Feed an Entire Ancient Village

Wang Lianhua is sixty years old, a widow of twenty years from Qingshi Village in the Great Yong dynasty. She goes up the mountain to dig wild greens for her grandson, misses a step, and when she opens her eyes again, iron boxes are darting all over the place, the skyscrapers make her neck ache from looking up, and people on the streets are dressed in a way that’s “shameless.” Clutching her basket, she has only one thought: How can I get home? The family is waiting for me to get the cooking started! Someone presses a recruitment notice into her hand: “Auntie, our film crew needs extras. Meals included, eighty yuan a day!” She can’t read, but she hears the words “meals included” loud and clear. She grabs the person by the arm. “Young man, I can do that job!” On her first day on set, she plays a corpse. The director calls cut, and everyone gets up, but she doesn’t move a muscle. “The director didn’t say ‘that’s a wrap,’ so I can’t move. I’m playing someone who’s stone-cold dead.” The director stares at her for three seconds, then his eyes light up. And so begins the extraordinary life of a sixty-year-old country woman. By day, she’s an extra on modern film sets, playing corpses, refugees, and mothers fleeing famine. Drawing on a lifetime of hardship, she delivers the real thing, going from eighty yuan a day to eight thousand. The industry calls her a “natural-born acting talent.” By night, she returns to ancient times, using the rice, flour, sweet potato seeds, farm tools, and medicine she bought with her earnings to haul her starving family back from the brink. She joins the village widows and elderly in reclaiming wasteland, repairing canals, and fighting locusts and taxes, pulling the whole village back from the jaws of death. No one knows that the old woman who plays the Empress Dowager so convincingly that the crew is ready to kneel before her once served as a respected village elder in another time. And no one knows that the confidence of the young man who ranks first at the county school comes entirely from the hard-earned money his grandmother makes each and every day. She never knew what it was like to live comfortably. But in her old age, she ended up shouldering two worlds.