Ｔｈｅ Ｂｏｎｄ ｂｅｔｗｅｅｎ Ｄａｕｇｈｔｅｒ ａｎｄ Ｆａｔｈｅｒ

Ｌｉ　Ｒｕｉｊｕａｎ

Zhang Mo, age 26, is the daughter of Zhang Yimou and his ex-wife Xiao Hua. Zhang Yimou was shooting a film in Guangxi on March 31, 1983 when he received a phone call from his parents that he had just become a father. Overjoyed, Zhang Yimou named his daughter Zhang Mo.

The baby daughter brought him good luck. Zhang rapidly rose to national and international fame in the 1980s. As cinematographer of “Yellow Earth” (1984), he won a top national honor and an international prize; as an actor and cinematographer in “Old Well”, he won Best Actor at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

Zhang Mos parents divorced when she was seven. The divorce dealt the daughter a blow. Her mother never said anything bitter against Zhang Yimou, but she never figured out why her mother and father did not stay together. And in her heart, the daughter resented her father, for he had not come to see her for five years.

So when the father finally came to visit her in Xian in 1995, Zhang Yimou was amazed to see that her daughter had become a pretty teenage girl. The father tried to hold her hand, but she jerked her hand away. She looked at her father silently and never said a word.

The first meeting after five years gave Zhang Yimou pain in his heart. He wanted to reach out to his daughter. He began to call his daughter from Beijing regularly and talked with her mother frequently on phone about issues concerning their daughter. In the summer of 1997 while directing “Keep Cool” in Beijing, Zhang Yimou asked Zhang Mo to come to spend the summer with him and watch him working at the urban comedy. Her mother thought it a good idea for the daughter to know more about her father and sent the daughter all the way to Beijing. The father did all he could to pamper the daughter. Her heart began to soften toward father. They chatted. Never before did the father and daughter have so much to say to each other.

Zhang Mo graduated from junior middle school in 1999. Zhang Yimou decided to send her to New York for further education. The father paid 35,000 US dollars a year for the daughters study there and he also appointed a guardian to take care of her. The father called the daughter almost every day.

In the winter break, Zhang Mo came back to Xian to visit her mother while Zhang Yimou was directing “Happy Times” in northeast China. Zhang Mo went to the site to visit her father. It was the first time Zhang Mo saw such a tough situation in which her father worked. Tears came to her eyes when she saw her father shudder terribly in the freezing weather.

Zhang Yimou went to visit his daughter at Columbia University in September 2003 when he was in the United States on business. Zhang Mo was a junior student there. The father and daughter were taking a stroll on the campus when the daughter mentioned that she was dating an American. He was one year senior and a major in financial management in the same university. Zhang Mo said he was a very excellent young man. Zhang Yimou was shocked by the prospect of having such a marriage in his family, for he had known that many a marriage between a Chinese and an American ended up in divorce. But Zhang Mo refused to back out. Seeing his verbal persuasion failed to change his daughters mind, Zhang went to see the boyfriend and point-blank asked the young man to break the relationship. The young man refused to oblige. The father decided to stay in American to put a stop to a disaster waiting to happen.

Zhang Mo compromised. She said she would break the relationship and asked her father to return to China. Seeing his strategy had worked, the father went home. But one day, he received a call from a lawyer saying that on behalf of the young man, he asked Zhang to stop interfering with the relationship for it was against law and he would sue Zhang Yimou on behalf of the young man if Zhang Yimou continued to interfere.

Zhang Yimou was astonished at the outright challenge. He called his daughter immediately, asking his daughter “how can you go steady with such a person?” Zhang Mo knew her boyfriend had made a big mistake. She knew he was an American without any idea of the best Chinese way of handling such things. She told her boyfriend that he needed to adapt to Chinese tradition. They decided to adopt a new tactic.

January 2004 saw Zhang Mo and her boyfriend come to China for the Spring Festival. The two went to see Zhang Yimou shooting “House of Flying Daggers” in Ukraine. Seeing Zhang Yimou working in the temperature of 20 degree below zero, the young man bought Zhang Yimou a down jacket. Zhang Yimou was happy with the gift. When Zhang was hospitalized for a serious cold, Zhang Mo and her boyfriend sat with the filmmaker day in day out. The two celebrated Spring Festival with Zhang Yimou and the production crew.

The new tactic won Zhangs heart. Zhang Yimou met the mans parents in October 2004. The would-be in-laws were happy about the prospects of a marriage. In early 2006, Zhang nodded to the marriage and offered to buy the would-be couple a house as a gift. But the son-in-law declined, saying that it was not American tradition. Zhang flew to Los Angeles in May, 2006 and gave the bride away at the wedding.□