I haven’t ugly cried from watching a movie in a very long time, but something about sad Chinese drama movies always makes it impossible for me to hold back my tears. And that was my activity last Tuesday night: alone in my room, crying about emotions that I couldn’t pinpoint in the moment.
“Us and Them” (2018) is a Chinese romantic drama film directed by Taiwanese singer-songwriter and actress Rene Liu. The story is mainly a flashback to the young love between Lin Jianqing (portrayed by Jing Boran) and Fang Xiaoxiao (portrayed by Zhou Dongyu), whose relationship first takes root when they meet on a train traveling from Beijing back to their hometown during the Spring Festival rush. Both in their early 20s and dreaming of making a life in Beijing, they quickly become friends. That playful friendship later deepens into a love marked by genuine chemistry. Yet, this love does not last. It unravels under the weight of life’s pressures, growing emotional distance, misunderstandings and Jianqing’s increasing frustration and anger, eventually leading to the two separating in the subway.
The movie then shifts back to the present, where Jianqing and Xiaoxiao meet again years later on a plane. Xiaoxiao remains single, while Jianqing is now married with a child. As they reflect on why their relationship failed, both become quietly overwhelmed by the realization that their love story had once come so close to becoming real, yet somehow never did. In this sentimental and bittersweet moment, the two arrive at a simple yet devastating truth: “We have everything in the end, but not each other.”
If you know me, you know I am a sucker for love stories that end like this. I have cried gallons of tears over movies like “Casablanca” (1942), “In the Mood for Love” (2000), “La La Land” (2016), “Past Lives” (2023), “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), “Comrades: Almost a Love Story” (1996), “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019) — the list goes on.
But “Us and Them” meets me at the intersection of my two favorite things: my hometown, Beijing, and a story about true love that ends in a tragically beautiful, inevitable separation. The film made me feel a certain kind of nostalgia that comes with its obvious poignancy — a sense of familiarity and quiet sorrow tied to a place I belong to. There’s something about seeing those retro, grainy shots of familiar Beijing subway stations, the worn-out walls layered with thousands of advertisements inside old Beijing apartment complexes and even specific buildings in the background of the film — whose names I can instantly recognize (like the Armani/Casa Residences and the CITIC Tower) — that feels strikingly real and intimate.
Yet what’s ironic about this feeling is that it isn’t real — it has already missed its chance to exist and to ever become real. I will never be that 20-something stepping into Beijing for the first time, trying to make a living and meeting some guy on a train during Chinese New Year.
I’ve also never experienced a real relationship built on genuine, shared chemistry, let alone the kind of pain that comes when it ends due to the complications of life. And yet, in one way or another, we’ve all known heartbreak; we’ve all lost someone or something we once held close.
Experiencing this almost artificial sadness and sense of nostalgia for a place or time that has never existed, while at the same time being so far removed from it, makes the sadness and emotional torment feel even more intense. Perhaps something about watching a film in one’s mother tongue evokes this. Or perhaps it’s the way stories materialize in settings and touch on ideas and emotions that feel intimately close to you, even if they were never really yours to begin with.
Movies that ask you to open your heart take courage to watch, at least in my opinion. But we don’t really know the depth of our own emotional connection to certain places, things and people until something triggers it, and the effect is volatile but also cathartic. So I would say it is a luxury to be able to ugly cry at movies, because that means you are still capable of being reminded of the emotional complications that we often subconsciously cover under a facade.
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