In the movie Blind Mountain, the 22-year-old female college student Bai Xuelu met Hu Xiaoxiao, a passionate and generous girl, when she was looking for a job in the 1990s. Enticed by job opportunity and money, she and Hu Xiaoxiao took a car to go to a mountain to purchase Chinese herbal medicine. After a long journey they came to a small village. However Bai Xuemei was drudged and when Bai Xuemei woke up on the next day, she discovered that Hu Xiaoxiao and her boss were gone, and she did not know where she was. Bai Xuemei was told that she had been sold by her ‘family’ to 40-year-old farmer Huang Degui as his wife. Only then did she realize that she had been tricked by the traffickers.
Bai Xuemei wanted to go home, but was rejected by Huang Degui. In the evening, Huang Degui went to bed to sleep with Bai Xuemei, but she refused to be in the same bed with him. The angry Huang Degui raped her and locked her in the house. Bai Xuemei will be beaten and scolded if she resists a little. Bai Xuemei has lost her freedom ever since and is forced to live in a strange and savage village. Bai Xuemei, who is very tough and brave, keeps looking for opportunities to escape. But no one in this enclosed village is willing to help her since she is a stranger to them. Instead, they helped Huang Shougui keep her under strict supervision. She was caught back every time she fled, and beaten in public. The selfishness and indifference of the villagers and the malfeasance of local officials and police kept her there. Later Bai Xuemei was pregnant and had given birth to a boy, which made the Huang family relaxed a bit that allows her to get help. With the help of Li Qingshan, a junior high school student, Bai Xuemei made contact with his parents. Because of the obstruction of the villagers, the two policemen who came with his father could not rescue Bai Xuemei, so they negotiated and decide to rescue Bai Xuemei secretly. One day, with the help of the police, she finally escaped the mountain village, but her children had to stay there.
From 1991 to 1995, the official number of rescued abducted women was 80,555. I can imagine those women who have been trafficked are raped, forced to have children, and separated from the outside world for life, but I have never thought about the various struggles they have come across in the process, nor the attitudes of those outside the “event”. Perhaps the creator of social crime is never an individual, nor a small group. It is a society’s overall crime, a direct crime, a common crime for the people who pretend to be ‘blind’ and ‘deaf’, and for us blind observers. This kind of “blindness” that cannot be overcome is legal blindness, illiteracy, and even bystander’s blindness.
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