Mai Hua, Afloat

Mom, but not only that. Blogger, but not only. Director, but not entirely. She has no box but one. "I'm Mai, that's all!" Her name is pronounced "my". Her life is made up of countless intertwined threads. In her documentary Les Rivières, she offers us a walk on her inland rivers.

Mai explores parts of her being that she had preferred to keep silent and parts she hadn’t discovered, until then. In front of the camera, the unsaid family suddenly finds expression. The Mother-Daughter relationship; the weight of patriarchy. Just as many tributaries that lead to her inner rivers. That camera was a kind of psycho-magical appointment that was important to their family. The camera puts us there. With her Mother and her Grandmother; in the intimacy of the family lock-up.

The truth is, we don't know where we're going. Neither does she. At that moment, the image is clear. Then it becomes blurred. There are all these events that you lived through, that you filmed, but nothing makes sense because you don't even understand why your soul is there. The current sometimes becomes torrential, but in several years, it will manage to stay afloat. Better yet, it will find itself. Mai, that's it. 

What are you most proud of in this documentary?

What I'm proud of is what it's created in our family. It destroyed old relationships and created new ones. That camera was like a shield of some kind. It was visceral, organic, and kind of a third eye. That's what made me feel safe enough to go into some pretty complicated terrain because the bottom line is that family is complicated! (laughs)

The loyalty systems that are put in place by the patriarchs are concrete. Everyone is an actor in this system, including me. We are conditioned by a system that creates our existence for us, as long as we don't question it. When I said, "I would like to create my life", I encountered a lot of resistance in front of me. Creating and distributing this film was a big internal battle.

 In the film, we learn how complicated your relationship with your Mother was. She explains to you, "I just wasn't a Mother, that's all.” Do those few words say it all for you?

It says it all and it doesn't say everything. Words cover both ideas and experiences. In the beginning, you have access to the idea. And little by little, the thing comes down and you have access to the experience. It's coming in and it's getting into your body, into your psyche; you're dreaming about it. And it triggers different levels of consciousness.

Has it changed anything in the way you're a Mother?

It changed everything. In Asian families, your loyalty is to the elders. To understand that my energy was vaporized by having to please my mother and having to respect the family rule dictated by the elders, took a lot of my energy and my sanity that I couldn't reinvest in my children or myself. 

Once I understood this, my attachment to my family changed. The hold that family could have on me disappeared. So, a whole part of our relationship self-destructed. That's what made it possible to develop other relationships where everyone could take their place.

In one of the videos on your blog, one of your interlocutors (Aurelia Silvestre) explains to you that it can be useful to be a bad Mother. Do you agree with that?

When you're a Mother or a Father, you have duties to fulfill. However, you have to understand that it's really hard and that you need a lot of help. There's a saying that it takes a whole village to raise a child. Except that today there isn't a village. You've got a couple with a nuclear family or even a single parent. It's really hard to raise a child. When you're in a system where children don't get help, they go crazy. I was lucky enough to be aware of all these issues earlier so I could learn to be the mother I wanted to be.

What hurt me the most was having a mother who had other desires than us. And that's quite possible. And you have to hear it. It's really hard, to be honest, and say, "I didn't want to have a baby." My children, I love them too. But in fact, there are times in your life when if you haven't dealt with your traumas, you go ahead and live. Because it's a lot of pressure.

Would you say you're more like a mom-blogger-color designer?

I'm not confined to a “label”. What you are and what you do is the same thing. And what you do changes all the time because you need one form of expression or another. You can say to yourself, "But she's a director!”. I'm not a director: I've directed two films, and that defines me well. But I don't know if I'm going to make other films. 

I don't want to be in a box. I want to be at the meeting. In fact, I'm just Mai! In the question of feminine energies, there's a lot of "and". We can do one thing and another.

What's your way of being a woman?

To make Les Rivières, I explored a lot of the question of, "Where is the woman in me?"

Until the documentary, my vision was that women are submissive, but that vision has surpassed. I seized the opportunity of my documentary to go beyond that and invest my life as a woman. In my body, as a Mother, and as a lover. 

It's really beautiful to be able to explore the points where we are exactly the same as a man or a woman - vulnerability and creativity, for example. But there are also spaces on the margins where it's not the same. These differences also need to be invested. There is a distinctly feminine experience that is also downright beautiful. 

Are you talking about the "female" sex?

Yes, I'm talking about the female sex! But that creates a gender because it creates a culture. Saying, "Because I have a uterus, I'm different" is a culture! It just means that in certain fields of our human existence, we go through points of difference. And we cultivate them. Cultivating this difference is also really beautiful, but it means that we recreate at the same time; not boxes, but times when we are only women.

How do you prepare to awaken your inner rivers?

To make the rivers, I've had a lot of experience. Therapy, in particular. I've been around a lot of people working on women, on gender differences. There is one that is still with me today, which is my experience in modified consciousness. It's called “Ayahuasca”. It's a psychotropic vine. 

Simply put, you drink a beverage from the vine. It's an incredible experience. It's like a pathfinder for you. It's a visionary plant so you have visions, you get in touch with parts of your unconscious that are very deep. It's one of the most powerful psychotropic drugs in the world because it gets into something very deep in your brain and your body. You have to rely on some mysterious force that you can't control. You don't know what you're going to come in contact with. And it's a very feminine presence.

What did that "feminine presence" sound like?

It's a kind of vastness that can be very gentle and very virulent. It's something that embraces you, almost like a Grandmother. It can take on terrifying faces, like super sweet. I think it opens up parts of the brain that you can't access any more because of trauma and fears. And you’re forced to look at them! And I'm kind of coming back to that in my documentary. In The Rivers, it's all about the symbolism of inland rivers. 

How do you experience this femininity?

I know that there are a lot of people who come to my blog and reconcile themselves with being a woman, and men love it, too. They understand our experience better. There's something about intimacy that's very, very strong. And that's a feminine thing. Culturally, that is. Women are closest to experiences, children, and education. 

That's why in my other film, "Remarkable Men", I think the messages are strong. We often talk about the difficulty of being a woman -harassment, lack of consideration, and so on - but, what we understand in this documentary is also the difficulty of being a man. The men in this documentary doubt that they are vulnerable.

It's very rare to find men who have acquired this skill: to talk about intimacy so freely. These men have been in talking groups for many years. I was convinced that in men's circles, masculinity was developed. There was "Me Too", and there, with Jerry - my friend - we thought we should do something about it - talk about it.

How do you place yourself concerning "Me Too"?

It's a movement that has two counterparts. A very activist, militant counterpart; that of fighting for the same wages. I don't have that kind of anger, the anger of the women, that thing of going to organize demonstrations, defending laws in Parliament. "Me Too" is still madness, everything we learned. It's lifesaving. It brings us together. 

Afterward, I understood that some women aren't comfortable with the fact that it's noisy, that there's violence, and that it can be misunderstood sometimes. My documentary on men is a way of saying we're on the same side. It's feminism where I say we're not here to wage a gender war but to defend humanist values. We are all human beings. We will have to listen to each other. I think that's what healing is all about. That doesn't mean the social struggle shouldn't take place, though.

Each individual should have the opportunity to create for themselves, and it's good to have spaces where we can explore our femininity and our masculinity. Each individual, whatever they want, whatever they love, should be able to express themselves as they wish.

Interview by Sofian Aissaoui

Photo by Remi Chapeaublanc

Illustration by Lucile Gomez