Interview: The Secret of My Birth

CiLENS: This film draws heavily from your own childhood experiences. We noticed many distinct local elements in it, from the use of the Guangxi dialect to depictions of patriarchal traditions and even references to folk beliefs and feng shui (traditional Chinese geomancy). Could you share your overall impression or reflection on your hometown and how it has shaped your creative vision?

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Jing: I’ve always loved my hometown. I’m still living and working in Beihai now. The local culture here is deeply rooted, something you only truly realize after leaving. Whether it’s the food, the climate, the people, or the rhythm of life, these are things that can’t be replicated elsewhere. When I worked in Beijing, I felt an enormous difference compared to the North.

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Beihai is by the sea, and I grew up watching the ocean, surrounded by trees and greenery. That’s why I love filming here—my first feature film was also shot in Beihai. I feel a strong emotional attachment to this land, though it’s a bond I only came to appreciate in my thirties, after years away.

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As a teenager, especially after the college entrance exams, I wanted nothing more than to escape. The clan culture and gender hierarchy in Guangxi and Guangdong are still very prevalent, and son preference remains common even today. I often find myself frustrated seeing it persist.

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When I was younger, I thought leaving might mean escaping backward traditions, but after going elsewhere, I realized these issues aren’t unique to my hometown. They are structural and systemic, just expressed differently in big cities. Through filmmaking, I began to reexamine my family and myself. Finishing The Secret of My Birth felt like a kind of healing.

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When I returned to Beihai to shoot the film, it was the first time I looked at the city through the eyes of a filmmaker. Streets that once seemed ordinary suddenly appeared beautiful and full of texture. Even though I resent certain aspects of the patriarchal culture here, my relatives and friends helped me enormously during filming. That’s when I understood how complex everything really is.

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The real problem doesn’t lie in individuals. My parents love me deeply, yet the pain I experienced growing up is equally real. The Secret of My Birth made me confront this paradox: how love and harm can coexist. Beneath it lies something much deeper, which is systemic, structural forces that shape our emotions and relationships. That’s what I’ve come to understand about both my hometown and my family.

 

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CiLENS: When you first began writing The Secret of My Birth, what emotions were you hoping to express? And after completing the film, how did the process change your perspective?

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Jing: The Secret of My Birth was my graduation project. I only started studying film formally in graduate school, and during those three years, I wrote many scripts and short pieces. Almost all of them revolved around women, talking subjects about loneliness, invisibility, and neglect. I think these are recurring motifs in my work because they come from something deeply rooted inside me.

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When it came time for my final project, I thought: If this were the last film I ever made, what would I most want to say? And what I wanted, honestly, was to release years of frustration and pain.

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In the film, Lili grows up as an only child adored by everyone, until one day she realizes she wasn’t a “wanted” child. She starts noticing all the little signs: how menstruating women are barred from ancestral rituals, how girls are trained to serve others, how sons are celebrated before they’re even born. When she learns the truth about her birth, her whole world collapses. That feeling of the ground falling away was something similar I experienced before.

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From that moment on, I carried this sense that no one could truly support me, that I had to rely on myself entirely. That loneliness stayed with me for years. I was hypersensitive to anything about gender inequality, sometimes even combative online. That’s the nature of a wound: it lies dormant until touched.

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So I wanted to voice all that pain to say aloud what so many young girls feel but can’t express. As a child, I never spoke up. I feared that if I did, no one would understand me, or worse, they’d abandon me. Knowing you weren’t welcomed into the world gives you a kind of quiet despair.

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When I saw my younger cousin, who once lively and mischievous, turn silent after her baby brother was born, I saw my younger self. She just sat quietly at the dinner table, eating whatever was served. That’s when I knew I had to tell this story.

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At first, I blamed my parents. I thought maybe they were ignorant or selfish. But over time, I realized they were not villains. They are kind people who love me and help others. Humans are complicated. You can be loved deeply and still be hurt profoundly. That duality makes The Secret of My Birth so painful to me, as it speaks to something ghostly and persistent, embedded in our daily gestures and words, repeating itself generation after generation.

 

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CiLENS: You mentioned that making The Secret of My Birth was a healing process for you. From many audience reactions, it seems the film also touches on deeper social and gender issues. Did this experience change the way you think about women’s issues?

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Jing: Yes, absolutely. Although I still feel quite pessimistic about the broader condition of women, The Secret of My Birth did heal me on a personal level. Before making it, I was always trying to run away from my hometown, from my family, and from the past. I kept a distance from my parents.

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But after finishing the film, I began to see them differently. I realized they, too, were trapped by their circumstances. They had their own pain and limitations. That realization softened me. I became less combative and less angry. I could finally look at the world with gentleness.

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CiLENS: Did your parents know your intentions when you made the film? What was their reaction after watching it?

 

Jing: My mother was aware of it. When I finished the script, I shared it with a few close relatives. One evening, we had a long, emotional conversation. The adults questioned whether such a young girl could really understand so much or feel such strong emotions. I told them honestly: this is what I felt as a child. Those anxieties and fears were real, and they shaped who I am today.

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At the time, my mother knew this topic, but I still haven’t told my father the full story. He and I come from very different emotional worlds. He genuinely believes he isn’t biased toward sons, yet he used to say at dinner that his biggest regret was not having a boy to carry on the family name. He didn’t realize that this very statement is son preference. To him, gender inequality is a thing of the past. He thinks women now have equal, even better, status than men. So having this conversation with him is extremely difficult.

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My mother, on the other hand, did understand the film to some extent. We didn’t have a formal reconciliation—there was no apology—but through talking, she revealed her own helplessness. She said she didn’t know better because she hadn’t had much education. Even today, she still instinctively reacts to births by congratulating those who have sons and consoling those who have daughters. “Don’t worry,” she’ll say, using that same old tone. When women in our crew had to rest during their periods, my mother would mutter, “Women are always the troublesome ones.”

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I’ve learned not to argue. Some beliefs are too deeply ingrained to change through reasoning. What matters is that beyond these differences, there is still care and listening in our daily lives.

 

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CiLENS: The Secret of My Birth differs from many “patricide” or “matricide” films we’ve seen. You focus on the sister’s perspective and her imagined “fratricide,” born from jealousy and fear. How did you navigate the balance between psychological realism and the broader commentary on gender and trauma?

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Jing: I started from the character, not a concept. I didn’t want to make a “feminist” film for the sake of ideology; I wanted to create a real person. For a girl Lili’s age, her world still revolves around her parents. They are her entire universe. She isn’t yet rebellious like a teenager. She wants their love completely. So when she feels it being taken away by an unborn brother, her instinct isn’t to “fight the system” or blame her parents. It’s to target the immediate “rival.” That’s why her destructive urge is directed downward, not upward.

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Her jealousy, fear, and confusion are natural for a child. The way she tries to stop the pregnancy, such as buying abortion pills, visiting a fortune-teller, comes from that limited, innocent logic. In her mind, these actions make sense. Some people suggested I should make the parents more cruel to heighten the drama. But I refused. In real life, my parents weren’t villains, and I didn’t want to simplify the problem into good and evil. The real horror is in how ordinary everything looks. It is the harm embedded in calm, everyday life.

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That’s why The Secret of My Birth is not about individual guilt but structural violence: how love itself can coexist with oppression, quietly perpetuated in the most “normal” of families.

 

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CiLENS: In one scene, Lili visits a fortune-teller who gives her a spell to prevent her brother’s birth. Later, the fortune-teller is arrested, and in the end, Lili’s mother gives birth to a baby girl instead. Did that supernatural thread intentionally shape the ending?

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Jing: That’s open to interpretation. Those scenes, including the fortune-teller and the feng shui fish, were designed with irony in mind. They blur the line between superstition and coincidence. Whether the spell “works” or not isn’t the point; it’s about belief, agency, and the absurd ways people try to regain control in powerless situations.

 

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CiLENS: Near the end, when Lili’s mother says, “There are no parents who don’t love their children,” Lili quietly pours the fish soup meant for her mother back into the fish tank. How do you interpret this gesture?

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Li Jing: That moment is a turning point. Lili softens because of her mother’s words. She no longer wants to harm her. Instead of forcing the soup on her mother, she pours it away. Children are not as rational as adults. Even if she suspects her mother’s words aren’t true, she still chooses to trust them. She wants to believe that her mother loves her. So she acts with compassion rather than anger.

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At the same time, her mother’s line “What parent doesn’t love their child?” is deeply ironic. We’ve all heard it growing up, but in reality, many parents do harm their children, even destroy them, especially in societies where daughters are devalued. The Secret of My Birth asks us to reflect on that dissonance between the rhetoric of love and the lived reality of harm.

 

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CiLENS: Will your first feature continue exploring the themes of female experience and gender inequality found in The Secret of My Birth?

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Jing: Yes. My debut feature is titled Name and Hair, and it carries forward some of the same concerns. It’s about a girl named “Chen Niandi” who wants to change her name.

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In 2021, I came across news stories about women with names like “Zhaodi” (“Bring a younger brother”) or “Niandi” (“Think of a younger brother”), which apparently embody son preference. Many of these women, now in their twenties or thirties, were trying to legally change their names, facing bureaucratic and psychological hurdles. That moved me deeply.

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So I based the film on one of those real-life women. Rather than focusing on the act of changing the name, I wanted to explore her journey of self-recognition: how a girl burdened by such a name grows up, especially during adolescence, and learns to reclaim her identity.

 

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CiLENS: What was the biggest difference or challenge for you moving from short films to your first feature?

 

Jing: Length and complexity. My short films were shot in under a week. The feature took more than twenty days, which I’d never experienced before. The scale of the production was larger, and the pre-production, especially financing, was full of challenges too.

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Creatively, short films condense emotion into a brief window, but a feature demands evolution. You must maintain narrative continuity and emotional rhythm over a long stretch. The challenge is to sustain the character’s arc to make her believable, layered, and alive from beginning to end. That, to me, has been both the hardest and the most rewarding part of the process.