Zhang Dalei Stories / The Death Huts and the Panama Jungle



In Deshan Carrying a Bowl, a gōng'àn of a disciple questioning his master ends with a complete reversal of the master’s behavior, in some versions even with a prediction of his ultimate fate:

Yantou clapped and laughed at Deshan and said: To be celebrated, the old man got the last verse! From now on, the world cannot get hold of him. A shame, though, only three more years left to live. Three years later, Deshan died. *

After shooting thousands of documentaries on local culinary cultures across China, grassroots filmmaker Zhang Dalei made an unexpected journey halfway around the world and smuggled into the US. There, he works to this day as a masseur.
In one of his last videos before leaving China, titled Lay flat from 40 years old, sit through a whole morning in the death hut, get drunk on a kilo of Shao wine and go home, he went to a small snack bar in his hometown, where a large bowl of Shaoxing wine and two plates of snacks were offered for 16 yuan (2 euros) from early morning. A “death hut” is what this kind of place is called, Zhang explained in the video, because people come here simply to get drunk, every day, until their death. As usual, he had little vocabulary to critique the food, “Tastes bad!” He shouted after sipping the wine. Then he laughed and drank all that was left.
An amusing comparison was found when I was reading the Deshan koan: a rigid twist of the story that feels almost like an error, a failure of the narrative process. A twist that lacks explanation and stubbornly insists on being meaningless. The two stories reveal the logic of a kind of true story, they contain the entire reality, the logic that the body of the story would fall apart the moment you contemplate it. It is meaningless in itself, or pointless to think about. At the same time, the integrity is apparent and firm, it holds because it exists.
The project aims to categorize, map and document the story of Zhang Da lei, in the form of a book consisting of two chapters, two stories that are virtually irrelevant to each other: a catalogue, organizing and analyzing Zhang Dalei’s career as a documentary director, showing the geographi- cal distribution and routes of the subjects, a listing of the full body of his films, excerpts and highlighted showcases; an adventure story, of Zhang’s recent journey to the US, where his documentary directing career seems to be coming to an end.

* Volume XVI, The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp