Reinterpretation of the meaning of ‘return’ in the film coming home as a reconstruction of collective memory of the new era

As an adaptation of the scar literature novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi, the change of its title to ‘Coming Home’ in its film adaptation by the fifth-generation Chinese director, Zhang Yimou, triggers curiosity. Previous studies have pointed out that the Chinese title of Coming Home is an allegory about Zhang Yimou’s ‘return’ to the scar narrative that was trending in the early 1980s, following the emergence of scar literature after the Chinese Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. However, it is also considered to have presented another narrative that distinguishes it from most of the films set during the Cultural Revolution era, especially in the films produced in the 1980s and 1990s. There is a narrative about the reflection of human adaptive attitudes towards painful reality as a strategy to respond to past trauma, which is also implying that the impact of the trauma remains real, and some survivors are still struggling to free themselves from the trauma. This article argues that, by reinterpreting Lu Yanshi’s ‘return’ as a site of both adaptive healing and persistent trauma, Zhang Yimou constructs a new collective memory of the Cultural Revolution that reflects the complex realities of the New Era, moving beyond the simpler narratives of earlier scar literature.