Stay Home: Ai Weiwei Document’s Ximei’s Life & Activism

Recent revelations of toxic tear gas dispersed throughout Hong Kong and the network of concentration camps imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs from East Turkistan prove the Chinese Communist Party is dangerous to human health. AIDS activist Liu Ximei knew that years ago. She was one of the thousands of Henan peasants who contracted the disease through tainted transfusion blood. However, she was not willing to meekly accept the substandard treatment grudgingly provided by state clinics. She organized patients, but that consequently made her a target, as viewers can see in Ai Weiwei’s Stay Home (written, lensed, and edited by Chen Shuo), which predates Andy Cohen & Gaylen Ross’s more complete documentary Ximei, but it still nicely compliments their film, which opens today in New York.

Hip New Yorkers may have already seen Stay Home, because the 2013 film played on a loop during Teacher Ai’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. It is also readily available on YouTube and Vimeo, if you do not live on the Chinese side of the CCP’s Great Firewall.

Stay Home is somewhat less structured and more fly-on-the-wall in the manner it documents the day-to-day health challenges Liu must endure. It also covers a shorter time-span, ending before she becomes a legit couple with her roommate, a fellow AIDS patient. We also witness worse acts of harassment in the newer documentary, because the Henan cadres had the good sense to be on their best behavior when Ai Weiwei showed up with a camera crew. In contrast, Cohen and company do their best to stay undercover. Nevertheless, the apparatchiks’ hostility and resentment for Liu still comes through clearly.

Ximei: Profile in Courage

Liu Ximei is continuing proof of one of Mainland China’s dirtiest secrets (and the Communist Party certainly has a lot to choose from). In the 1990s, peasants in hardscrabble Henan province were encouraged to supplement their subsistence income selling blood. Tragically, unsafe sanitary practices led to widespread AIDS infection among both donors and recipients. Naturally, the Party tried to sweep it under the rug, because that is what they do. However, one brave young woman emerged as a leader for the rural AIDS patients, after she contracted the disease through a transfusion. Viewers will meet her and witness the powerful opposition she faces in Andy Cohen & Gaylen Ross’s Ximei, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Liu might be familiar to some viewers, because she was the subject of Ai Weiwei’s documentary, Stay Home. Those who have seen it will be reassured by Teacher Ai’s involvement as an executive producer of Cohen & Ross’s doc. We get to know her better as a flesh-and-blood person through their lens—and to know Liu is to admire her.

Many of Liu’s experiences are somewhat universal, with respect to her search for companionship and her eventual romance with a fellow Henan patient. However, her activism and humanitarianism often put her at odds with the police and health services bureaucracy. Believing in the efficacy of patient solidarity and support, Liu opened “Ximei’s Home for Mutual Help,” a shelter and resource for patients who cannot afford to regularly commute from their rural homes to the urban clinics. Of course, even when they show up, the doctors and nurses often refuse to see them in a timely manner, prompting Liu to lodge rather pointed complaints on their behalf. Frustratingly, but not so surprisingly, the police have regularly forced Liu to relocate her shelter.

Although Ximei is a more personal profile than Ai Weiwei’s film, it still covers sufficiently sensitive topics to get Cohen and his crew rousted by the police at least once. This is definitely gutsy, truth-to-power filmmaking, but the subject and star is truly courageous.