ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Lü caodi/Mongolian Ping-Pong (2005), a film directed by Han independent filmmaker Ning Hao about a group of Mongol children who play on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s notions of transitional space and transitional object and on Owain Jones’s idea of the otherness of childhood, this chapter argues that the filmmaker has transformed the space of the grasslands into the children’s transitional spaces of play, while a ping-pong ball discovered by one of the children is turned into their transitional object. In transitional spaces, the children safely and creatively manipulate cultural resources of diverse scales to understand the sociocultural identity of the ball. Consequently, their unique vision of the world unfolds. The filmmaker’s cinematic treatment reveals his celebration of the children’s creativity. He sympathises with their inability to escape the fate of acculturation once they start school education in a Han-dominated society.
