What does Chunhe’s town hall speech mean, and how does it show his journey in Big World (2024)?
Chunhe's lecture in Big World (2024) is where Jackson Yee's character stops arguing through action and states his claim directly.
Spoilers follow for Big World (2024). The article discusses a key scene from the second half of the film.
Chunhe’s public address in Big World is the moment the film stops making its argument through accumulated action and lets its protagonist state his claim directly. For most of the preceding story, Liu Chunhe (Jackson Yee) has been entering rooms where other people have already formed their verdict. The lecture scene that 37th Tokyo International Film Festival press coverage identifies as one of the film’s turning points is not about petitioning for access. It is about Chunhe demanding to be heard in the first place.
Who Chunhe Is Before He Speaks Publicly
The film sets up Liu Chunhe with a contradiction his world cannot resolve. He has cerebral palsy that affects his movement and speech. He also has the intellectual drive to pursue a literature degree at a distant teachers’ college and eventually become an educator. His grandmother, Chen Suqun (Diana Lin), treats those two facts as fully compatible. His mother, Chen Lu (Jiang Qinqin), does not.
In 37th Tokyo International Film Festival press coverage, Jiang Qinqin described her character’s impossible position through a precise metaphor: hold Chen Lu’s son too tightly and he starts bleeding, but without her warmth he would freeze. That double bind, harm in both directions, is what the film tracks across Chen Lu’s scenes. Her response to Chunhe’s ambitions is not malice but fear without a safe outlet.
What the film makes precise is the daily cost of being visibly disabled in public. Chunhe describes his experience of moving through the world: “Gazes of pity, gazes of fear and even gazes of disgust. But I have never seen a gaze that dared to stare at me and tell me that I am one of them.” The problem, as the film frames it, is not only the hostile stares but the absence of the neutral ones, those that register a person rather than a diagnosis.
What the Lecture Scene Demonstrates
What makes the lecture matter is its mode rather than its content. Up to this point in the film, Chunhe makes his argument through presence: taking the cafe job, joining the choir, applying to university. Each is an argument by demonstration. The lecture is different. He is not showing what he can do while a room decides whether to believe it. He is telling a room what he thinks, and they are there to listen.
The 37th Tokyo International Film Festival press report describes a scene in which Chunhe lectures a class of children on poetry, calling it “a killer lecture” that displays his depth of knowledge, his poetic sensibility, and his ability to win over children who came in skeptical.
The film also documents the casual slights alongside the formal exclusions. When Chunhe loses a drumming competition, a classmate calls him a slur, assuming his movement differences indicate a cognitive deficit. The lecture scene is the direct counter-instance.
The Mother’s Arc Changes How the Speech Reads
Every public success Chunhe earns is an implicit argument against Chen Lu’s belief that he cannot live independently, and the lecture brings that dynamic into the open. Jiang Qinqin’s portrayal, which earned a Golden Rooster Awards nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 2025, shows a mother whose love has contracted into control.
His decision to apply to a teachers’ college far from home, rather than stay nearby under her supervision, is the spatial form of that argument. The public lecture is its verbal form. The film presents this not as a simple story of a capable person escaping an obstructive parent, but as a study in how maternal fear and adult self-determination can operate within the same relationship without either being dishonest.
Jackson Yee’s Preparation and What It Adds
Jackson Yee (Yi Yangqianxi) prepared extensively for the role, conducting research and spending time with people who have cerebral palsy, according to 37th Tokyo International Film Festival coverage.
That preparation registers in the public speaking scenes in particular. The effort visible in Chunhe’s address, the physical cost of producing speech that emerges differently from a neurotypical speaker’s, is drawn from firsthand observation rather than approximated. Yee won Best Actor at both the 16th China Film Director’s Guild Awards and the 38th Golden Rooster Awards in 2025. The casting of an able-bodied actor in a cerebral palsy role is a live debate in disability representation.
The Argument the Film’s Two Titles Make Together
The film’s Chinese title, 小小的我, translates literally as “Little Me” or “Small Me.” The English release title, Big World, is the corrective the film argues Chunhe deserves access to. According to RADII, Yang Lina has noted that approximately 80 million disabled people live in China and that “we seldom see them on the streets.”
His public address is where those two titles meet. A person the world has classified as a small, bounded problem stands in front of an audience and occupies the full space of the conversation. In context, that is what the speech means: not a petition for accommodation, but a refusal to stay small.
