TV REVIEWS : WORLDS APART IN 2 DOCUMENTARIES

Two excellent documentary series that debut on KCET Channel 28 tonight look at worlds so different that it’s hard to believe they can coexist on the same planet.

“Silicon Valley” (at 10 p.m.) traces how that area near San Jose has become the vital high-tech heart of America’s future-looking electronics industry. “One Village in China” (at 8 p.m.), on the other hand, seems to travel back in time as it shows how the residents of a rural Chinese village are racing to catch up to the present.

“Boom Town,” the title of Part 1 of the three-hour “Silicon Valley” series, does a swell job of explaining how, in 80 years, the Santa Clara Valley went from growing apricots and prunes to producing microchips, video games and personal computers.

Long before Apple Computer wizard Steve Wozniak fondled his first integrated circuit, the area (which was first dubbed Silicon Valley in 1970) was crawling with electronic pioneers such as Lee De Forest, the early 1900s daddy of the vacuum tube; radar pioneers Russell and Sig Varian and transistor co-inventor William Shockley.

Tonight’s segment focuses on the brilliant, highly energized men whose innovative ideas and futuristic dreams built giant corporations such as Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor. It shows the catalytic role played by Stanford University and traces the evolution of some of the Valley’s most important 2,000 to 3,000 high-tech companies. Videogame-maker Atari’s astonishingly swift birth, super-rapid growth and near-death is recounted as an extreme example of the electronics industry’s inherent volatility and uncertainty.

Despite its high entrepreneurial content, the documentary says, the electronics industry has always been greatly dependent on the military’s demand for increasingly sophisticated weaponry. As one engineer says, “Computer science didn’t happen from teen-agers in garages. It came from war money.”

Produced for station KTEH-TV in San Jose by Julio Moline, “Silicon Valley” provides an excellent and interesting history of the people and ideas that created a high-risk, highly competitive industry whose products continue to revolutionize our lives.

“One Village in China,” a beautifully filmed three-part series, provides an incredibly rich and intimate examination of everyday life in Long Bow, a primitive village of 2,000 souls trying to cope with the radical political, economic and social changes that have been buffeting them.

Tonight’s episode, “Small Happiness,” centers on the relationships of different generations of women and their roles in society. Three older Long Bow women are amazingly candid about how their marriages were arranged by their parents, how they fought with their husbands and what it felt like to have their feet bound in the now-outlawed feudal way that all but crippled them. One tells how her father told her he’d sell her to anyone for $200, which he did. Another tells how her mother-in-law never allowed her to leave the courtyard of her husband’s family home.

Compared to these women, a young woman named Ling Qiao is a regular Cosmo girl: She’s got a high school education, drives a tractor and defied her parents by marrying for love.

The lives of women such as her have been been vastly improved since the revolution of 1949, says director/interviewer Carma Hinton, an American born in Beijing in 1949. Women now can choose their husbands and get divorces, she says, though they still are expected to move in with their husband’s family and continue his family line. Thus, a baby girl will always remain a “small happiness” while a boy is a “big happiness.”

Episode 2 “stars” a Catholic country healer and deals mostly with village religious and medical practices. Part 3 includes a look at how the villagers are increasingly thinking like born-again venture capitalists as they contend with new free-market economic policies and a recent change in Chinese agricultural policy from collectivized farming to individual household farming.

Throughout, Hinton faithfully and lovingly captures the villagers as they worship, work and celebrate colorful traditional holidays. She lets them speak for themselves and, though she asks about such controversial things as the state’s coercive birth-control policy that limits rural couples to two children, she generally avoids making political points. She and co-producer Richard Gordon have provided a great view of a small part of China and its people.