“It’s hard being a human, but being a common person in China is even more difficult,” blurts out a tearful shopkeeper from his backroom peering along the near-submerged banks of the Yangtze River.

His store, among the thousands of other ramshackle businesses and homes on these banks, will soon be casualties of China’s massively industrious hydroelectric Three Gorges Dam project in Chinese-Canadian Yung Chang’s doleful documentary, Up the Yangtze. By 2011, the damming process will displace two million Chinese farmers and lower-income merchants.

For a solid year, Yangtze tracks 16-year-old peasant Yu Shui, whose hard-scrabble subsistence farmer parents scrape for corn by day and down soggy noodles by night. Her dreams of attending high school are politely dashed by her father who reasons she’s more useful working aboard one of the Farewell cruise tours for Westerners.

Once there, it’s pure culture shock. The Victoria cruise line corporate ethos is about Anglicizing all native employees to adopt English and arbitrary English names. So, Yu Shui becomes “Cindy” while her co-worker, a middle-class urbanite lounge singer named Chen Bo Yu, becomes “Jerry.” Together, they kowtow for tips, wash dishes, and croon old Chinese music in the ship’s auditorium.

Chang’s year-long probe into the heartbreaking dislocation of native countrymen is saddening, swept together with even more haunting images of faded water level markers (175m, 200m, etc.) quietly being swallowed whole by the Yangtze River.

Up the Yangtze screens tonight at 9 p.m. and then all week at Cosford Cinema at University of Miami (1380 Miller Dr., Miami). Tickets cost $6 to $8. Call (305) 284-4861, or visit http://com.miami.edu/cosford. Also screens June 6 to June 12 at Lake Worth Playhouse (713 Lake Ave., Lake Worth). Tickets cost $5 to $8. Call (561) 586-6410, or visit www.lakeworthplayhouse.org.