Replicated mother-daughter relationships and privatized Chinese American cinema
Qi Xiangu Film Arts Magazine
2022-09-15 17:00 published in Beijing
This article is selected from "Film Art" Issue 5, 2022
Qi Xiangu
Film researcher, Master’s Degree from Renmin University of China and Master’s Degree from Florida State University
Abstract: "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is a win-win at the word-of-mouth box office around the world. After "Crazy Rich Asians" and "Turning Red", it once again pushed this kind of Chinese-American film with mother-daughter relationship as the core to the public. It unexpectedly won the favor of Chinese and American audiences. However, this type of film actually caters to the "political correctness" appeal of the American film industry in recent years, which is directly manifested in the conservatism of its content. More importantly, through a mother-daughter relationship that is constantly being reproduced, they strategically shift the audience's attention to the Chinese American family, conceal the survival and struggle problems that these families may face in society, and then personalize Chinese-American films.
Key words: Chinese-American film, mother-daughter relationship, privatization, "Turning Red", "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
American movies have always been a mirror for observing American society, history, and culture, and it is also a manifestation of its social symptoms. During Trump’s tenure as President of the United States (including a long time after he left office), the various crises encountered by the United States have been presented in American movies, among which the most prominent and most likely to attract attention are Sino-US relations and “#MeToo" movement, and the immigration issue is also sandwiched between these two phenomena or issues.
The connection between these three is not only the fall of the myth of American superheroes (mostly white males) in the Chinese and American markets, but also the global coronation of Asian female directors and actors, represented by Zhao Ting and Sandra Wu. The "re-popularity" created by Asian women, specifically, the survival and encounters of Chinese women immigrant, "Crazy Rich Asians", "The Farewell", "The Half of It", "Turning Red", "Everything Everywhere All At Once", the continuous achievement of "amazing" results in box office and word-of-mouth by movies such as "Crazy Rich Asians", "Turning Red", and "Everything Everywhere All At Once", has repeatedly brought this kind of movie to the fore. Chinese-American films centered on the relationship between mother and daughter have been pushed to the public.
It is also here that American films, especially Hollywood films, integrate the aforementioned three major issues in their own way, and try to use this to regain their status as "universal language".1 It became a sharp weapon for a new round of siege. However, the appearance of Chinese-American female protagonists seems to not only support the "#MeToo" movement fermented from Hollywood, but also observe the successive "Stop Anti-Asian Hate" movements to a certain extent, which is absolutely "politically correct" ", but in fact none of them responded to or dealt with these social issues directly or indirectly, but circumvented them skillfully and strategically avoided the risk of being further questioned; the ordinary mother-daughter relationship in creation is achieved by further personalizing this type of creation.
The reason why the term "re-popularity" was used to limit this type of film creation is because the essence behind it is the old tune of Chinese mother-daughter relationship, and the prevalence of this "old tune" can be traced back to "The Joy Luck Club".
The double sales of "The Joy Luck Club" novel and movie not only verified the American society (readers and audiences) to the parents of Chinese immigrants, especially the story of how a daughter representing Western culture can get rid of the oppression of a Chinese-style mother, and even carry out reverse education through books and movies, and this relationship between reading tendency and watching movies has been consolidated by taking advantage of the "best-selling" stories of the commodity economy.2
We may even find that the "re-popularity" of this type of creation shares many power logic relations of representation with the Hollywood Walk of Fame of Huang Liushuang (Anna May Wong) and Guan Nanshi (Nancy Kwan): who is "represented" and who is manipulating this "representation", who consumes this "representation," who benefits from this manipulation of "representation," and so on.
In other words, "Chinese-American mother-daughter conflict" (a relationship), following "Oriental Beauty" (an image), has become a shortcut for American society to interpret or imagine the Other/"China (culture)"/Chinese-American.
Still from the movie "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
Replicated mother-daughter relationship
In the aforementioned intricate matrix of power relations with regard to representation, this so-called manipulator points to the entire social environment in which this type of film production takes place. As Foucault puts it, "The status of a discourse and its reception are affected by the social context in which it circulates"3
The latest Chinese-American films are all set in contemporary times, which is related to the starting point of view of the creators. Although the history of Chinese immigrants has a long history, the present is obviously closer, and many heavy political and historical burdens can be stripped away, especially considering the injustice and suffering that Chinese immigrants have encountered in American society, as a ‘model minority’ seems to be more easily accepted as an object worthy of being filmed.
Even so, the selection of the location is more thought-provoking than the natural setting of the time. Different from "The Joy Luck Club" and other early films of the same type, where China, the United States, and the social and cultural poles are set in space, recent films of this type are set in multiple spaces.
"Crazy Rich Asians" chose multiple geographical spaces, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, etc. have been included in the landscape, but the Chinese mainland has been absent. "Turning Red" chose Chinatown with the most transnational characteristics, and "Chinese culture" was replaced by an ancient myth and a dull old ancestral hall.
In "Everything Everywhere All At Once", Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn shuttles through countless universes, but China has always been only the place where "prehistory" took place, that is, all the universe splits occurred after Evelyn left China. Different from the presentation of China in the Chinese-American films of the 1990s, these new films all deal with "China" as a blank index.
In this sense, the "ethnic Chinese" in "ethnic Chinese disapora" has been exiled into the background, or even out of the background, and such banishment behavior and visual choices have inspired us to think: what kind of social context has given birth to such The narrative setting? In order to answer this question, we must first clarify: Why is the relationship between Chinese mother and daughter selected by American movies again at this time?
Still from the movie "Crazy Rich Asians"
The mother-daughter relationship is not only an intergenerational relationship, but also a relationship of cross-cultural communication. Although the problem of Chinese and Western cultural conflicts has become so common in movies that recent films no longer use it as the only theme, in fact this problem has always existed, but it has only been put on a mask-the relationship between mother and daughter.
Although "Crazy Rich Asians" is about the dispute between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, its essence is the debate between the older generation of Chinese female immigrants and the younger generation of Chinese female immigrants debating the purity and insufficiency of Chinese sexuality, and is no different from the other two films about the conflict between blood-related mother and daughter.4
In view of the dominant position of the tense relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in Chinese society and culture, the presentation of such a (type of) mother-daughter relationship is more likely to be recognized as a typical representative of "Chineseness".
These (types of) mothers more or less carry the influence of Chinese tradition and culture, and represent China, while the daughters who grew up overseas are undoubtedly the spokespersons of American culture. The personalities of the two are also shaped as opposite ends mainly around the differences between Chinese and Western cultures, and the dramatic conflicts unfold and advance from this.
This kind of narrative mode has defaulted from the beginning that the mother-daughter problem is not simply a communication difficulty or an intergenerational gap, but is based on the premise that Chinese and Western cultures are different. Therefore, no matter what era it is, how globalization develops, and how much mothers are soaked in the culture of settlement, Chinese and American cultures are different, and the similarities are completely erased.
This "difference" not only exists, but is selected, amplified, and circulated, while "similarities" are "disappeared" in the reproduction production of this media age. Therefore, the cultural conflict between China and the West is "a pre-publicized confrontation" hidden in the inner layer of mother-daughter relationship.
The result of the confrontation is often the reconciliation of mother and daughter, but before that, the mother must go through a process of inward self-examination, and this process also points to the family.
In these movies, from the daughter's point of view, the mother often has no empathy and is superior, but at the same time she stubbornly thinks that she is doing what is good for the child.5 Such an image is directly or indirectly derived from Western culture's deep-rooted cognition of "tyrannical and authoritarian" Chinese parents.
This cognition is based on the fact that Western culture believes that Western civilization is more modern and enlightened, and it is also based on the fact that American daughters who have been influenced by Western culture absolutely cannot identify with and understand the Chineseness represented by their mothers.
In "Crazy Rich Asians", the superficially gentle but extremely bossy, Mandarin-speaking mother-in-law played by Lu Yan is a typical Chinese parent, far more traditionally Chinese than Eleanor Young (played by Michelle Yeoh). And Eleanor Young's contempt for Rachel Zhu (played by Constance Wu) is actually copying her mother-in-law's behavior.
The red panda and the curse-removing ceremony in "Turning Red" also appeared among several generations of women as an intergenerational inheritance.
The repetition of history is actually an intergenerational practice of so-called "inheritance". This kind of "inheritance" is manifested as a fixed, rigid, and oppressive practice, and the content of the practice is often incompatible with American culture's ruthless attitude towards Chineseness.
No matter how far or how long the mother in the film is away from home, the imprints and genes of her previous generation will not disappear due to changes in time and space, but instead become stronger and deeper, so that they themselves begin to believe that is their way to survive, the foundation of their foothold, and it is a precious thing like a "family heirloom".
Therefore, they look forward to their daughter's inheritance, and then hope that the family in a foreign country that they have worked so hard to support can be maintained through this treasure. Daughters often become "ungrateful daughters" because they cannot bear the weight and constraints of such expectations.6
Under Eleanor Young's repeated attacks, Rachel Chu finally fell into self-denial because of the "embarrassing" experience of her biological mother and her boyfriend's rich background. In "Turning Red", the mother wept silently and threw herself into Xiaomei's arms; when Joy was about to come out to grandfather, Evelyn rushed to declare her own identity for her daughter.
Once the antagonistic mother-daughter relationship intertwined with the issue of family inheritance is locked as the core of the story, the social relationship connected with the characters will be greatly compressed and simplified. As a result, many problems faced by immigrants, such as racial discrimination, gender discrimination, public violence, etc., are all generalized as problems within the family, or are all traced back to the original family, and blamed on the parent-child relationship.
In other words, it seems that the education of children is only the responsibility of the family, or even the responsibility of the mother. Therefore, motherhood has become the best spokesperson for the crime. From here, we have to think about at least two questions: first, where is the father, and what did the father do? Second, where is the United States and what is the United States doing?
Still from the movie "Turning Red"
In the films mentioned above, the father is, if not completely absent, then silent, powerless, indifferent, and even a direct persecutor. Nevertheless, the father’s negative influence on the family seems to only affect the mother, making the mother appear more masculine and socialized, thus losing the (maternal) softness and affinity that the world expects, and becoming an agent of patriarchy; it has no similar effect on daughters, and even daughters will get closer to their fathers because of this, thinking that fathers are the ones who understand themselves and can help them resist mother's dictatorship.
This kind of family model has both a credible side and a false side in the life of Chinese immigrant to the United States, because women will encounter more difficulties than men no matter where they go, especially in immigrant culture, women seem to naturally echo the world's admiration for the tenacity of survival in difficult situations, as well as the vigilance of the accompanying temperament such as toughness and utilitarianism.
American society has enough space for imagination when it comes to Chinese women, but shows little interest in Chinese men. Naturally, there are historical and political factors, and the role of media representation cannot be ignored.
Firstly, Chinese-American fictional writers in the United States are dominated by women, or female writers are more exposed in the public eye, and most of their brushstrokes fall on female characters. The subsequent film and television adaptations will basically continue to use the original storyline and character relationship, and the image of the father is mostly single and flat in both literary texts and film and television texts;
secondly, most of these stories are set within a framework of family ethics, and their target audiences (readers and viewers) are mainly middle-class American women and Asian women. The father who is out of focus is blind and indifferent.
In reality, take the husband-and-wife Chinese restaurant that is most well-known to the public as an example. The male owner is the chef and the backstage manager, who is not seen or known by the guests, and the role of the cashier and lobby service is often played by the female owner.
Among the people coming and going, everyone knows more about the woman with great social functions, while the man becomes a shadow hidden behind the curtain. As clear as the former is, so vague is the latter. This is how the production of popular knowledge about Chinese immigrant families is constantly copied, disseminated, and stereotyped.
The second question is perhaps more worthy of investigation. Although most of these films set the story background in the United States, the real face of American society is rarely presented. Even though Chinese immigrants like to live together, this does not mean that they have no contact with Americans, nor does it mean that they live in a self-contained and monolithic heterotopia7 that is not connected to American society.
Compared with China's geographical absence, the United States has not played a substantive role despite its geographical presence. All important stories and plots take place within a family or among several families, and even if there are outsiders, they will not lead the insiders to break out. The United States seems to have become an empty place, and the influence of Western culture on the daughter has also become a "factory setting", which has never changed, and is only fine-tuned when the last scene comes. And such a design actually serves a certain invisible operation shared by these films, that is, domesticating Chinese-American films.
Still from the movie "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
Privatized Chinese American Cinema
There is no doubt that the popularity of these films has internal market, political, and economic reasons, but they still largely continue some of the previous content of the Asian American identity crisis, intergenerational relations, and cultural conflicts. They are more family-oriented, which means that they condense many problems in one family, and even tacitly strip away the influence of American social problems on Asian-Americans.
American society is relatively open, but these films almost all default to Asian-American families, especially Chinese-American families, as being very homogeneous. The struggles faced by the characters almost all come from their mothers, and they all come from within the family. Such acquiescence privatizes the lives of Asian Americans and the problems they face as a single family problem, and behind it is not only the privatization of cultural differences, but also the privatization of the real social context.
The selection of the laundry room as Evelyn's living space and working space in "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is an audio-visual presentation of this kind of private domain. Although the laundry room is the most common means of survival for Asian-Americans, washing machines, washing clothes, and tidying clothes are directly regarded as housework activities, and have been tied to women for a long time, so the movie actually domesticates Evelyn's identity as a woman. She is a mother herself, and all her problems come from her family. At the same time, her identity and work are all related to her family.
Whether as a housewife or as a professional woman, the movie sets up a double private domain for Evelyn. The scene at the beginning of the movie fully reflects this point: in the dark light, the mirror that once reflected the picture of a happy family of three leads the audience to the interior of the family; the picture instantly turned into a messy dining table and desk. The camera advances in depth along the mirror, and Evelyn carries the bag into the painting, hangs the bag quickly, and then sits in front of the table surrounded by various furniture and home decorations. The camera slowly zooms in from a panoramic view to a close-up view, and finally fixes on her, making her seem like a trapped person.
In front of her was a pile of laundry bills, while she was actually sitting in her living room. With the arrival of her daughter and customers, we see that the next step she takes out of the living room is actually into the laundry room. Her home and her workplace are so inextricably linked that her work and household chores become one, and she herself is completely confined to this private space.
Under such a design, the social space where the story takes place is completely reduced to the background board, and our eyes are completely directed to the contradictions within the family—the relationship between mother and daughter, without being able to trace its social and institutional roots, and the United States was thus exonerated.
Still from the movie "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
If the film provides the father's way of survival—be kind, then what is the mother's way of survival? In these movies, the mother's survival strategy is the opposite of being kind. They have to be strong to survive in America because their immigrant status is indelible.
The parental relationship we see in Chinese-American movies is different from the division of labor between men and women in general Chinese/American movies, because in the process of survival in Chinese families, the mother’s role is often forced to be kind, otherwise the whole family will find it difficult to survive, but this series of movies do not demonstrate this truth well.
Chinese mothers seem to always be tiger mothers, overwhelming their daughters to the point of suffocation, but no one goes into the social reasons for the formation of this personality or temperament, and no one asks: these mother characters were originally conceived as transnational "Nara" so why do they doubt the validity of American culture and try their best to suppress their daughter's rebellious spirit when they arrive in the America they yearn for? And why did they turn from being traitors of the family order into defenders of it?
There is also a core setting in these films, that is, the characters in the film are anti-diaspora, but this setting is exactly at odds with the development of the plot. In the classic studies on diaspora, even if the diaspora group is in a foreign country, their hearts are still attached to their homeland. What connects the two places is the suspended mentality of this group who wants to go back but can’t go back, and this also constitutes a certain collective unconsciousness, collective imagination and collective temperament of this group.
Although diaspora studies in recent years have moved beyond this scope to include critical discourses such as cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and flexible citizenship8 the so-called "hometown of mind" has also begun to turn to reflections on assimilation into American culture.
However, in these films, separation is the premise for the development of the story, that is, the mother is still influenced by "China" or "Chinese culture" to some extent (this is also an important reason for the mother-daughter confrontation). Paradoxically, this situation never actually unfolds in the story.
Therefore, no matter how diverse Chinese-Americans are experiencing diaspora outside the screen, the end button has already been pressed for diaspora on-screen. This also means that neither the real China nor the imagined "China" is available as the selected object, since US is set to be the only visible option from the start.
This setting, which is different from the earlier films of the same type, not only implicitly blurs the complexity of the contradictions involved, but also subtly diverts the audience's attention from the reality of Sino-US conflicts, immigration, race and other related issues.
In addition, these recently hotly discussed films also intentionally incorporate stories of growth education, and "Turning Red" is the most prominent. This change implies a problem of perspective adjustment. This is not to say that earlier films of this type only started from the perspective of the mother, or were more empathetic to the mother, but rather the perspective of the "daughter" (including not only the perspective of the daughter in the film, but also the perspective of the mother in the film when she was young, as another family's "daughter") becomes more prominent in these films.
Moreover, the mother's own growth process from daughter to mother is pushed to the narrative foreground, and will play a vital role in the "last minute rescue". For example, after the mother-daughter battle in "Turning Red", Xiaomei redeemed her young mother. It is also in this sense that "before the mother became a mother" constitutes an important part of the problem, and the mother's own growth story actually points to how the daughter who left the country can get rid of the bad influence of the Chinese native family.
Taking women as the main characters and combining the two narrative models of bildungsroman and melodrama not only indicates that such films have entered a new round of creative context, but also implies that "the urgency of the task of "saving the city/saving the world" seems to further illustrate that only when the crisis9 occurs, women will be given the responsibility of saving.
The emergence of these recent blockbuster films is evidence of this situation, and "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is the most obvious and powerful example of it. Evelyn was directly set as the "chosen one", shouldering the heavy responsibility of saving the universe, because the fact that she couldn't do anything well proved that she had great potential.
The logic of this is worth digging into: the man from the Alpha universe—Waymond (played by Ke Huy Quan believes that the woman—Evelyn is the savior, so she is. This is exactly the same as "God said let there be light, so there was light". It even reveals a certain disdain for women: what I say you are, you are, why doubt this? The appearance of a male savior is always touted, while the appearance of a female savior only requires confirmation from a male. From this perspective, these films are no more meaningful than "The Chair". The motive is to find a puppet, or even a scapegoat.
Still from the movie "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
In Conclusion
Based on the above analysis, American movies choose Chinese female immigrants to rescue the market, which is the most "politically correct" choice. In the confrontation between mother and daughter, the American-style daughter finally won, and thereby stopped the inheritance of Chinese culture that lasted for several generations, while American society became the key field to resolve this confrontation, but was completely absolved.
However, the Chinese-American film, which has been widely accepted, recognized, and promoted by audiences in China and the United States because of the loud voice of "stop anti-Asian hatred", not only failed to respond positively and deal with this imminent social problem, but instead cleverly circumvents it and strategically avoids the risk of being questioned, which just exposes the real contradiction.
Of course, this does not mean that we should stop eating because of choking, and regard these Chinese-American films as meaningless creations. Instead, they make sense. Regardless of whether it is in terms of genre mixing, character image creation, or the application of film technology, these films have made some progress.
At least the female savior broke out from the male saviors and was seen by more people, and these female saviors hold the initiative a lot of the time. Xiaomei escaped from the family's curse-removing ceremony, returned to her friends, and defeated her "demonized" mother with her "red panda" in her arms, saving everyone.
But it is still worth noting that this limited subjectivity is still based on a subject position given by the male or patriarchal system. Therefore, this is not an excuse for us to give up our vigilance. On the contrary, we should get closer, take the initiative to reach out to uncover that layer of illusion, carefully see the dark hand behind this subjective position, and seriously think about why it pushed the female savior to power at this time, and what it intends to do.
Only in this way can fundamental changes really take place, and we can expect Chinese-American films to usher in a new turn, which is to break the prohibition of private domains, enter the depths of society, and even go to transnational, in the context of globalization, we should face up to the problems that need to be paid attention to and solved urgently.
Still from the movie "The Joy Luck Club"
At the same time, outside the screen, represented by the directors of these films, the new generation of Chinese-American directors, with a mixed attitude different from the older generation, described the curse of "sandwich survival" suffered by Chinese-Americans. It is understandable to turn it into an in-betweenness10 survival advantage of great flexibility and fluidity, and promote the discourse of cosmopolitanism, so as to seek a more flexible and resilient creative path.
However, the middle leap as both a survival strategy and a marker of the subject’s identity is not an inscription-style preaching, but a practice deeply rooted in the specific social and cultural context, which always requires us to stay alert to structural restrictions and potential compromise costs. In other words, the price to be paid for privatizing Chinese-American films and winning the embrace of the mainstream American film industry, is the long-term accumulated criticism of such film creation.
For example, Wayne Wang’s discussion of the so-called Yellow Peril and racial identity stereotyped reflection, the richness and heterogeneity of Chinese Americans shown by Alice Wu through "Saving Face", Ang Lee's filmization of the process of self-disintegration and self-suture of a solid cultural tradition through the "Father Trilogy" (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) etc.
Then, from the film creators to the film recipients, maybe everyone should carefully re-evaluate the gains and losses, and promote the entry of new criticism from a historical and contextual perspective.
Notes:
See also: Hansen Miriam. Babel and Babylons:Spectatorship in,American Silent Film.Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1991:173-187.
Rey Chow.Women in the Holocene: Ethnicity, Fantasy,and the Film The Joy Luck Club.Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life. Carmen Lake(Ed.),New York:State University of New York Press,1996:204-211.
Michel Foucault. What Is an Author?. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch(Eds),New York:W.W.Norton,2018:1394-1409.
See also: Xiangu Qi.Mahjong,Chinese Diaspora Cinema and Identity Construction.East Asian Journal of Popular Culture,2021,7(2):223-240.
In contrast to this type of mother image is the traditional Chinese mother image in Asian male mythology, that are gentle and loving, such as Chen Fala in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, played by Ying Li.
See also: Erin Khue Ninh.Ingratitude:The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature .New York: NYU Press,2011.
See also: Michel Foucault.Of Other Spaces.Jay Miskowiec(Trans),Diacritics,1986,16(1):22-27.Originally published as Des Espace Autres (Conference an Cercle d'hudes architecturales. 14 March 1967).Architecture,Mouvement,Continuire,1984(5):46-49.
See also: Aihwa Ong.flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.United Kingdom,Durham: Duke University Press,1999.
It includes both the crisis of American movies and the crisis of American society.
See also: Xiangu Qi.Mahjong.Chinese Diaspora Cinema and Identity Construction.East Asian Journal of Popular Culture,2021,7(2):223-240.
被复制的母女关系和被私域化的华裔美国电影
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