Like many of my misguided opinions in life, I've often thought of Hong Kong cinema as somehow universally "beneath" that of the Western world based on my very limited exposure as a child. I remember experiencing no small amount of shock that after having seen The Departed in theatres with friends and Infernal Affairs at home - two vastly different takes on the cat-and-mouse game between moles in the police and local crime gang - I had much preferred the latter despite it's slight over-commitment to melodrama and three paper-thin female characters. The acting choices and expressive face of Tony Leung Chiu Wai particularly drew me in. "Wow", I thought, "There are talented people making movies in Hong Kong afterall."

This didn't mean I started watching a plethora of Hong Kong features afterwards. It was hard to find any in the rapidly dying Blockbusters, the bootleg DVDs in the tiny, cramped shops of Chinese strip malls in Richmond could not be trusted to have reliable and accurate subtitles, and trying to find an active torrent seemed an impossibility. Besides, where would I even start? My parents are hardly cinephiles and I didn't have a friend-group or community to glean recommendations from. I made a point to drag my mother out to any release that featured Chinese actors or stories heavily - even sitting through the very uncomfortable sex scenes in Lust, Caution in theatres with her - but that was the extent of it. Unsurprisingly, I gravitated towards films that focused on the experience of second-generation immigrants and their experiences, including but not limited to Saving Face, My Wedding and Other Secrets, Double Happiness, Crazy Rich Asians, and The Farewell.


Today, in an attempt to have a better appreciation for Tony Leung's immense talents and charisma while not feeling comfortable enough to brave the cinemas for Marvel's newest installment -  Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings - I sought out a way to watch the much lauded In the Mood for Love instead. Glory Hallelujah but streaming sites (legitimate or not) have made it so much easier to access more obscure titles, and once I found a link for this movie I jumped on it. It was as visually gorgeous and lush and as emotionally wrought and mildly devastating as I have read about for many (many, many, many) years. I knew of course that for Tony Leung this is a performance that is widely noted as career-defining, having won him the acting award at Cannes. And he was as captivating as expected - much is made of his expressive eyes and it cannot be emphasized enough how incredibly true and accurate all of those plaudits really are. If anyone has a particularly effective longing smolder for the camera, it's him (the last scene in the movie and everything leading up to the culmination of it, ugh). What I didn't expect was how much more this is Maggie Leung's movie, how quietly heartbreaking she is in a way that his character is not quite. Seeing her on her lonely nightly sojourn for noodles, sitting and watching others play mahjong with polite (dis)interest, covering for her boss and his own infidelity, contemplating on how complicated marriage is and the contentment of being single and alone, worrying about the morality of the situation and what the neighbours will think as she seeks emotional comfort from the one person she knows understands her own hurt...

I expected even less to be so emotionally impacted by the Shanghainese influences peppered throughout the movie. The dialect of the landlady and the elderly house attendant, the clothing, the hair, the architecture and personality of the narrow building and the rain-soaked streets, the anxiety about the imminent political changes. These are my maternal grandparents' people in the city my mother grew up in. This time and place - in some ways - has a part in the history of my family roots that I have not seen demonstrated before because I've never gone looking for it.

Perhaps In the Mood for Love was a melancholy way to spend an afternoon, all in the pursuit of staring into Tony Leung's dreamboat gaze. But it turned out to be emotionally productive, one way or another.

(ETA: A summary of our family history as a result of my rekindled Tony Leung infatuation.)

I've written a little bit about the lack of Asian representation in Western media and its effect on me as an Asian-Canadian. Well, here are some resources I want to have for the future: 

(As an aside: I like to try and "pamper" my dad as well, but he's always a hard sell. Paul McCartney's coming to town for a concert? But why would he want to see Paul McCartney, he's not The Beatles! Tickets to the Seahawks game are available? He'd much rather watch the game from the comfort of his own living room anyway. How about going to White Spot for a burger? Eh, he'd rather just have A&W-- no wait, scratch that, he'd rather just have some food from home, thanks. The fact that he said yes to The Beach Boys at the PNE was a huge surprise to me, and that's how I ended up at a Beach Boys concert with six "seniors".)

Movies are an indulgence as well, but it's not often that there's something that both my mom and I are interested in watching. The only sure-bet has been movies featuring Asian characters, which has been far and few between for most of my life. One of my first Christmas presents to my mom was tracking down Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet - a movie she professed to loving and hadn't seen in years. When Lust, Caution came out we watched it together (uncomfortable sex scenes and all) in theaters. I took her to see Crazy Rich Asians, even though I'd already seen it myself, because it was something I wanted to share with her. When The Farewell came out in theaters, it was really only a matter of time.



When my maternal grandmother - who I called MaMa - became very sick, my family tried to convince me that I needn't hurry back to Hong Kong to see her. They couldn't - or wouldn't - tell me what her diagnosis was and told me she would wait until May, likely in denial about how serious her condition was. Unlike Billi, I did not have a particularly close or loving relationship with MaMa. She had been dismissive of me and my parents in the past and my dad had not been on speaking terms with her for over five years. Still, she had mellowed out in those intervening years, and I remember commenting to my mom "I've never seen MaMa smile so much when looking at me before" after a short visit for tea and cake with her in 2013. Beyond all that, she was still my grandma, and I felt compelled to see her. So I chose to fly to Hong Kong for a very tough 5 days to say my own farewell. I read a review that talked about how the conflicts of Billi wanting to be able to properly say goodbye to her grandmother vs Billi struggling with her identity as an Asian and an American do not dovetail nicely and therefore interrupt the rhythms of the movie. But that's the complications of real-life, where you can't just set one or the other neatly aside to be dealt with later. In a different way than Billi, I struggled with both of these things during my time in Hong Kong. I visited MaMa every day, twice a day during that period, and there was only one time that she was awake enough to acknowledge me. But she smiled and nodded when my uncles asked if she knew who I was, and she held my hand. She passed away a month later.

I didn't even get to do that for Bubu. When I returned from my time in Washington, my dad drove me straight from the airport to the hospital. Bubu was sleeping fitfully, oxygen at 95%, heart rate jumping from 45 to 145 beats per minute. Even when she opened her eyes, she didn't seem aware. I had to return to work the next few days and wanted to wait until I could go to the hospital together with my mom. I planned to see her after work on Sunday evening; Bubu passed away early that Sunday morning. Despite being so close for most of my life, I didn't get to say goodbye.

The Farewell feels in many ways like it was made for me, even moreso than Crazy Rich Asians was. We don't all get to fall in love with charming men who are secretly wealthy, but we almost all have to go through the grief of losing a grandparent. And the struggle with fitting in to a culture that I don't feel a part of felt more personal and painful this time around. In one of the last scenes, I looped my arm through my mom's, leaned my head against her shoulder, and cried. I'd thought this movie might be cathartic for both of us, but the movie was so overwhelmingly Billi's that I suspect it only had that effect on me.

Growing up, I spent a reasonable amount of time being entertained by the television. I'd watch Duck Tales, Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers, She-Ra, Care Bears, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and more after school, and my mom bemoaned that on weekends she'd hear me coming early in the morning to ask for permission to tune in to the Saturday morning cartoon line-up. As I've mentioned before, I don't know that I overtly felt the absence of Asian-American representation growing up, especially as a lot of my early programming featured anthropomorphic cartoon animals. I also had the benefit of watching kid's programming in the late 80's and early 90's, where it felt like there was a concerted effort to have a more multicultural representation to reflect what was happening in the real world. 

In this post, I wanted to reflect on the Asian-American characters I distinctly remember from my childhood.  These are characters that were named, have speaking lines, and distinctive personalities. It has been years since I have revisited most of these characters, but if they had enough of a presence to at least leave a memory, they're included here.

One thing I did notice is that there seems to be a lot less representation for young Asian-American boys growing up. I don't doubt that I may be overlooking some characters, but overall it does seem that shows tended to have more female Asian characters than male.



Ah, the early 90's! Maybe it's the rose-coloured glasses talking, but my memories of the 90's was an overall positive one. There was an emphasis on decreasing pollution and preserving our environment, we were taught to embrace multiculturalism, and were constantly told that gender equality was on the rise as women were becoming more powerful in the work force. I felt like I was constantly being promised a better world and... I don't know that I got it. Still, shows like Captain Planet and the Planeteers were dear to my heart, with kids like me being able to harness their respective element to help keep the Earth clean and protect nature. I loved that they had a diverse group of characters from all around the world helping to deliver this message, and I've always had an affinity to water and swimming so it was doubly exciting that Gi - the Asian girl of undetermined ethnicity - was the keeper of the water ring and got to do amazing things like swim with dolphins. Other than that, I don't really recall much more than Gi seeming like a pleasant character who sometimes felt like a secondary character in terms of storylines and personality. Still, it was exciting to see someone who looked like me being part of a team that's goal was to help save the environment!



Look, the Power Rangers was practically a cultural phenomenon when it first came out. Was it maybe a little too on the nose that the Black Ranger was African-American and Yellow Ranger was Asian-American? Yeah, it probably was. But as an elementary school kid, I was thrilled that one of the Rangers was an Asian-American girl! Trini's existence gave me a chance to pretend to be her on the playground and feel like I was "right" for the part. It gave me permission to feel part of something that was huge at my school! Although it wasn't much deeper than that - none of us were watching this show for the writing - it was still very powerful to see an Asian-American kicking monster-butt and getting to also be a hero in the same bombastic manner as her fellow rangers. Power Rangers suffered its share of ridicule - it was a cheesy kids' show after all - but it was very important to me at that time. Although I doubt I would have stuck around long anyway, the fact that Trini was written off the show after the first season definitely played a large part in my general disinterest in the franchise from there on.

I'm a CBC: a "Canadian-Born-Chinese". According to Statistics Canada - I'm a second generation Canadian by definition as I was born in Canada with at least one parent born outside of Canada (both parents, in my case). I am also a beneficiary of birth tourism. With the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China looming only about a decade away and all the uncertainty surrounding it, my parents arranged for my mother to visit her parents and brother in Canada so that I could be born a Canadian citizen. They reasoned that should things go badly south with China before they could immigrate, at least Canada would not be able to refuse me. So my mom visited her family in Canada, I was born, and a month later we were back on a plane to Hong Kong where my dad would meet me for the first time.

About two years later, my parents qualified to immigrate to Canada through the points system and we were on our way back to the good old Canadian soil. Suffice it to say, I have no memories of my two years in Hong Kong and that plays a large part in why I have much more strongly identified with being Canadian for almost all of my life. I remember my pre-school days in a suburb of Toronto, where there was a reasonable number of Asian children in my classroom and I could speak English and Cantonese at almost equal opportunity on the playground. When we moved across the country to Vancouver, I was suddenly one of maybe ten Asian kids in my entire elementary school. I immediately felt the difference on the playground, noticing - as much as a five year-old can - that I was having a harder time making new friends. I was suddenly not only contending with being the "new kid" in Grade 1, I was also the kid who looked very different from everyone else. I took to wandering around the playground looking for other Chinese kids and eagerly asking if they could speak Cantonese. Two were new immigrants from Taiwan so we were at an impasse for communication, one was a third generation CBC who couldn't speak any Chinese dialect, and the final one was a girl a year older than me who was in almost the exact same situation. We started to wave to each other when walking home separately with our families, and soon our parents connected over this and became friends so that we also became playmates. 

(I did also make friends with two other girls in my class who were not Asian. We became the oddball trio of the classroom, and that is a status I don't feel I ever quite left behind, especially through my pre-University days).

It was during these early days where I really felt my "otherness" for the first time in my life. I was young and not very bright, and really all that mattered to me was that I had friends I could play with. It had never occurred to me prior to this that my being Chinese made me different enough for it to be of note. Of course, I grew up in a very sheltered neighbourhood during a time when Canada really embraced the mosaic narrative and heavily emphasized it in our education, so I lived a fairly uneventful childhood. Sure, there were the occasional comments about the Asian stereotype of getting good grades, but I don't even recall that many microaggressions being aimed at me during this period of my life. The only overtly racist incident I experienced was a passing adult making an offhand remark about my eating dogs when I was walking dogs with a (Caucasian) friend. Honestly, if she hadn't been so offended on my behalf, I probably wouldn't have even noticed because it was a reference I did not understand.

Much has been made in recent years about the lack of diversity and Asian-American representation in the media and the accompanying negative effects it can have. Like many of my generation, this is something I recognized and acknowledged as I became older and learned to question why I didn't see myself reflected in popular media. Something as simple as finding a character costume for a themed party would make me realize how few options I really had. I don't know that I necessarily set out to find shows, movies, or characters that were Asian, but I kept my eye out for them and would make a point to watch them if I was able. I've certainly used search engines to look up Asian characters in Western media, wondering if I've missed any important ones. So I thought I'd make a list for myself - that way I have something to review and reflect on that is meaningful to me.

I'm going to be using "Asian- American " because - as far as I am aware - there is not a blanket term that encompasses those of Asian ethnicity who grew up in Anglosphere countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and USA). "Westernized Asians" doesn't seem quite the right fit either because that doesn't necessitate growing up in an environment as a visible minority, which I think is one of the defining characteristics of an Asian-American. Also of note: I'm not going to pretend that this list is exhaustive. I don't have any kind of educational background or credentials that make me remotely qualified to reflect on or critique Asian-Americans in popular media. On top of this, I am going to be mostly covering East-Asian representation in Western media, especially with a focus on the "Chinese-American" experience. I do this not because other cultures are better represented (they're not), but because I can only speak for myself and reflect on my own experiences! After all, this is a "fun project" for me in my spare time in a journal that no one reads!

My plans to sit and relax at home with no obligations on my schedule did not quite pan out! After feeding my grandmother breakfast at the care home, I got ready to join some colleagues from work for an impromptu brunch and then one of them hung out at my apartment until it was time for her personal training session. That gave me enough time to start laundry before dinner with my mom, and now it's bed time! It was probably all for the best, since I needed to not wallow. My mood is improved anyhow; we'll see if that lasts through the next two work days!

In other news, it looks like there will continue to be some steps towards greater representation for people of colour in the media, which I am excited about! I never thought I'd see the day where there would be a Jane Austen-style period piece featuring actors of varied ethnicities, and certainly not in leading roles!

Alas, the cough persists! Although I have regained a croaky version of my regular voice - enough to make an attempt at being back to work now that I can feasibly hold a conversation and be heard over the phone. All these years my philosophy with work has been "if you show up and they send you home, then you probably need a sick day." And so, in the five years since I have embarked on this career, I have gone to work with a minor concussion, a nasty cat bite that required IV antibiotics, any number of raging headaches and stomach cramps, as well as your run-of-the-mill cold, flu, and gastrointestinal disasters. Well, joke's on me! It turns out that having a voice is kind of vital to my carrying out my veterinarian duties! So I texted my amazing bosses that my inability to speak may impede my effectiveness as a veterinarian and they arranged to cover my shift so I could take one of these fabled "sick days".

But I am no layabout! My parents raised me to show up and fulfill whatever duty is expected of me, sick days be damned!

(Except for that one time my dad told me to stay home and take a mental health break back when I had a job where sick days weren't just an impossible dream. My dad really loves me, you see, but we'll cover that later).

(Also my mom always gets very upset on my behalf when I explain to her why I can't just call in a sick day whenever I'm not well, on account of there not really being "last-minute substitute veterinarian"" system in place and our patients need to be seen and the hospital needs an income to pay all the staff, etc etc. Because she also really loves me. So, basically my parents were probably only tough on the concept of "sick days" when I was a child and they thought I might be faking it. But I digress.)

So with great confidence, I texted the head receptionist yesterday that although I would sound hoarser than chain-smoker, I was definitely going to be at work today. I walked in with a smile and croaked out a hello to the reception team this morning and assured them I was just fine.

.... that illusion lasted all of ten minutes, when a particularly bad coughing fit had me sprinting for the one bathroom located in the reception area. I emerged with my surgical face mask firmly in place (leaning hard into that Asian stereotype) and watery eyes, and their sympathetic looks told me that there was no way they could even politely pretend to ignore all the retching noises they'd been forced to listen to. Our head receptionist (one of the partners of the clinic) didn't miss a beat. "Let's take a look at your day and see what we can do," she said, like this wasn't going to throw a massive wrench in the day to be able to offer less appointments when we are usually booked solid with a waiting list of irate clients. But she blocked off the few emergency spots I had left and called a number of clients to try and get them in earlier so I could come home and collapse in a heap while my loyal cat continues to throw me irritated looks when a coughing fit interrupts her twenty-third catnap of the day.

The whole day everyone was lovely and sympathetic to me. One of the technicians kept bringing me cups of "throat-soothe" tea, everyone tried to minimize how much I had to speak and checked in on me. My clients almost uniformly thanked me for seeing them and tacked on a "I really hope you feel better soon!" And one of my bosses finished her procedures early and offered to cover my late afternoon appointments because she wanted me home to rest and recover.

These are the times when I pinch myself and think "I still can't believe I work here. I don't deserve it!"

Of course there are the less pleasant occurrences, like the man who arrived screaming about his dog getting into a cocaine pipe and refusing our urgent advice to take the dog to the emergency clinic. Or our phone provider being down and only some calls getting through, which many clients reacted to by flooding the receptionists with rude e-mails. But that kind of thing would happen at any veterinary clinic. Also I really believe everyone should be forced to work a customer service job once in their life so that they might deign to remember that there are human beings on the other end who are honestly trying their best to make things work.


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My being sick has also been another reminder about just how wonderful my parents really are. The older I get, the more I'm exposed to the various dysfunctional relationships that can exist within families. And I won't pretend those same dysfunctions don't exist in my relationships with some of my extended family. But my parents and I? We are totally solid.

(Oh god, please let me not have jinxed it.)

I live close but not too close to my parents - enough that it's easy enough to drop by, but only if you really feel like it. So upon hearing that I was sick, they came on five different occasions between the two of them to ensure I had some kind of nutrition, or to drop off various nutraceuticals or health-boosting gadgets. They checked in with me frequently to track my progress and my dad probably would have been by to cook every meal for me if I had asked. He's never been the kind of person to be very demonstrative with affection, but the one way he does it is through his cooking. When he made me a massive pot of soup filled with healthy ingredients that he'd chopped up into small pieces to make it easier to swallow,that was his way of telling me how much he loves me.




So of course when I watched Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman last night on a whim, I was a bit verklempt. Because that's my dad. He's not a professional chef by any means, though many of my early memories have me sitting in the back kitchen of some kind of fast food or restaurant joint he used to work at. But he loves to cook for people, loves to watch them eat his food and see the enjoyment on their faces. I still joke about the time he came to visit me in Australia for two weeks and how my housemates were sadder than I was when he left because they'd gotten used to him cooking three hot meals and various snacks throughout the day for us and our friends. Cooking is how he communicates to us that he cares, and it's not unusual for him to call me and say in Cantonese "Have you eaten yet?", because that's how he checks up on me.

My dad is also frustratingly like the father character in the movie in that all his recipes are in his head. Many a time I asked him to give me a recipe while I was in Australia, craving some of that home-cooked taste, and every time I had to throw in the towel because his instructions were almost impossible to follow and he'd usually end with "I don't have a recipe, I just know." Unfortunately I do not have an innate talent for cooking or admittedly any kind of inclination to spend a ton of time in the kitchen. One Christmas my parents (but really my dad) asked me to buy them a sous vide, and I asked for some recipes of the staple dishes I grew up with in exchange. I have yet to receive anything more than a list of ingredients ("That's basically a recipe!" my mom insists) despite all the badgering, and part of me is terrified that if I don't get them, that's a huge chunk of my childhood - of my parents - lost. Every once in awhile I resolve to sit in the kitchen with him and take notes and try to quantify things in a way he never has in cooking, because I know my limits.

I wouldn't say that I see our relationship reflected exactly in the way the father and the middle daughter interacted in the movie, but there was certainly a rocky period between us when his own complicated relationship with his mother was breaking down and my life was very much in limbo, living at home with a decent, steady job but no great career options . But as I've gotten older and more settled about my own place in life and (crucially, I think) moved out, our relationship has only improved. I'm also much more aware now that he is getting older, and the idea that one day he may not be around is something I can't even consider at this time. So now we argue about who shovels when it snows (I usually win and am rewarded with a meal), or who will carry a heavy suitcase up the stairs (he usually wins, it's a matter of pride). And when he asks me to come over for dinner, I rarely say no anymore because now I can recognize the meaning behind it.