> a paper chain of movies
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: movies!
Hello friend,
My cousins took me to see a film at one of those movie theaters in the mall. Top floor, stains on the carpet, no popcorn, no drink, thank you. It was hot, like all the summer days in southern China, and I was nineteen. My last teenage summer.
The movie was Wolf Warrior II, an action flick about a Chinese ex-special forces agent dropped in an unspecified African country. I didn’t realize it until looking it up just now but I guess the movie made a lot of money, like a lot of money, like “highest-grossing non-English film of all time” a lot of money.
Honestly, I thought I wouldn’t understand most of it, but it was fine. I didn’t realize that you don’t have to know everything about a language to watch a movie. And that sometimes watching a foreign film without knowing all of the language can be its own kind of entertainment.
Anyway, I didn’t like the movie, but I kept thinking about the American love interest. The actress, Celina Jade, is Hong Kong-American, I think, and her Asian American-ness made me want to project onto her. She spoke English, she spoke a little Chinese, and she was in a movie. I always feel a little displaced in China, and it was cool to see a celebrity like her.
That summer, I was feeling other kinds of distance, too. During that trip, I felt like all my cousins were becoming grown-ups. My cousins were working marketing, having babies, studying for college entrance exams, finding college girlfriends. What happened to lazy afternoons playing card games, buying popsicles by the playground across the street?
Part of the reason I wanted (and still want) to learn Chinese is to speak with my extended family, to try and stay in touch. I called one of my Chinese cousins pretty regularly over the summer, the one who works in New York now, and he gave me a lot of movie recommendations.
My cousin recommended Farewell My Concubine 霸王别姬 first (I think it’s his favorite film), but also some Taiwanese movies—A Sun (陽光普照) and Dear Ex (誰先愛上他的). I liked all the movies (I liked Farewell My Concubine best).
When I watch movies in Chinese, it’s easy to want to flick on the English subtitles, but I’ve been trying to watch them without. Sometimes it’s a painful process. When I watched Farewell My Concubine, I paused the film probably once every minute just to look something up. If I got tired of translating, I just let the movie roll and tried to figure out what was going on by context. If I was really confused, I kept the Wikipedia page open while watching.
In quarantine, I watched more movies than I usually would. On the plane ride over, I watched Nina Wu (灼人秘密). On one of our first quarantine days, a group of us watched Dear Ex (誰先愛上他的). I watched Suzhou River (苏州河), a recommendation from someone’s Chinese film class. I watched Your Name Engraved Herein (刻在你心底的名字) with another Fulbrighter from Indiana and fellow English major, which was lovely. I tried not to use English subtitles while watching (although I regularly used Wikipedia). And even though I probably won’t remember most of the words I looked up or wrote down, it was fun to watch, to try to listen closely.
I wouldn’t call myself a movie person, but suddenly there are so many movies in Chinese that I want to watch, mostly because my friends like them. Dearest (亲爱的). Shower (洗澡). In the Mood for Love (花樣年華). Black Snow (本命年). Yi Yi (一一). It’s like a pretty paper chain of recommendations that makes me feel connected to people, which is what I wanted from learning Chinese, anyway.
Cheers,
Tiffany