Lucius (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} luciusk) wrote,@ 2007-11-16 20:21:00 |
|
Joy Luck Club (1993)
I must have seen this movie about 10 years ago but I don't remember it, and then a few months ago I read the book. And today I saw the movie again. The book was better: more detailed, with more depth to the characters and less of an impression that all the old Chinese women did was dispense old Chinese wisdom in broken English. The original book was a collection of short stories, each one with enough material to fill out a 2-hour feature film, so single movie of the 16 stories is going to be missing a lot of detail, or even entire stories that didn't make the final cut.
What's there is good, though it really only scratched the surface of each character. A movie can convey visual, audio, and emotional content much better than words on a page.
I find myself thinking about my own parents and the parents of other first-generation Chinese, and everything they've had to deal with, and the things we take for granted. Our parents, the ones who gave up everything in China to start anew in a strange country, are not the kind of people to be satisfied with what they have. They needed ambition and discipline to go through the long and expensive trans-Pacific journey (flight, in my parents' case), and then to stay in a land where they could hardly speak the language and faced discrimination in the wake of the conflict in Vietnam.
There are many other issues that the book touches on, and while the movie gives a very emotional treatment on a lot of them, the book is where you really start to ask yourself the important questions. Questions about your own relationship with your parents. I still disagree with many of their values and beliefs, but at least I know to ask about where they came from and how they came to their beliefs before I judge them.
And it makes me want to write a memoir of their lives.
I must have seen this movie about 10 years ago but I don't remember it, and then a few months ago I read the book. And today I saw the movie again. The book was better: more detailed, with more depth to the characters and less of an impression that all the old Chinese women did was dispense old Chinese wisdom in broken English. The original book was a collection of short stories, each one with enough material to fill out a 2-hour feature film, so single movie of the 16 stories is going to be missing a lot of detail, or even entire stories that didn't make the final cut.
What's there is good, though it really only scratched the surface of each character. A movie can convey visual, audio, and emotional content much better than words on a page.
I find myself thinking about my own parents and the parents of other first-generation Chinese, and everything they've had to deal with, and the things we take for granted. Our parents, the ones who gave up everything in China to start anew in a strange country, are not the kind of people to be satisfied with what they have. They needed ambition and discipline to go through the long and expensive trans-Pacific journey (flight, in my parents' case), and then to stay in a land where they could hardly speak the language and faced discrimination in the wake of the conflict in Vietnam.
There are many other issues that the book touches on, and while the movie gives a very emotional treatment on a lot of them, the book is where you really start to ask yourself the important questions. Questions about your own relationship with your parents. I still disagree with many of their values and beliefs, but at least I know to ask about where they came from and how they came to their beliefs before I judge them.
And it makes me want to write a memoir of their lives.
