Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 78
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Popular Culture Review
Tan’s thematic preoccupation with balanced portrayals of women’s lives in the
two countries. In the movie, however, several changes have been made to accen
tuate how hopeless things are in China while pointing to the possibilities of recon
ciliation of life in America. The movie version of The Joy Luck Club keeps intact
all the negative portrayals of life in China. From the practice of child bride to the
custom of concubines and to abandoned children, the movie paints a dark picture
in which the audience sees no light of hope but only oppression and exploitation.
It is true that in the movie, as is in the book. Tan portrays some very strong female
characters whose determination to fight against adversity is as strong as their long
ing for change. But the portrayal of the mothers’ lives in China seems to result as
much from the script writers’ determination to expose the darkness of the old China
as from their awareness of the appeal of exoticism and their eagerness to placate
the viewers’ sense of complacency. The strategy apparently worked. When Annette
Bening hosted a private LA screening of the movie, she warned guests to get out
their handkerchiefs; the movie “is a five-star tear-jerker.” After viewing the movie,
as Tan recalls, one of the first things her mother said was: “So many bad things in
China; it wasn’t that bad.”^
In comparison to the mothers’ struggles in China, though, the daughters’
marriages, as they are portrayed in the movie, carry a reconciliatory tone. Waverly
Jong and her boyfriend Rich’s is not so much a struggle of cultural misunderstand
ing as a way for Waverly to impress her mother and get even with her. In the book.
Rose Hsu Jordan finalizes her divorce from Ted Jordan by insisting on keeping the
house. But in the movie, the two have reconciled resulting not so much from a
logical development of the plot as from deus ex machina. The only divorced couple
in the movie are Lena St. Clair and Harold Livotney. With a name like Harold
Livotney, the character apparently was not conceived as Asian American. But in
the movie, the role is played by an Asian American actor whose stinginess only
further confirms some of the cultural stereotypes about Asian people: penurious,
cheap, petty, and dishonest.
Amerasian author Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s Thousand Pieces o f Gold is
a creative non-fiction. First published in 1981, the book helped to blaze new trails
in the development of a new literary genre. It was also one of the first books which
started the movement for Asi an Americans to reclaim their voice, history, and iden
tity. The movie version of the book, however, seems to follow the formulaic Hol
lywood approach in its portrayal of characters’ experience in China and in the
United States. In the opening of the movie, the audience are again reminded of a
country tom by war and its people tortured by bandits, famine, and other calami
ties. Unlike the book which devotes nine chapters to describing the main character
Lalu’s tender and caring relationship with her parents, the movie shows a glimpse
of a heartless man who sells his daughter for money, a man who shows no con-