Paper details:

The movie I chose is “The Wedding Banquet” by Ang Lee. I have written the proposal and summary. The file is attached. Each student chooses a primary text by or about Chinese American experience from or outside the class reading: novel, short story, memoir, graphic novel, live-action film, animation, documentary, TV show, MTV, Vlog, advertisement, multi-media text, etc., and complete a critical analysis. The final project should include the following components: A critical analysis essay (100pts): your analysis essay should be 1400-2000 words, and will be evaluated according to the criteria listed on the syllabus.

“The Wedding Banquet” by Ang Lee

Proposal

For my final project, the critical analysis essay, I chose the movie “The Wedding Banquet” (Xi yan in Chinese) by Ang Lee. This is a 1993 romantic comedy film about a gay Taiwanese immigrant man who marries a mainland Chinese woman to placate his parents and get her a green card. But things got out of control after his parents came to the United States. The movie director Ang Lee is a famous director in Hollywood, whose movie including Life of Pi and Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee was growing in China Taiwan and went to the United States to finish his college education, and started his career at American (By the way he completed his bachelor’s degree at UIUC). Ang Lee's life experience allows him to have both the essence of traditional Chinese culture and an open field of mind and vision.

Based on this movie, the main topics I will discuss on this project are the difference between Chinese immigration and American-born Chinese, the ethical dispute in Chinese immigrant families, the conflict between traditional Chinese culture and new generation.

The reason why I think my topics are important is these issues really exist among Chinese immigration and they are really mattered in the life. I think that only by understanding the identity problem can we truly understand the Chinese-American world. In this lesson, we have come into contact with many works about Chinese Americans. Most of them have one unchanging theme, that is, the Chinese-American are searching for their identity. I think the search for identity has two meanings, one is more common, that is, the identity between American and Chinese. The second meaning is the identity between traditional Chinese culture and modern culture.

From now to the due day, I will focus on this project. I planning to watch this movie twice. And reading some reviews of this it. I will also carefully read the comments from my classmates which really helpful for me.

Summary

Wai-Tung Gao is an immigration on American from China Taiwan, and he is living in Manhattan with his gay couple Simon. But his tradition-minded parents, who are back in hometown, don’t know anything about this. They are so eager to see Gao get married and get a baby with his wife in order to continue the family line which is so important in traditional Chinese culture and also in most of the Chinese family now. Therefore, his parents keep introducing women to Gao. In order to stop this, Gao decided to have a fake marriage with his tenants, Weiwei, an artist from mainland China who do need a green card to stay in American. Besides to help Weiwei, Gao and Simon also hope this fake marriage can placate Gao’s parents. But everything is lost control with the visit of Gao’s parents. Mr. and Mrs. Gao are visited from Taiwan and they decided to hold an extravagant wedding for their Son. But after a simple wedding hold on the city hall, his parents are extremely unsatisfied, therefore they are holding magnificent wedding banquet to recover this. After the banquet, Gao is super drunk and has sex with Weiwei. Weiwei are pregnant after this night. Until now, things totally lost control. Simon is extremely upset, Weiwei don’t want to keep this child, and Mr. Gaohas another stroke after he found out everything. After a family meeting, Mr.Gao said he will treat Simon as his son as well; Weiwei decided to keep this child and ask Simon to stay together and be the second father of this baby. Finally, Mr. and Mrs.Gao returned to the home.

Bibliography

Wei Ming Dariotis, Eileen Fung. "Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and Displacement in the Films of Ang Lee." in Hsiao-peng Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. p. 212. 1997.

Roger Ebert. “The Wedding Banquet.” 27 August 1993.

           https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-wedding-banquet-1993

Micheal D. Klemm. “Going to the chapel.” CinemaQueer.com. 2009.