Tim Wong: Absorbing culture from film

As far back as I can remember, Eat Man Drink Woman, was the first Asian language film I ever saw. There were, vaguely, a series of encounters with several prime Bruce Lee movies - probably low-grade, English-dubbed VHS bootlegs - which were far too violent experiences for my age. There's also the memory of being repulsed at the sight of a bloody, tortured body hanging from chains in another Bruce Lee film, Enter the Dragon, and again in an earlier scene involving a fleeing girl and a very large, unruly shard of glass.

But mostly, I recall being coerced into a family outing to see Ang Lee's Taiwanese film about food, family and food at Wellington's long-standing Paramount theatre - quite reluctantly - because my only conception of the movies at that point revolved around animation, science fiction and Indiana Jones.

When you're that age, the slope of the theatre seems so much steeper; the screen so much wider; the movie so much more visceral. While overwhelmed on two out of three of those accounts, Eat Man Drink Woman was not visceral; in fact, I know the whole ordeal was profoundly uninteresting. There was also the trivial matter of the film not sounding English, having to read instead of watch, and toughing out a slight adolescent moment of self-conscious embarrassment during a scene of half-clothed love making (you know, when watching with parents).

The film, as such, didn't exactly change my life. And having lived the sheltered, bourgeois suburban upbringing to the hilt, it's hard to imagine that I was equipped to respond to such a film at such an age. But it's an object of nostalgia for me nonetheless, and has the significance of remaining my first true, foreign, out-of-comfort-zone experience. More importantly, it also seems to represent a certain cultural ambivalence in my 12 short years of life at that point; on the one hand, I was unquestionably Chinese; on the other, I had been assimilating myself into a New Zealand culture and lifestyle since as young as I could remember.

It's also nostalgic for me to remind myself from time to time what I thought of my own "culture" back then. I used to hate the Cantonese language. Not only did it sound abrasive (unlike French, which I actually took up), but those who spoke it talked loudly enough too. Traditional Lion dances and classical Chinese operas would scare me. I would puzzle over why other Chinese were so round and inflamed and had red cheeks all the time. Most of all, I questioned - as one does during an impressionable childhood - why I wasn't quite the same as the others.

As a therapist might tell me, these are all common, natural uncertainties that any child experiences when growing up. I think most would also agree that, with age and progressive maturity, those of scattered descent come to eventually identify more strongly with their inherent culture than ever before. In a strange and slightly self-important way, Eat Man Drink Woman fostered a slow but gradual revival in an interest with this person, me, even though I still concede to disliking many things about my "self" at that fledging point of my life, including the occasional (but usually unintended) racial slur, or the crude, violent Chinese television serials my Grandmother liked to watch, somewhat irresponsibly when we were around. (One soap opera had a woman going at her husband, cowering in bed, with a bloodied axe - apparently a frequent outcome.)

This was, I stress, a terribly slow process, and it wasn't until several years later that I was spurred in the same way again. Although this all happened unintentionally, there was an element of serendipity in my next encounter which took place in the now-defunct King Wah restaurant that resided beneath, appropriately, the Paramount.

The establishment - which doubled as a late-night Karaoke bar and boasted an array of ceiling-mounted television screens - was half-empty that afternoon, so it probably occurred to one of the owners to fill the void with a little ambience.

Usually the only thing you ever see on these TVs is a bad karaoke rendition of Happy Birthday or the occasional bout of Canto-pop. On this day, however, appears a movie: it's in Cantonese, without subtitles and makes no sense whatsoever, having begun half way through. I'm both confused and slightly irritated - this was a restaurant, after all - but I watch, and it's just about the most amazing thing I've ever seen: a baroque martial arts extravaganza where everybody flies, knows kung fu, coughs blood, can bend their swords, get sucked into the middle of the desert and wear too much makeup - but only if you're the bad guy.

The film is Dragon Inn, although I wouldn't know this until 4, maybe 5 years later after inadvertently renting it and finally, putting two-and-two together. This is not the proverbial King Hu classic of 1966, nor the recent Tsai Ming-liang homage to, but a garish early 90's remake that is, with the best intentions, a mixture of unrestrained spectacle and excessive Hong Kong camp. I know I'm still indifferent about the film (it is, after all, a remake), but it is both at once a revelation and a guilty pleasure of mine. Of course, it's shameless fun, and is what I like to think Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon should have been - so totally imperfect. But it's also so perfectly Asian; a film that could not come from or exist anywhere else in the world.

I'm fiercely proud of this sort of cinema, perhaps in the same way that New Zealanders are so embracing and protective of Lord of the Rings.

There's nothing remotely accurate or profound about Dragon Inn, yet there are so many things that I can - for once - identify with; that everyone speaks noisy Cantonese; that it stars Maggie Cheung and Brigitte Lin; that there are faces on screen that actually look something like I do. And unlike the universal notions of Eat Man Drink Woman, Dragon Inn is explicitly and uniquely of Chinese theme and origin. Asian cinema - or in this instance, Hong Kong cinema - is revelatory for this very reason: it's something tangible that is indicative of my culture, something that I can now appreciate and something that is impossible to be ashamed of.

This writer, like many, is a second generation New Zealander, one of Chinese descent. And for me, there's been something lopsided about this description for a while - too much of the New Zealand, not enough of the Chinese. Before rediscovering Dragon Inn, I rented John Woo's The Killer and A Better Tomorrow; viewed Tsui Hark's Once Upon A Time in China; reveled in the irresponsibility of Jackie Chan's Police Story; watched Jet Li explode in Fist of Legend and fly in The Tai Chi Master; cried just a little during Zhang Yimou's Not One Less; attended the Incredible Film Festival screening of Butterfly & Sword.

This wasn't so much an indulgence in a love for the movies (actually, it was), but something of a reacquaintance with a half of myself that I think - wait, I know - I consciously neglected for years.

I'm well aware that it sounds completely self-absorbed to attribute such life change and cultural epiphany to a mere obsession with moving images, but isn't Nick Hornby the same, fixated narcissist when writing about music? I think he is.

Movies aren't necessarily as versatile or omnipresent as music is; cinema exists on a projected surface; music can be heard almost anywhere. Hornby lost his virginity to Rod Stewart; me and the movies just can't compete with that. But aren't movies great? What they lack in musical ubiquity they surely make up for in their ability to tell stories, construct grand narratives and transcend cultures through the universal language of cinema. And subtitles. Don't you love movies?

What I'm grasping at here - and it has nothing to do with losing virginity - is that movies are important, maybe not in terms of social change or world peace or egalitarianism, but because they're international. On a superficial level, they're just a form of throwaway entertainment. On another, they're historical artifacts, recording devices or cultural insights. The kind of Asian films I've grown into may perpetuate cultural stereotypes rather than displace them (no, not every Asian knows Kung Fu), but of course, that doesn't matter to me; they're meaningful simply because they don't feel foreign, even though I've still a lot to learn. And having finally quit being apathetic for this culture of mine, an indulgence in Asian cinema is merely one way of making up for lost time.

Yet, this indulgence isn't entirely responsible for such a coming-of-age (see, even my life's a genre). I've wanted to start learning the language since, have become strangely attached to rice, and know that the increasing amount of (female) Asian pedestrians in the country is but a good thing. This is me, I take it, just getting older and possibly a little wiser. But I like to think those movies - Eat Man Drink Woman, Dragon Inn, and in more recent years, Chungking Express, In The Mood For Love, Yi Yi and Unknown Pleasures - have had at least something to do with it. You could call it a sudden urge, one that friends and family have satisfied by traveling straight to the source of dislocation. I'll get to that, one day, but in the meantime am quite happy to meet them half way there - from my own living room.

* Tim Wong is the Founding Editor of the Lumiere Reader, an online journal dedicated to film criticism and review.