Chinese Version
03-08-2019
Today, while flying back from Boston to Beijing to celebrate my father’s 90th birthday, I watched the movie “Joy Luck Club” again on the airplane. This is a film about the cultural and generation gap between China-born mothers and ABC daughters, I still shed tears during many scenes in the film, and I felt age also stimulated new feelings towards many plotlines.
In 1995, when my daughter was two years old, I ran into a middle school classmate at George Mason University in Virginia where I took my computer science courses before switching from chemistry to software. He told me: “‘The Joy Luck Club’ talks about the generation gaps between mothers who grew up in China and daughters who grew up in the United States. You have a daughter. It’s worth watching it. ” So I rented the video tape of “Joy Luck Club” to watch it carefully at home and I learnt not to be too strong of a mother like Lindo in the movie.
On the plane, I sat next to a born-in-the-80s mother of two daughters. We chatted casually and I learnt from her that she earned her Ph.D. degree in agriculture in the United States, that she is the only child of her parents, and that her family last name is Chi. This is the first time she and her husband brought their two preschool-age daughters back to China. Seeing me watching “Joy Luck Club” with tears, Dr. Chi asked: “This is an old movie, as I never heard of it before. Is it good? “
I said, “The film tells a few stories about the generation gap between mothers grew up in China and daughters grew up in the United States. You have daughters. It’s worth seeing. “
More than 20 years later, I passed the same message to a young China-born mother of “Joy Luck Club”, which is worth watching, because it reveals the challenges of dealing with cultural differences between China and the United States.
On the airplane, after watching the Joy Luck Club, I once again felt the ordinary human-sustaining nature of being a mother as well as the beauty of Chinese culture in terms of food and clothing. I also had a new discovery based on my previous reaction towards this movie.
In 1995, I was surprised to see the standing sex scene in the “Joy Luck Club” for the first time, so I remembered it.
In 2019, when watching the once surprising scene in “Joy Luck Club”, I immediately noticed this scene was shot in the hall of the main building of Filoli garden. Actually, “Joy Luck Club” borrowed the Filoli garden to shoot many scenes that took place in Shanghai in the 1940s. The movie of “Joy Luck Club” I liked came across with my favorite Filoli garden in Silicon Valley, which made the movie more personalized and interesting for me.
Recalling of the couplet of Jingxi Pavilion in Yongan temple in Beihai Park: “Stillness suits contentment. No need of long journey to grasp (悦性适应静，会心何必遐).”
Comprehending heartedly without going far requires a hardened mind.
Little Episodes
1. List of movies on the flight:
2. One of scenes in movie “Joy Lucky Club”:
3. The main building of Filoli garden (03-18-2018):
5. The Hall in the main building of Filoli Garden (03-18-2018):
