For my weekly solitary movie-watching, I saw Saving Face. It is already typefied in the genre of Asian-American-daughter-caught-in-a-culture-clash-of-an-Asian-mother.

Typical. I did like Joy Luck Club. The Wedding Banquet. And the movie was still good. Yet, what bothers me about these movies is that sometimes the culture is really not there. What Saving Face did well was that there are some asian families that aren\’t that tied to their cultural roots. Some do accept things new to them. Homosexuality. Non-asians. Forgetting to take off shoes at the door. Not eating with chopsticks.

Still. When I write about my own life, I find that I rarely refer to my asian heritage. It just hasn\’t been a big part of my life, growing up in a predominantly Caucasian community. My parents too didn\’t demand that my sister and me stick closely to Chinese traditions. Sure, we did eat dinner with chopsticks and my mom did lay the stove with alumninum foil. Yes, there were Chinese paintings in the house. Yet, there wasn\’t any extreme awkwardness of inviting people over who would be surprised by a different culture. My parents, as far as I know, don\’t participate in the so-called Asian gossip. They don\’t know how to play mah jong or make open belittling comments about who got fat, who was in an affair, etc. (although I remember my Uncle made a comment once about my sister and me – both of us were incredibly insulted…) Only recently have my parents got involved with Chinese soaps. To this day, I don\’t understand yeet hay aka hot air…and the balance of hot and cold. Maybe I am too Americanized.

The strange thing is that my friends at Berkeley taught me the most about it all–when I took time to be part of the Asian student assocations such as the CSA, TSA, HKSA. Not that I regret not knowing my heritage, it just hasn\’t been a big part of my life to begin with.

But then, perhaps that was the point of the movie. It just so happened that the characters are Asian. And that they could be any other ethnicity. It\’s interesting how people complain that Asians are not predominant in the media. But the reason that is…is because we still believe that Asians need a purpose–a cultural purpose–to appear in a movie. Whereas it\’s not the same for African Americans or even Latinos. The cultural reason is not there anymore. And was that why it felt almost out of place that Sandra Oh was in Sideways? But she was good in Double Happiness.