Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart: Family Style

By Brian Hu

Essays—

Aug 15, 2023

<em>Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart: </em>Family Style
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Wayne Wang is perhaps best known as a cinematic chameleon. Working both inside and outside of the Hollywood ecosystem, he has consistently demonstrated a restless curiosity about a wide range of cultures and filmic traditions. In addition to directing two of the landmark movies of the 1980s and ’90s—his solo debut film, Chan Is Missing (1982), helped usher in the eighties independent-cinema movement and was the first Asian American film to receive mainstream attention, and the hit The Joy Luck Club (1993) was the first Hollywood film directed by and starring Asian Americans—he has taken on projects that vary significantly in size and style. From the explicit Las Vegas drama The Center of the World (2001) to the girl-and-her-dog family film Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), from the loose Brooklyn smoke-shop comedy Smoke (1995) to the nineteenth-century Chinese epic Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2011), Wang has created a headache for auteurist critics in search of a clear authorial signature. Many of these critics have further struggled to fathom a Hong Kong immigrant making a Natalie Portman (1999’s Anywhere but Here), Jennifer Lopez (2002’s Maid in Manhattan), or Queen Latifah (2006’s Last Holiday) comedy.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that one of the most beguiling pockets of Wang’s eclectic filmography is also one of the most overlooked. Over the course of his career, Wang has often returned to a mode that might be seen as his equilibrium point: the quiet domestic melodrama, usually about Asian Americans, usually set in San Francisco. These films feature parents and children at crossroads in their relationships, and have nurturing titles like Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2007), and Coming Home Again (2019).

Wang’s first bite at this kind of melodrama, Dim Sum, marked a significant departure from the chatty guerrilla noir of Chan Is Missing, which was made with the bravado of a filmmaker who knows he may never make another feature. With Dim Sum, Wang was freed to turn inward, to the feelings that don’t yet have words, 
to the overlooked sounds of the everyday. The film’s plot—with its origins in real life—is characteristically unassuming. Geraldine (Laureen Chew) is in her thirties, living in a San Francisco home with her widowed mother, Mrs. Tam (Laureen’s actual mom, Kim). A fortune teller once told Mrs. Tam that she would die at sixty-two, so when that year arrives, Mrs. Tam is anxious for her daughter to get married and start a family of her own. Geraldine, though, is torn. While she can envision a life with a husband and kids, she can’t imagine leaving her mother’s side. In any case, her current romantic prospect—Richard (John Nishio), merely acceptable—doesn’t have her rushing to the altar. As in many Chinese families, here mother and daughter dance around the topic, with input from Mrs. Tam’s trusty brother-in-law, Uncle Tam (Victor Wong). Circuitously, the three seek to find a domestic resolution that honors both family bonds and Geraldine’s path as an independent (and often strong-willed) young woman. The mother-daughter relationship anticipates those in The Joy Luck Club, but through a far more relaxed brand of domestic melodrama.

Indeed, Dim Sum’s ingredients are those of a Yasujiro Ozu film: parents, children, marriage, home, sacrifice. There is even a scene in which Uncle Tam describes Geraldine’s situation as like “an old Japanese movie,” no doubt a reference to Late Spring, or any other Ozu film in which parents quietly free their children to marry. Wang has made no secret of his indebtedness to the Japanese director. In the 1970s, Wang frequented Berkeley, California’s Pacific Film Archive, where he soaked in every Ozu film he could. (In his midst was fellow Ozu devotee Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the video maker and writer, who worked at the PFA.) Throughout his career, when pressed to imagine, however impossibly, an “Asian American aesthetic,” Wang would turn to Ozu’s principles: silence, emptiness, restraint, simplicity.

Many of those principles appear in the formal style of Dim Sum. The narrative is oriented around a number of domestic tableaux. There is a dining table, the scene of holiday gatherings as well as everyday meals. There is a bedroom in which Geraldine poignantly brushes her seated mother’s hair. There is the repeated view of a birdcage, flanked by potted plants, perched by a window whose sheer curtains blow softly with the bay breeze.

The first shot of the film is of a sewing machine stationed in front of such a window. Mrs. Tam enters the room with fabric and sits down at the machine, like a pianist getting comfortable in front of a familiar old keyboard. If we take Dim Sum to be a tribute to an earlier generation of Chinese American immigrant parents, this loving image reverberates with similar ones in foundational Asian American shorts like Eddie Wong’s Wong Sinsaang (1971) and Arthur Dong’s Sewing Woman (1982), documentary portraits of the filmmakers’ parents working in the American garment industry. In Dim Sum, the image of the mother sewing is accompanied by relaxed silence. Then appears a shot of the birdcage and the empty dinner table, followed by a view of the rolling hills of the Richmond District, and a shot of the Bay Bridge, under which a cargo ship drifts calmly by, two of its containers charmingly splashed in red, like the teapot in Ozu’s Equinox Flower. These opening moments are “pillow shots” in the Ozu tradition—moments to take a breath, to shake off the urgency of narrative, to look without understanding—as are the film’s recurring shots of shoes parked at the door. For a non-Asian audience member, like the many who made Chan Is Missing a hit, the image is one of ethnic difference, highlighting the Chinese custom of not wearing outdoor shoes in the house. For the Asian American audience, though, it’s an image that welcomes us into a familiar milieu—one of comforting cleanliness and of leaving the pressures of assimilation at the door to be among family.

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If Ozu’s rigorous composition, his playful repetitions and variations, are the result of studio-bound exactitude, Wang’s spare shots of the everyday emerge out of the real world. The Tam house isn’t a film-studio construction. It’s the actual Richmond District home that actors Kim and Laureen Chew had, by the time of filming, lived in for over a decade. The modest dining table, the houseplants, the sewing machine, the Chinese movie magazines, the cookie tin, the birdcage—these were the ordinary accumulations of an immigrant family, the sort of mundane trinkets absent in Hollywood fabrications of Chinatown.

Wang recalls conceiving the film by simply observing the Chews at home. Neither was a professional actor. Laureen was a community activist and professor at San Francisco State University. Kim ran a day care. Like her character, Laureen was unmarried, eating at her mother’s dinner table and brushing her hair. In the way that it allows real life into the frame, the relaxed narrative and humble glimpses of home are not just Ozu-esque but recall the New Taiwan Cinema, a movement that was underway at the time. Moments of Mrs. Tam presenting her daughter with family heirlooms recall similar mother-daughter scenes in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s contemporaneous A Time to Live, a Time to Die. Wang would have been keenly aware of Taiwanese filmmakers. His wife and regular actress Cora Miao would star in Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers the following year.

Reflecting its themes, Dim Sum was truly a family affair. Not only does Wang’s wife play Geraldine’s confidant, Julia, and not only does Laureen’s mom play Geraldine’s mom, but an aunt (Mary Chew), a sister-in-law (Helen Chew), and a nephew (Jarrett Chew) also play versions of themselves. In the ultimate twist of life imitating art, Laureen Chew met her future husband on the set of Dim Sum: Spencer Nakasako, the second assistant cameraman, soon to be an accomplished director himself.

And for those in the local Chinatown community, Dim Sum would have been not just a self-contained domestic drama but a pageant of familiar faces from San Francisco’s Asian American movement. As with Marc Hayashi and Wood Moy in Chan Is Missing, many of the performers in Dim Sum were regulars of the pioneering Asian American Theater Company (AATC), often making their big-screen debuts. Amy Hill, Victor Wong, John Nishio, and Keith Choy all turn up in the film as members of the family and their circle. Also making appearances are San Francisco Journal writer Rita Yee and the famed George Woo, spokesperson for the Wah Ching youth gang and professor at SF State. On set, AATC cornerstone (and future John Carpenter character actor) Dennis Dun lent his hand as a production assistant. Boom operator George Leong and sound mixer Curtis Choy were at the time feisty culture workers coming out of the legendary 1968 strikes calling for an ethnic-studies program at SF State, during which Laureen Chew was a central protester, serving twenty days in prison as a result. The backdrop to Dim Sum is not the easygoing family dramedy depicted in the film. But neither is it an elision of that history. The quiet joys of Dim Sum are built upon two decades of Chinatown activism. It is serenity earned through turbulent times.

A testament to that historical shift is the neighborhood in which the Chew/Tam house stands. Downright sleepy compared with the bustle of Chinatown shown in Chan Is Missing, the Richmond District was a later development in the history of Asian Americans in San Francisco. Like many Chinatowns in the United States, San Francisco’s exists because of racist housing laws that kept immigrants segregated there. With the repeal of those laws, and the rise of new Asian arrivals after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Richmond emerged as a “New Chinatown,” a more suburban alternative a bus ride away from the Chinese grocery stores, an enclave of familiar languages and customs in a middle-class environment. If Chan Is Missing is the quintessential San Francisco Chinatown film, capturing the energy and personalities carved out of a century of exclusion, Dim Sum is the quintessential Richmond one, finding home in a calmer corner, where a new generation will hold birthday parties, celebrate Chinese New Year, and grill up some burgers.

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There’s such a barbecue scene in Dim Sum, during which the film reveals its seams, and second-generation Richmond life shatters the controlled Ozu aesthetic. Geraldine and her girlfriends—played by Miao, Hill, Yee, and a young Joan Chen like they’ve been grill buddies their entire lives—hang out for the afternoon. Their eyes acknowledge the camera. The camera shifts, reframes, and adjusts exposure midshot. The film’s impulse to spontaneously let in the real world finally takes over. One can’t help but see not only the characters but also the actors sharing a casual bite. There’s Miao and Chen—the Hong Kong veteran and the Chinese up-and-coming star, each in her first U.S. film, both of whose work has often shown an attentiveness to the sweeping tides of war and migration—on a stoop shooting the breeze about life in America. There’s a universe where Dim Sum could have been a documentary-esque hangout film, with joyrides, unscripted girl talk, and rock and roll. And in fact, two years after the feature was released, Wang, Nakasako, and documentarian Ruby Yang experimented with cutting together outtakes of Geraldine and her friends as a separate project.

Once we look beyond the variation in Wang’s filmography, we see him as arguably the most important San Francisco narrative filmmaker, a chronicler of generational change and neighborhood transformation. Just as Dim Sum presents a detailed portrait of the Richmond, with a brief detour to posh Nob Hill, Wang has traced Chinatown’s contemporary history not only in Chan Is Missing but also through the multilingual politics of The Joy Luck Club and the recent mainland sojourners of The Princess of Nebraska (2007). He tells the story of Ghirardelli Square restaurateur Cecilia Chiang in Soul of a Banquet (2014), and of a Korean American family in the Russian Hill–set Coming Home Again, which, like Dim Sum, was shot in the family home of one of Wang’s collaborators.

Among Wang’s love letters to the city, though, Dim Sum stands out as a poignant postcard: an Ozu-esque tableau on one side, handwritten words of comfort on the other. Much of the director’s filmography takes audiences around the world, and Dim Sum delivers them back, to a familiar street and house, shoes waiting at the door, welcoming you home.

Brian Hu is associate professor of Television, Film, and New Media at San Diego State University. He is also the artistic director of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, and the author of Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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