“I was filming in a Chinese home and saw all the shoes on the floor by the door. This image gave me the idea of making a movie about the people who belonged to those shoes … how their family lives and outside lives fit together.”
– Wayne Wang
Wayne Wang’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart is an unapologetically derivative homage to Ozu that deals with the understated relationships going on among Chinese-American families in San Francisco. I adore it.
I had only seen Wang’s adaptation of The Joy Luck Club beforehand — which I love but is definitely awkward and overstuffed — and knew that he pivoted toward boilerplate Hollywood movies like Maid in Manhattan in the 2000s, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from him here.
Turns out, it’s everything I love about movies. Dim Sum is a fantastic experience, soothing in approach without smoothing over difficult subjects. It tactfully deals with themes of expectation, family, love, regret, death, and the way that it’s sometimes okay to fuck up dinner and go to McDonald's instead. It’s about friends and family talking; often failing to directly communicate what they mean and driving each other crazy, but still being there for one another despite such shortcomings. It’s about disappointments and the ways we cope with them. It’s about what human connection means, what home means.
The film centers on 30-year-old Geraldine and her mom, Mrs. Tam (played by real-life daughter and mother Kim and Laureen Chew). They live together in relative harmony. The mom sews and gardens. The daughter works and takes care of the house. Disputes are petty and small, the kind that give onlookers a wry smile. Like when Geraldine doesn’t want to show herself at her mom’s mahjong night because her mom’s friends always pester her about getting married. The mom says they won’t do that, but of course as soon as the daughter enters the room, the old women immediately pester her about getting married.
It’s just delightful! This warm, gently humorous dynamic plays out in a number of scenes, tempering the melancholic calm that otherwise permeates the film. We’ve got the nosy neighbor Auntie May for one, who boasts about marrying off her innumerable children; or the charming Uncle Tam, Mrs. Tam’s brother-in-law, a goofy old man and bar owner who longs for the past and mourns the loss of tradition just as much as he loves being an American and the life he’s built in this new country.
The mom wants her daughter to get married, but she seems to want Geraldine to stay with her just as much. She is feeling her age and wants to settle all outstanding accounts. A fortune teller once told her she was going to die at the age she is now, 62, so she perhaps feels a greater urge to see her daughter tie the knot. For her part, Geraldine is ambivalent about marriage. She has a long distance boyfriend, Richard, but when he comes to visit they seem companionable at best.
We see the way this mother-daughter relationship tugs at the both of them. Are they codependent? Maybe. Is the mom frustratingly underhanded in her communication style? Probably. But there’s so much love between them that this imperfect bond wins us over.
And it’s not just Geraldine and her mom. Everyone is going through something. Partway through Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, the plot (what little of it there is) pauses so the characters can have a barbecue. As lazy, charming sax plays, we watch home video-style footage of young women grilling food, joking with one another, having fun.
The scene eventually shifts its focus onto two women — both minor characters, Chinese immigrants in contrast to our first generation Chinese-American heroine — as they talk about their dreams of living in the United States.
“My first American dream was to own a car and drive in it all the time,” one says. “Now I have a Mercedes. And one-fourth, no, one-eighth of a husband … An empty apartment. My reality is bigger than my dream.”
“Dream a new dream,” the other replies.
“I can’t even sleep at night.”
The conversation peters out as the second woman (Joan Chen in an unnamed early role) tries to relate by sharing her dream of having a station wagon with lots of kids and going on a picnic, but first she wants to become a rock star. The first woman, Julia (Cora Miao, a wonderful actress and Wang’s real life wife), smiles and lets her ennui drift away.
I love this mixed sense of home and belonging that Dim Sum emits. Like, we never do enough for each other. Our lives aren’t what we thought they’d be. We can’t communicate our longings to one another. The characters in this film are unsettled — yet, in another way, they’re comfortable where they are. They do what they can with what they’ve received even if life didn’t turn out the way they hoped it would. They take their pain deeply because to resist it would be to let the world harden them. They live peacefully even as dreams fail and relationships don’t work out. Characters smile all the time in this movie, hiding what they really feel from one another.
We can’t always fix our lives and we can’t always connect as deeply as we want to with the people around us. But we can try and show that we care about each other. Dim Sum, I feel, is here to remind us of that.