Center for Asian American Media
About the Film
Based on the short story by Oakland-based author Yiyun Li, director Wayne Wang and screenwriter Michael Ray bring us a story of a modern young sojourner, Sasha, drifting between the prospect of becoming a commodity in a new global economy and the liberating if solitary path of self-determination.
Everything happens in America
Of America Sasha declares, “Everything happens here. A prostitute can become a princess overnight.” She’s referring to “Pretty Woman,” the movie she and Yang watched the night they conceived the child in her womb back in Beijing. She’s taken this far-fetched romance as a promise. She lands on American shores naïve yet pragmatic, a risky combination. She resembles the new China she’s grown up in, the only China she’s ever known: young and mobile, out to get hers.
Sasha arrives at Oakland Airport where her friend doesn’t come to pick her up as promised, so she takes the metro to San Francisco, where she meets Boshen, the man who shared Yang with Sasha and is concerned about the fate of their child. She has come to San Francisco ostensibly to get an abortion, but clearly she is still thinking about it. She is to stay with Boshen while she undergoes the procedure.
Still a child
Sometimes Sasha is petulant and unsympathetic, especially when she pouts and paws through other people’s closets and purses. But she is still a child. In our first view of her, she’s pacing up and down at the airport in pink pants and shiny red pumps, a lost child-woman checking her phone to see what happened to her ride and for a text response from the man whose child she is carrying. She carries the seed of an older China, a China left behind. Will she abort it or will she carry it to term? She is a pregnant girl, on the cusp of many possibilities but vulnerable to slavery and exploitation in a strange land.
Sasha has been keeping a diary full of schoolgirl longings and panda stickers. At first angry at Yang’s lack of response, she staples together the pages describing her past four months as if to erase that part of her existence—forget that solid block of time. She explains, “In America I’ve learned a new phrase: moving on. Tomorrow I can start a new page.” But it’s harder than she thinks.
Since the depiction of Sasha is relatively uncommon, some might think that she doesn’t accurately represent the modern young Chinese woman. But in recent years, Wang had been observing a dramatic change in the young women arriving from China. A combination of research, meeting a number of recent arrivals, and the casting process confirmed his assessments. Westerners, he says, have very fixed notions of the 21st-century Chinese woman. They might point to a retro Gong Li in “Raise the Red Lantern” – cold, calculating and uncomfortably close to the Dragon Lady stereotype. Or Ziyi Zhang’s characters in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “House of Flying Daggers” – lightning quick, tight-lipped martial artists. Or in the present day, Maggie Q, the actress (American in fact) who has appeared in “Mission Impossible III” and “Live Free or Die Hard” as exotic, brainy Chinese hackers and operatives.
The modern-day Chinese woman just out of her teens is a unique being: free of moral, religious or historical trappings. Unmoored from the Chinese past, she searches the world over for the best she can find, material or otherwise. Her older sisters bear scars from the Cultural Revolution and the Communist past, but the 21st-century Chinese woman is free to a fault. Her purportedly Communist world is dominated by capitalistic aspirations, and she has a clear-eyed sense of her own value in the scheme of things. She is no longer the Confucian ideal of daughter, wife, and mother. She is that rare thing: a prized commodity with the awareness of her worth.
The old China
Sasha knows little about the Great Leap Forward, nor even about the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Ironically, she learns the truth about Chinese history—her and her child’s legacy—once she leaves the country. Over the course of the night, Sasha meets victims of that other side of China’s history.
Gene the bartender/pimp says, “You’re lucky, little girl—you’ve grown up in the new China.” He remembers the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s as being full of steel—and under those tons of steel is buried his entire Mongolian family, lost to China’s colonialist urge to increase steel production at any cost.
In the film’s refusal to show us some vital images, we see a thematic pattern. We never see Yang’s face—he is described as “super cute” and “pretty” but we can only imagine him. Letters and text messages are addressed to him, but he never answers—a viewer would be forgiven for wondering if he even existed if it weren’t for the baby that bears his seed. He is like the mylar balloon that one moment is in your grasp and the next has escaped it.
Yang is the old China that no longer exists. Although we don’t see his face, Sasha tells a karaoke bar-hostess that she resembles him. He’s therefore feminized, bringing to mind films such as “Farewell My Concubine” or “Madame Butterfly” – feminized male Asian performers who have been loved and abandoned by more masculine men with enterprise in mind. In an echo of the Madame Butterfly tale, Yang has been loved and then abandoned by a Western man. It’s a quaint old tale that’s busily being revised by globalization and transformation.
Now China is turning the tables, becoming a nation of vast inventory and consumerism. We also never see the face of Wolf, the potential middleman in Sasha’s baby-selling scheme. Since his identity as a specific character is cloaked, does he function as something larger than just a person? In his negotiation with Sasha does he represent the mercantile role of China to the rest of the world? His kind buys and sells, keeps those with something to lose in eternal bondage. All he needs is a commitment from Sasha, at which point she will be enslaved to him. As a symbol Wolf seems to straddle the old and new Chinas with a vengeance: willing exploiter of his own people, always waiting for his prey to weaken and enslave themselves.
Identifying with Sasha
Our sympathy and identification with Sasha is deliberately designed to waver and shift. At first it’s easy to place her among the other users and exploiters in the story since she’s so flippant and petulant (and she admires Paris Hilton!). But we learn that she’s been developing a hard crust over her soft core even before she left China, and she’s a player in the global economy simply by the circumstances of her birth. In Sasha it’s hard to distinguish between the bad judgment of an innocent girl and the calculated move of a young cynic.
The film is anchored by an extraordinary performance by newcomer Ling Li. Sasha is not a verbal character, but we are intimately with her in her moments of solitude—chewing off an acrylic fingernail, trying on a man’s shirt, stealing shopping bags from a family at the mall, talking to her unborn child. In closeups Ling’s eyes are large and opaque—her seemingly inexpressive face could be a mask for someone stunned by her potential choices. Faced with a bewildering array of options for her future, Sasha stares back wide-eyed, her mind working but her final decision never clear.
Sasha sees the sonogram of her baby for the first time on the day of San Francisco’s unique Saint Stupid’s Day parade. As she tiptoes out of Boshen’s life, she emerges on the other side of the parade alone but with her head held high and her eyes wide open, experiencing a private and mysterious epiphany. The song that plays through the final scenes, “Hope There’s Someone” by Antony and the Johnsons, is sung in a voice of longing and vulnerability. But it’s also a voice that evokes shifting gender and the possibilities of transformation, and we are left knowing that Sasha is no longer the pacing child-woman at the airport—she is master of the decision she has made.
The Future
Finally we never see the most important image that Sasha sees: the baby’s ultrasound. But clearly it is what propels Sasha to her final decision, whether or not we know what it is. Sasha’s unborn baby has taken her on a daring journey from the streets of Beijing to the back alleyways of America, and the untold sequel to this umbilical film is a great American saga of stranger in a strange land, all promise and potential.
by Frako Loden
