Canadian cinema’s canon does not give an equal space and opportunity for marginalized voices. Self-representational films such as Double Happiness (Mina Shum, 1994) construct and contest racial stereotypes of the diapora of Asian communities in North America. This essay will examine the reflection of identity-politics in Asian Canadian cinema, with a textual analysis of Double Happiness at the forefront of my argument. Cultural assimilation for ‘hyphenated’ Canadians in the contemporary will be considered as a contextualization of the film. Shum’s contemporary cinematic techniques will be examined to confirm Christine Ramsay’s centre/margin discourse as the most appropriate academic reading of Canada’s national cinema. Adopting Eva Rueschmann’s reading of Double Happiness, this essay will target the film’s representation of marginality through a racial and gendered discourse. Race will be considered in terms of the film’s representation of the Li family and the struggles of intergenerational cultural assimilation, as well as bigotry against the protagonist, Jade Li. Gender will be examined in terms of Asian women stereotypes and their sexuality, with a focus on Shum’s stylized aesthetics to create a female perspective and authorship. Tracing Shum’s representation of this specific Chinese-Canadian family in Vancouver will help conceptualize Canadian minoritarian film.
Firstly, it is important to note Mina Shum’s position in contemporary Canadian cinema. David Spaner comments that Shum’s debut film Double Happiness made an “invaluable contribution to more than Vancouver filmmaking. Chinese immigrants have been a huge part of the B.C. fabric…” This huge space for Asian Canadians in the social fabric of British Columbia is exemplary of the possible consumptive demographic for films such as Double Happiness. Elaine Chang deconstructs the notion of being a ‘hyphenated’ Canadian as “the hyphen still marks a contentious spot on our cultural-political maps; it serves to punctuate an otherwise awkwardly or deceptively empty space.” It is clear from the analysis of the hyphen in grammatical terms that cultural hybridism is a sensitive yet integral part of Canadian racial discrimination. Socio-cultural identification and classification is a complex issue, especially in such a multicultural country as Canada.
Double Happiness deals with these complexities in numerous ways. Initially, the title Double Happiness is indicative of the film’s multi-faceted nature. Eleanor Ty comments that the title ostensibly “refers to the Chinese wish for twice-blessed good fortune.” Certainly, it is a pun and reflects stereotypes of Chinese beliefs. Yet, I think the intention behind the title is in reference to the protagonist, Jade Li. The film is told from solely her perspective and follows her two pursuits of finding happiness, one her family wants and one she wants. Both interpretations of the title’s meaning set up the film as ethnographical as well as showing awareness of racial stereotyping.
The Li family is established as specifically Chinese in the opening sequence. Shum’s utility of the “cinematic gaze, narrative voice, subjectivity and racial stereotypes” in the opening sequence pinpoint the film as self-reflexive and satirical. The opening shot is provoking; Jade talks directly to the camera. Jade’s opening monologue compares her Chinese-Canadian family with The Brady Bunch. Chris Gittings summarizes that Jade asks the “viewer to see past racial and cultural difference to apprehend a very human story of family conflict.” As an audience member, I found this comparison initially humorous as comparing a typical white American nuclear family such as The Brady Bunch with a Chinese immigrant family in Canada is absurd. However, in hindsight, why cannot these two fictional families be compared? Shum uses humor to highlight how popular culture marginalizes certain ethnic communities and ultimately stimulates institutionalized racism (the institution being contemporary mass media).
Through the genres of comedy and romance, Shum “reveals to the extent which identity is constantly being performed.” This notion of performativity is used in the representation of Orientalism, a Westernized racial stereotype. A prime example of distinguishing cultural identity through performance is when the Li family greets an old family friend, Ah Hong, at the airport. Jade and her sister recite a Chinese specific greeting for Ah Hong, whereas, in return, Ah Hong greets the family speaking English and with acquired Western mannerisms. These opposing performances of Chinese and North American mannerisms illustrate identity-politics in Canada as backward. Notably, both Ah Hong and Jade’s family are trying to adopt culturally specific mannerisms out of mutual respect. Nevertheless, their acting is exaggerated to clearly distinguish both national identities. This moment is significant as it presents the intersections of culture, tradition, nation and intergeneration on a familial level.
However, it is Jade’s aspirations of becoming an actress which extends this notion of performativity in the film. There are two scenes which personify Jade’s conflicting construction of a new kind of national identity. Both audition scenes are important as they are on different ends of the ethnographical spectrum. During Jade’s first audition for a small role as a waitress, she is asked to create a “fabricated Chinese accent.” This is another example of Orientalist fantasy from a Westernized perspective. Jade’s second audition is for a lead role in a film. Because of Jade’s ethnicity and appearance, the director, played by Mina Shum herself, assumes that Jade speaks fluent Cantonese, even though she was raised in Canada. Both these sequences are representative of an assumed Chinese identity from two different perspectives, an English-Canadian perspective and a Chinese perspective. Mike Gasher comments that in these instances Jade is either “too Chinese or not Chinese enough”, resulting in Jade’s inability to appropriate to either national identity. This identity crisis limits Jade’s career opportunities and success in the film industry. The fact that Shum plays the director in this scene is indicative of her accomplished aesthetic style. It confirms Shum’s efforts to present Canadian identity-politics as multifaceted and complex.
Gittings comments that Shum included these conflicting scenes to “represent the film industry as constraining Chinese to perform white essentialist versions of Chinese difference.” It is clear that the racial stereotype Orientalism is exacerbated in the film through performance, both in the family plot-line and in Jade’s career prospects. Shum overtly presents the audience with racial stereotyping to shed light on everyday racism and victimization. Kass Banning comments “Double Happiness adopts exaggeration further as its strategy, pushing the limits of Chinese specificity.” The over-sensitivity to racial stereotyping and performance arguably takes away from the film’s serious discussion of identity-politics in Canada. Nevertheless, it is integral to the film’s representation of otherness as it renders empathy to marginalized groups in Canada. Although the film examines bigotry on a personal level, the film is by no means microcosmic for a larger Chinese-Canadian population. In an interview with Sheila Benson, Shum comments “I’m not representing Chinese culture. I’m representing this one family.” The Chinese specific markers perpetuated in Double Happiness are not representative of a larger diasporic community rather self-a humanized perspective on racial discrimination and cultural integration.
Through a gendered lens, it is clear that Jade’s feminine identity is also uncertain. Asian female sexuality is dealt with explicitly in the film. Jade’s sexuality is repressed and dictated by her parents. She is trapped between the traditionalist values of her family and the modern dominant culture. Jade’s interactions with her love interest, Mark, define Shum as aesthetically innovative. The use of costume, non-diegetic sound and lighting all characterise Jade as a sexualized young woman. The first night Jade and Mark meet and go back to his apartment, Jade’s red dress indicates a sexual agency and defiance against stereotypes such as the servility of Asian women. The loud dramatic non-diegetic music frames the couple’s movements as highly stylized and theatrical. The use of Jade and Mark’s silhouettes against a stark red background establishes Shum’s take on appropriated sexuality as overstressed in dominant culture. Another technique Shum uses to emphasize Jade’s otherness is slow motion. Banning comments that “extended moments, such as when the family group watches and waves to Jade as she embarks on a date, emphasize the situation’s faux superficiality.” This superficiality is used to accentuate the family’s rigid cultural specificity. The slow motion draws out Jade’s movements getting into the Chinese man’s expensive car. It ridicules Hollywood romance films which acknowledge heteronormativity as the end all.
A contributing factor to the film’s success is its female authorship and self-reflexivity. In Sheila Benson’s article on the film’s release and praise at the Toronto Film Festival, it is clear Shum has personal resonance with Double Happiness. Benson comments “Ms. Shum takes particular pride in the fact that the characters in Double Happiness are middle-class.” The film’s praise and attention is partially due to Shum’s ironic handling of racial and gendered marginality. Eleanor Ty recognizes Jade as “doubly, triply marginalized, as Asian female, and Canadian in a predominantly americanized culture in North America.” Jade’s identity is defined through race and gender and they deeply entwined with one another.
However, the film’s ending is problematic. Jade decides to move out in the pursuit of her own happiness by prioritizing her feminine identity over her cultural and national heritage. It is as if Jade cannot be happy sexually without distancing herself from her Chinese specificity and family. The ending is double-edged as it appropriates Jade into Canadian society but at an ancestral and cultural price. This could be exemplary of Gittings’ idea of a “negotiation of whiteness” and in this case, Jade negotiates and bargains her cultural roots for a westernized feminine identity. This disengagement of cultural heritage demonstrates the contradictions of multiculturalism in Canada. Gittings argues that Double Happiness was “produced with some government assistance agency that facilitates multicultural policy.”If this film was funded in the agreement of promoting multiculturalism in Canada then it falls short. Again, it is not microcosmic in any way yet appropriates cultural assimilation as a matter of ancestral disengagement. The film’s ending is arguably ambiguous on its stance of multiculturalism in Canada as it is self-referential and subjective cinema. In spite of the ending’s ambiguity, it clarifies that marginality, on all levels, is a complex yet abundant issue in Canada.
Arguably, Asian Canadian film is oppositional. Gittings’ analysis of Moving the Mountain (William Ging Wee Dere and Malcom Guy, 1993) confirms that Canadian films about Chinese immigration and cultural assimilation are oppositional to Canadian racist legislation, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923. The harsh treatment of Chinese immigrants in Canada is dealt with explicitly in Moving in Mountain through personal interviews, whereas, Double Happiness gives a more contemporary and intergenerational perspective on Chinese discrimination. Grouping these two films together allows us to see that although with multiculturalism being integral to Canada’s legislation in the contemporary, diasporic communities still suffer some degree of bigotry.
It is also important to note that these two films are made in the early 1990s which is perhaps a turning point for Canadian minoritarian films. Other minoritarian films borne out of the 1990s include Sam and Me (Deepa Mehta, 1990), Masala (Srivina Krishna, 1992) and Rude (Clement Virgo, 1995). By seeing this influx of films by hyphenated Canadians or First Nation peoples collectively, one can understand Gittings notion of “ghettoizing filmmakers”. Considering these films collectively runs the risk of marginalizing hyphenated Canadian and First Nation directors further yet it is interesting to see that these films are all produced from 1990-1995. Perhaps this oppositional cinema could be linked to the national recession of the 1990s? Either way, conceptualizing Canadian minoritarian films is a complex process grouping diversity is illogical.
It is clear then Christine Ramsay’s centre/margin discourse of Canadian cinema should be implemented when considering films produced by marginalized voices. Ramsay’s centre/margin discourse is progressive and contemporary thus in alignment with Double Happiness and the other mentions above. It would be paradoxical to these films through the Canadian cinema rubric constituted by scholars such as Peter Haarcourt and Robert Fothergill. Canadian cinema should be constituted by difference, not by similarity. This essay has only examined marginality through an ethnic and gendered lens; needless to say there are numerous other forms of marginality. Canadian cinema should adopt a Benedict Anderson perspective of distinguishing a national identity (and subsequently a national culture). Canada is a plethora of “imagined communities” that should be constituted by cultural diversity.
Bibliography
Banning Kass. “Playing the Light: Canadianizing Race and Nation”, in
Armatage, Kay, Banning, Kass, Longfellow, Brenda & Marchessault, Janine (eds.) Gendering the nation: Canadian’s women cinema, University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Benson, Shelia. “Chinese but Not Chinese, And Revealing the Difference” New York Times, 23rd July 1995.Proquest Historical Newspapers, Access Date: 30th October 2009.
Chang, Elaine (ed.) Reel Asian: Asian Canada On screen, Library and Archives Canada Cataloging in Publication, 2007.
Gasher, Mike. The Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia, UBC Press, 2002.
Gittings, Christopher. “Multicultural Fields of Vision.” Canadian National Cinema, London: Routlege, 2002.
Ramsay, Christine. “Canadian Narrative Cinema from the Margins: ‘The Nation’ and Masculinity in Goin’ Down the Road.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2.2-3, 1993.
Rueschmann, Eva (ed.) “Mediating Worlds/Migrating Identities: Representing Home, Diaspora and Identity in Recent Asian American and Asian Canadian Women’s Films” in Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities. 2003, University Press of Mississippi.
Ty, Eleanor. The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives: University of Toronto Press, 2004
Spaner, David. Dreaming in the Rain: How Vancouver Became Hollywood North by Northwest, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003
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