Eighteen years after Ang Lee’s (李安) Eat Drink Man Woman (飲食男女) hit the big screen, the film’s producer Hsu Li-kong (徐立功) and award-winning television director Tsao Jui-yuan (曹瑞原) are releasing what’s billed as the sequel, Joyful Reunion (飲食男女—好遠又好近), which stars one of the original cast, Kui Ya-lei (歸亞蕾).
The film relies on the same concept of mixing food and human relationships, but content-wise it’s not sequel at all. The result, a narratively uneven tale about two families in China and Taiwan, delivered with a message of reunification, is nothing like Lee’s 1994 work, which explores familial relations and social reality.
In present-day Hangzhou, China, aging chef Tang Shizhe (Kenneth Tsang, 曾江) and his two daughters lead respectable and comfortable lives, thanks to the father’s prosperous vegetarian restaurant.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
The elder daughter, Wa’er (Huo Siyan, 霍思燕), whose boyfriend, Chang Chuan (Blue Lan, 藍正龍), is a slightly nerdy computer game designer from Taipei, manages a luxury health resort.
One day Chang takes his aunt, Pai Ping (Kuei), who raised him like her own son, back to Hangzhou after a trip to Taipei.
To Ping, the Chinese city, which she grew up in and has not visited after fleeing to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War, looks unrecognizable at first. But she soon settles into the luxurious surroundings at the resort where Wa’er works.
Meanwhile, Shizhe announces his plan to sell the restaurant because the chronic illness he suffers from is starting to take its toll. While agonized by her father’s condition, Wa’er is fed up with being neglected by Chang, who spends too much time in the virtual world, and decides to break up with him.
In an attempt to get the two back together, Pai phones Shizhe, who invites her to his restaurant for a feast. When the elders meet, memories come rushing back.
The film’s most glaring flaw is its structurally shaky screenplay, which was penned by six writers and two contributors, who are credited with “script coordination.”
While the movie’s most enjoyable moments are when the screen is dominated by Kui’s high-energy performance, she sometimes overdoes the comic delivery.
Anchored by Tsang’s quiet poise, Kui moves freely from a forthright, loud-mouthed waishengren (外省人, or person who fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War) visiting The New China, to a woman reliving the emotions of her past life.
As the English title suggests, Joyful Reunion is more of a fairy-tale in which two generations learn to get along and live happily ever after. Whether the film is politically naive, or just a cynical ploy to tap China’s market, is up to the audience to decide.
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS