Tell your dad that you and your little sibling won’t be able to understand the movie if we can’t find a version with subs. Tell him again more insistently after he doesn’t believe you the first time. Feel curious that he would think that you would be able to, considering the utter state of your spoken Chinese, but you’re not fluent enough to voice the thought. Maybe it’s denial on his part. Maybe it’s grief.
Listen to your mom and dad try to one-up each other on how many of the revolutionary songs they know, when they play in the film diegetically. Over a scene where the teenaged characters are learning how to shoot guns, they playfully compare notes on how good their aim was in their own basic training. They only really get along when they’re reminiscing about the past together.
You didn’t know that your mother went to basic training. Your dad has mentioned something like it before, but in the context of doing things like stacking up school desks to practice making barricades. He made it sound childish and silly, the self-conscious way he talked about it. You didn’t know that there were real guns, and that your mom was a much better shot than your dad. (Your dad didn’t know that, either, but he took it with surprising grace.)
You think of your mother the way she looks in the really old photos, the sepia ones where she still has a bit of baby fat, and you imagine her with a rifle strapped to her back. The image does not come easily.
Come up to the part of the movie where the kids encounter a smuggled cassette player and hear Theresa Teng for the first time. Be reminded of when your dad told you his own experience with her. Want to ask him to recount it again, just for the pleasure of rehearing it, but you’re not fluent enough in Chinese to voice the ask. You let it drift away, instead.
Watch your parents utterly fail to engage with the themes of the movie (I would have bullied that girl too, your mom just about says) and fixate on entirely the wrong things (which actors have really let themselves go since the movie came out, which actors look funny when they cry). God, their takes are awful, and you want to disagree with them vociferously, but you’re also horribly aware of your relative standing. Besides, your Chinese is too bad. You console yourself by exchaning a Significant Look with your sibling on the sidelines instead, like, look how much more sophisticated we are with our interest in the Political Underdones Of The Work and our Letterboxd accounts.
The movie ends with a non-twist: after the seventies, the youth who survived, which are most of them, continue to exist. They exist through the eighties and nineties and the 00s and the 2010s and, presumably, onwards. They change with the times, trading in olive military garb for cheongsams and blue jeans and sneakers. They go to university and find jobs and move abroad and gain weight and have children. They reminisce with each other at their children’s weddings, which take place in the 2010s. It occurs to you that your parents are not special; the parents of all of your ethnically Chinese friends would have similar stories.
The movie ends. Your mother says, that reminds me. She proceeds to invite you to go to the wedding of one of her university friend’s sons, in New York City. The son works a finance job there, you learn. You have never met the son, nor the university friend. Is this normal? you ask. Being ok with having your parents use your wedding as some sort of reunion?
Yep, she says. In China, that’s the primary function of weddings; they’re entirely for the parents. These friend weddings you speak of would be utterly scandalous there, it would indicate that the parents didn’t approve of the match at all. Like they’re too ashamed to invite their friends.
I hope you’re not looking to invite several dozen of your university friends and their families to my eventual wedding, you half-joke. Don’t worry, she says. We realized in your early teens that you’ve gone full native, and we’re not going to get to do a lot of the things we expected to with you. We’ve made our peace with it long ago. (They have not. But it’s sweet that they try.)
Dad puts on an interview with the director. She talks about how she based the movie on her own life experiences, or so he tells you. She looks only a little older than your parents, and you can’t really follow what she’s saying. Oh, wow, you really can’t understand it if it doesn’t have subtitles, huh? You dad says, after some stalled attempts to make conversation. Well, you can’t watch this movie now in China. The director was on a live-streamed panel, and at some point some white panelist made a critical remark about China’s Covid response and she made a noise of agreement. Since then, all of her works have been scrubbed. Anyways, I didn’t realize that this interview was going to be this boring, you don’t need to watch this. Does anyone want any last things to eat before I do the washing up?
