THE VAULT, APRIL 2021:
The Trained Chinese Tongue, dir. Laurie Wen (1994)
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MY SIGHT IS LINED WITH VISIONS
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The Trained Chinese Tongue (1994)
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"In a film that seems to center around cooking and eating — where the viewer is prompted to engage in a direct, sensorial relationship with a cultural experience — food is verbally invoked in only two instances: at the beginning, when the filmmaker recalled her piano practice in Ohio as a young pre-teen from Hong Kong, and in the middle of the film, when Mr. Bau, an 'American-born Chinese' hosting a dinner for his Japanese business associates, made an off-putting assumption about Wen’s ability to spit out chicken and fish bones. In sharp contrast to the warm, empathetic, and arguably gendered images of food-making, these blunt articulations foreground the intrinsic difficulty in anchoring intercultural identities, where individuals are at once tied to and disassociated with a so-called authentic culture."
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From "An Incredible and Ordinary Feast," Chanel Kong's essay on The Trained Chinese Tongue
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Screening copy courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
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