The Golden Child is currently playing at the Spot Taipei Film House as part of their event We Are Family: Festival of New Immigrants. (See the schedule here.) Four films make up this mini-festival, and they all focus on the experiences of women from China, Vietnam, and Indonesia who come to Taiwan to marry Taiwanese men. The first two films I’ve seen were The Happy Life of Debbie and My Little Honey Moon. I enjoyed both of them very much, but I wasn’t convinced that they were accurate portrayals of the experiences of these women. The third film, The Golden Child, fit this pattern.

In a previous blog post, I noted that these movies left me with many questions about the practicalities and the realities of how these women end up in Taiwan and married to the men that they marry. The Golden Child at least answered a couple of these questions. I don’t want to give away any of the plot, but when it was decided that it was time for this young man in a farming community in Taiwan to get a wife, his mother simply marched over to a little shop to get one. The shop was a kind of match-matching operation for foreign brides. The mother sat down at a computer and clicked through a series of profiles of young women from Vietnam who were looking for husbands. It was no different from an online dating service. In fact, it didn’t even have the pseudo-romance of that. It was more like going on Amazon to pick out a book or a DVD.

I assume there was some back and forth as the arrangement was concluded. I’m sure the mother sent details about her son and their farm and where they were living and that this woman from Vietnam could go over this information and then eventually agree to come or decide not to. However, the movie didn’t show any of this, and once the mother had settled on one of these women (after assuring herself that she had “good teeth”), the bride suddenly appeared at the Taichung airport with two sad little suitcases. She was picked up by the man who ran the matchmaking company and then driven over to her new house to meet her new husband and his family. (Note that no one from her new family, including her new husband, could even be bothered to meet her at the airport.)

There was no wedding ceremony shown in the movie, and it gave the impression that this woman and the Taiwanese man were already married when she showed up at the house and met him for the first time. I doubt it really works that way, but I’m not sure. There was also no discussion of who paid for what. The mother does, in a fit of anger later in the movie, allude to the “fortune” that she spent to get her son his Vietnamese wife. We don’t learn, however, how much this fortune was nor who got the money.

These aren’t criticisms of the movie. I’m just interested in how it all works. The movie, in fact, is very uneven. It felt to me like four different movies telling roughly the same story. Some of it was played like a light, quirky comedy, some like a dark comedy, some like an outrageous farce, and some like a serious drama. In the end, I had no idea what it was trying to say. I was just left with an overall sense of horror at the position that this young woman from Vietnam found herself in. It was so horrific to me that, just as with the other movies I’ve seen, it didn’t make much sense. The only reason a person would put up with that kind of terrible situation would be if they had no other option at all. This woman’s previous life in Vietnam would have to have been beyond horrible in order for this move to become a farmer’s wife in Taiwan to make any sense. I mean, had she married a young man and adopted a new country and home or had she been sold into slavery? The only scrap of warmth and affection this woman managed to find in her new life came from the tiny dog that wagged its tail and came up to her to be pet. I’m not saying that she was beaten or abused or anything like that. She simply had to work and work and work from dawn to dusk on the farm and cleaning the house and preparing meals and caring for a paralyzed older man while having zero human contact. She essentially had four full-time jobs in the middle of nowhere and got no pay. It was just weird.

Much of this, I should say, was played for laughs by the filmmakers. They tried to be quirky and funny and sometimes zany, and this quirky and zany tone was the best part of the movie. If they had kept that all the time, it would have been okay. But they also tried to be serious, and then the humor fell flat for me. Worse, the humor was just plain bizarre given the context. A couple of times, my mouth literally dropped open in sympathetic horror at this woman’s plight. Perhaps that’s just my personality speaking (and my western perspective), but I couldn’t imagine anything more awful than being trapped in that depressing house with that crazy family. The son was the worst of all. I know this Vietnamese woman could have nothing but contempt for him. He was this ludicrous figure – everything about him struck me as loutish and uncouth and unpleasant. He had no manners, no warmth, and no personality and the scenes at the end of the day when this lovely and kind woman from Vietnam had to climb into that hard, horrible bed in that dark and dismal bedroom with this guy just made my skin crawl.

As unpleasant as I found all of that, I am glad I saw the movie. It offered an interesting insight into a side of Taiwan that I don’t know at all. And I saw bits of an interesting movie inside this one trying to get out. In terms of tone and the quirky humor that I liked, it actually reminded me of the 1983 movie Local Hero, in which a city boy from Houston, Texas, finds himself in a tiny Scottish village full of eccentric characters. This look at the quirkiness of life in a small farming community in Taiwan was the best part of the movie by far. There was some confident filmmaking hidden in there.

 

Tags: DVD, Indonesia, Local Hero, Taiwan, Vietnam