Course:ASIA325/2023/The Way We Are (2008)

The Parallelism of Women and Tin Shui Wai: Marginality in The Way We Are

keywords：

marginality, forgotten, space, underprivileged women, Hong Kong’s public housing estates, widowed mother, post-handover, neoliberal, confucian, patriarchal

Group Members' Contributions

Y G: Introduction, conclusion.

Y Z: Stories behind the film, histories of the film's reception.

T Z: Scholarly literature reviews, Alternative Interpretation.

N T: Comparative analysis.

Introduction

The Way We Are is a 2008 Hong Kong drama movie directed by Ann Hui. This story was written by Lou Shiu-Wa. Paw Hee-Ching played Mrs. Cheung,  Leung Chun-lung played her son, Cheung Ka-on. This movie mainly tells a story about Mrs. Cheung and her son live in a place called Tin Shui Wai, Hong Kong’s public housing estates, that mainly lower class people live in. Mrs. Cheung is a widow and she raised her son on her own. They were poor but they lived their natural life here. Mrs. Cheung is a positive woman and she helped support two of her younger brothers to study abroad. After her husband died, she raised her son on her own. Mrs. Cheung works in the local supermarket while Ka-on is a Form 5 student and this summer, he is waiting for his HKCEE results. Granny Leung Foon is an old single lady who lost her daughter and no one would like to provide for the aged. Mrs. Cheung helped the old lady as she helped her mother, her brothers, and so on. Even though Tin Shui Wai is the forgotten space through the marginalized, those lower class people like the widow woman live the positive and strong life in neoliberal post-handover Hong Kong. The parallelism of women and Tin Shui Wai is about the marginality in The Way We Are. Women like Mrs. Cheung is the expression of the marginality of patriarchal society, and Tin Shui Wai indicates the marginality in the economic and political development of Hong Kong society.

Stories Behind the Film

The Way We Are was set in Hong Kong’s Tin Shui Wai area, although the name does not explicitly appear in the film. The Chinese title, The Day and Night of Tin Shui, is more revealing. Tin shui sits on reclaimed land near the border with China. The town gained the nickname “City of Sadness” for its failed planning, high rates of social problems, and crime. Tin Shui was a residence for persons displaced from other parts of China but soon gained notoriety for lawlessness. The crew set up in Tin Shui, observing the town for several months during the shooting of The Way We Are. The area was characterized by poverty, unemployment, and persistent melancholy among the residents, characteristics that often permeated to the popular representation of the place. Rather than play to this conventional portrayal of Tin Shui, the director Ann Hui, portrays the mundane normality of Tin shui, with people living uneventful and less sensational lives.

Hui has stated that her motivation when making The Way We Are was to experiment with HD films. She did not target the film for a commercial film market, but its success is a good return on investment. The producers planned to release the movie on cable TV and then sell it as a DVD. They eventually gave Hui a minimal budget first for a TV movie. The budget for the film is not publicly known, but it was minimal without the fanfare of big films. The Way We Are lacks plot and drama, and its realism resembles an "unintended home video”.

Among the cast, Nina Paw Hee-ching (Mrs. Cheung) and Idy Chan (Miss Tsui) were the most known, having starred in several films before. Hui doubted casting Idy Chan, describing her decision as a gamble and a surprise. Similarly, Hee-ching succeeded in prior films and was affectionally known as Sister Paw for playing mother and big sister roles. However, Leung Chun-lung (Cheung Ka-on) was virtually unknown in Hong Kong’s cinematic scene. Chan Lai Wun (Granny) came out of retirement to star in the film, with Hui describing her acting as “reminiscent of post-war Cantonese movie.

Histories of the Film’s Reception

The public reception of the film, The Way We Are, was highly positive. Despite lacking the flamboyance of big Hong Kong films, Hui's bold approach to realism was attractive to the public. In the film, the public sees a reflection of a mundane existence that they can closely identify with. As a node to realism, the film presents Hong Kong in a bold new way and focuses on the lives of people who would rarely be presented to any audience. Hui’s depiction of realism, in a simple way, resonated with much of the audience even as it departs from the spectacle of conventional films. Thus, the film reflected the tranquil regularity of many people’s lives. What made the film stand out is its ability to present the mundane aspects of life without being boring. The film was set simultaneously with the audience to which it was released. Strangely and surprisingly, the audience follows along but can hardly explain why the film is entertaining and believable. The ability of the audience to relate and connect the film with their daily lives explains the warm reception the film received.

Another aspect that endeared the film to the viewer was the intersection of realism and optimism. Hui does not whip up sensational emotions in the audience about the cast's struggles when presenting day-to-day struggles. Thus, The Way We Are emerges as a gentle production where an act of kindness flowers a friendship with simple events giving birth to extraordinary connections. Despite these characters living in the "City of Sadness," they demonstrate kindness and sacrifice that draws the viewer's emotions. Through Cheung, Hui demonstrates a stoic character in the way she confronts her son’s idleness, the prosperity of her relatives, and her willingness to help Granny. Further, the film does not bother to blame the government or authorities for the poverty and issues affecting the cast in the area they live. The display of virtue, compassion, and tranquility is reminiscent of Confucian ideals that explain the film’s endearment to a Confucian society. In the West, the film gathered little attention but was praised for its warm and realistic portrayal of Hong Kong life. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film gathered an audience score of 82%, and on IMDB, it picked up a rating of 7.5. Cinematic depictions of everyday life may fail to attract the hype and revenue of hyper-realistic films but serve as a subtle mirror to society.

Scholarly Literature Review

Lu Tian’s article aimed at exploring one of the most visible filmmakers in Hong Kong who maintains both box-office success and critical acclaim, and who has shown her concern for marginalized individuals in Hong Kong’s diverse spaces, Ann Hui’s cinematics of everyday life in The Way We Are by focusing how spaces are perceived, understood and represented. Lu analyzed spaces in the film by three sections: ordinary but marginalized space; repetitive and routinized space ; intimate and shared space, in order to argue that on one hand, the urban space surrounding the characters is unremarkable, repetitive and routinized, in which people live ordinary lives without any dramatic events, on the other hand, such mundane spaces set the stage for affective investment and creative practices, which enable people to resist the dehumanizing forces in the neoliberal metropolis of Hong Kong. For Lu, The Way We Are is a film about the peripheral and forgotten urban space that is increasingly overshadowed in the process of economic liberalization, while although the film constantly reminds us the real people live ordinary lives in Tin Shui Wai’s forgotten space, the chance encounters in the mundane places release the strength of humanity in spite of capitalism’s attempts to extinguish it. In other words, The Way We Are represents an attitude of “coolness”, rather than “numbness”, and the strength of Ann Hui’s cinematics of everyday life lies in its ability to reveal a tactical mobility of the underprivileged in Hong Kong to foster meaningful bonds in everyday space.

By mainly examining Ann Hui’s two critically acclaimed companion films: the Tin Shui Wai diptych —The Way We Are (2008) and Night and Fog (2009) together, Chang stated that Ann Hui’s recent social dramas are not merely citations to postwar Hong Kong’s cinematic tradition of Cantonese social ethics film, they are attempts to expand the possibilities of the cinematic “flashback” to expose the complexities within her characters’ psyche and perception within the larger context of the politics of post-handover Hong Kong. The primary contention in Chang’s article is that Hui’s attempts to give voice to women in her films is at times tampered by a narrative closure that returns to a cinematic perspective at once omniscient and patriarchal; Then Chang examined the scholarship on Ann Hui’s key works within the context of the New Wave movement, and how her works may also be read as citation to and reinvention of postwar Hong Kong Cantonese social ethics cinematic tradition as alternative modernity; Finally, Chang provides a reading of these two films in some of the ways they explore feminist perception and subjectivity. In the last section, for The Way We Are specifically, Chang demonstrated that it can be read as Hui’s new rendition of the postwar social realist film on the daily reality of a humble Hong Kong Chinese family, and also as a cinematic portrait of the daily struggles and predicaments of those within the walls of the public housing estates, given that the marginality of Kwaijie and Granny Leung Foon is presented as an inalterable fact of life. While although the flashback device provides us glimpse of Kwaijie’s subjectivity, and the absence of a strong patriarchal figure facilitates ironically the power of women’s perception and storytelling, however, Hui’s insertion of black-and-white photographic footage and the establishing and reestablishing shots of Tin Shui Wai’s expansive rural and urban landscapes at dawn and dusk, and how the narrative focus shifts from the stories of Kwaijie and Granny Leung Foon to Tin Shui Wai itself as a true witness to the daily monotony of its residents’ lives, distance viewers from protagonists’ perception, replaced by the history of modern Hong Kong’s development toward industrialization and urbanization. Thus, although Hui attempts to recover the perception of her marginalized characters by way of undermining the patriarchal figures in The Way We Are, patriarchy is never completely dethroned, and women continue to be marginalized in representation in post-handover Hong Kong.

The Chapter 10 of Gina Marchetti’s book A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema focuses on three films by director Ann Hui: The Way We Are (2008), Night and Fog (2009), and All About Love (2010), exploring the role women filmmakers have played in shaping the agenda for the depiction of HKSAR women on screen. It examines the issues, perspectives, and aesthetic concerns of Ann Hui's films in relation to the wider context of feminist theory and global film practices. These films bring up issues includes domestic violence, family life, and romantic coupling that are common in Hong Kong film culture. Gina mentioned that all three films deal with the changing dynamics of family life in Hong Kong and the breakdown as well as the stubborn endurance of Confucian values and patriarchal, heterosexual norms. For The Way We Are specifically, even under the ostensibly tranquil domesticity, she said a passive-aggressive anger still brews. The film illustrates the Chinese saying that "neighbors are closer than distant blood relatives", but it also takes a jab at the Confucian order, that the two neglected women bond across generations as victims of the same male privilege: one sacrificed her youth for her brothers' benefit while do not interfere in their Confucian obligations to their mother as living in fear of being considered a nuisance to her family; one lost her husband and daughter who clings to her relationship with her grandson as her last remaining blood relation, while forced to abandon her rights to be involved in her grandson's life as her former son-in- law prefers not to have her as part of the family. According to Gina, the third protagonist On serves as a pillar of Confucian virtue in the film and saves the story from wallowing in the bitterness of his mother's and their neighbor's lives.

Comparative Analysis

Among the films with similar themes to The Way We Are, the realistic film adapted from the novel of the same name - Feng Shui (万箭穿心）- can be used as the object of comparative analysis.

Full version of the movie from YouTube

The movie Feng Shui was released in November 2012 in Mainland China. Wang Jing is the director and the main actors are Yan Bingyan, Jiao Gang and Li Xian, etc. Feng Shui was released in 2012 during the same period as domestic and imported blockbusters, including Life of Pi, which ultimately Feng Shui did not gain huge box office. However, Feng Shui received noteworthy reviews. It received a 7.7 out of 10 rating from IMDb. In the Chinese Douban it received a rating of 8.6 out of 10, exceeding 96% of family films and dramas.

The movie Feng Shui depicts the story of an ordinary family in Wuhan, China, in the 1990s, after they move to a new house. Li Baoli, the wife, works in a sock store on Hanzheng St., and Ma Xuewu, the husband, works in an enterprise and they have a young boy, Xiao Bao. However, from the day of the move, a series of incidents occur: the husband asks for a divorce from his wife Li Baoli, the wife finds out that the husband is cheating on her, Li Baoli reports the husband to the police for illegal erotic services, which causes the husband to lose face in the affair and the husband is fired from the company. Finally, the husband chose to suicide after a series of shocks. After the husband's suicide, Li Baoli takes on the responsibility of earning money to support the entire family. Li Baoli's best friend believes that the tragedy of her family is due to the bad luck brought by the new house, which in Chinese Feng Shui stands for Wan Jian Chuan Xin (meaning ten thousand arrows piercing the heart or the center of something). Therefore, Xie Fei, the film's art director, said, "The English title of 'Wan Jian Chuan Xin' is difficult to understand if translated directly from the film's title, so it was suggested to translate it directly to Feng Shui, which is immediately acceptable to Westerners."

In addition to the thematic similarities, the similarities between The Way We Are and Feng Shui can be shown in the following examples:

Figure 1 - The Way We Are 01:26:21~01:27:40 The three main characters sit warmly at the round table for dinner during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

About eating:

Figure 2 - Feng Shui 00:06:03~00:07:21 Li Baoli's family celebrates the move to their new home by eating at a square table.

The eating scenes both occur frequently and attract attention in both films. In both films, The Way We Are appears at least 13 times in the eating scenes, and in Feng Shui the eating scenes appear at least 7 times in the meal-related scenes. Influenced by traditional Chinese cosmology, the ancient Chinese philosophy of round sky and square earth has been used until now. Such a concept includes the completeness of the family. The Chinese, who are deeply influenced by Confucianism, place great emphasis on family reunion and kinship. As can be seen in the two stills on the right side, according to Figure 1, the dining table is round in the home of Kwaijie; the main character in The Way We Are, according to Figure 2, dining table in the home of Li Baoli, the heroine in Feng Shui, is square. The two stills represent the beginning of Feng Shui and the end of The Way We Are. In the scene at the beginning of Feng Shui, the Li Baoli family has just moved into a new house, and to celebrate the move, the family sits around the dining table and eats dinner. In the scene at the end of The Way We Are, Kwaijie, Granny Leung Foon and Cheung Ka On sit down for dinner to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. In traditional Chinese culinary culture, dinner is a more formal meal and an important friendship or family event. Eating with people they love after an exhausting day of work is a manifestation of a well-rounded life. Meanwhile, during important celebrations or holidays, a group of people eating around the table is the best way to connect emotionally in a limited space. The still shows Li Baoli, her husband and son eating together because of their marriage and parent-child relationship. But the sense of belonging between Kwaijie, Granny Leung Foon and Cheung Ka On is generated by their mutual help and care for each other. Eating together is a testifying of intimacy. Characters like Kwaijie and Li Baoli, who come from marginalized social spaces, can also temporarily detach themselves from the loneliness that marginality brings to them through a meal that represents getting together.

Figure 3 - The Way We Are 00:35:23~00:37:10 Kwaijie asked her son to help Granny move the TV.

About touching help between underprivileged women without kinship:

Figure 4 - Feng Shui 00:16:00~00:16:21 The Chinese subtitles here are Li Baoli speaking to Aunt He. Help Aunt He get the job.

In both The Way We Are and Feng Shui include a special bond between women. The female characters in both films are widowed mothers and underprivileged women, thus representing them as marginalized figures in the social space. The touchingly kind help between women is an eye-catching scene in both films. In the next stills, both show the two female protagonists volunteering to send signals of willingness to help women who are without kinship. Both stills appear at a time when the female characters are offering help to another woman in the film. In Figure 3 from The Way We Are, Kwaijie helps Granny get a TV and save money by having her son help Granny move the TV back to Granny's home. In the Figure 4 from Feng Shui, Li Baoli helps Aunt He, a worker who carries a pole, to get a chance to earn money, so that another male worker can give up this easier opportunity. In both scenes, the heroines' help to the other two women will not benefit Kwaijie and Li Baoli themselves at the time. They do not hesitate to help, even though they will not be immediately reciprocated. But the help paved the way for these marginalized women to build a warm space for their relationships later on. Also, these generous help were responded to when Kwaijie and Li Baoli needed help.

Marginalized figures in specific spaces:

Figure 5 - The Way We Are 00:01:55~00:03:06 Kwaijie is a normal supermarket worker.

Figure 6 - Feng Shui 01:00:35~01:01:10 Li Baoli is a pole carrier on Hanzheng St.

The female characters in both films are situated in specific areas. As can be seen in Figure 5, Kwaijie in The Way We Are is a common employee of a supermarket in Tin Shui Wai. According to Figure 6, Li Baoli in Feng Shui works as a pole carrier in the Hanzheng St. neighborhood in order to earn more money to support her family after the death of her husband. In the social structure, Kwaijie and Li Baoli's jobs are not considered to be the higher social class jobs. Within social bias, their work is as socially marginalized as their characterization. They are widows and underprivileged women, but their significant contributions to their families in the film make their characters to be shining. Despite the fact that their professions are not high-paying ones, both Kwaijie and Li Baoli provide a guaranteed life for their children and even improve the lives of their families. Although marginalized characters in society are more likely to be forgotten by the public, both heroines become respected in their limited space and eventually gain a sense of belonging where they live.

Beyond these similarities, there are the following differences:

Figure 7 -The Way We Are 01:11:45~01:11:50 Kwaijie speaks gently and politely to anyone, even she says please to the restaurant waiter.

The difference between characters:

Figure 8 - Feng Shui 00:04:30~00:05:00 Li Baoli called her husband very shameless in front of other people.

The impressive mother-child relationships included in The Way We Are and Feng Shui are distinctly different. According to psychology, emotionally unstable parents have a profound effect on the development of their children. By comparing Figure 7 and Figure 8, the mother-child relationship in The Way We Are is better than the one in Feng Shui. Kwaijie's characterization by the actress shows that she is a gentle and not easily angry mother. Therefore, Kwaijie's son, Cheung Ka On, is also an emotionally stable teenager who never argues with his family. On the contrary, Li Baoli in Feng Shui is a woman with a temper who will say hurtful things in response to her displeasure. Growing up with such a mother figure, Li Baoli and her son's relationships are more like enemies. The easily angry mother is unable to give her child Xiao Bao an intimate mother-son connection, which leads to an irreparable mother-son relationship in the end. These differences in characterization also makes the plots of the two films tend to have opposite emotional atmospheres.

Different plots:

Figure 9 - The Way We Are 01:16:55~01:18:17 Kwaijie's son and Kwaijie go to visit grandma. The son volunteered to give his mother a chair.

Figure 10 - Feng Shui 01:31:00~01:35:30 Li Baoli's son rudely says she is no longer his mother.

The plot and the pace of the storyline in both movies are related to the characterizations. (The characteristics of each are shown in Figure 9 and Figure 10.) Because the emotions of the main characters in The Way We Are are steadily developing. This movie has a softer plot and a slower pace. Including the slow-paced background music in The Way We Are, the whole movie gives the viewers a steady emotional progression. Compared to Feng Shui's protagonists, who are prone to mood swings, this film's pace fluctuates significantly and has a stronger sense of emotional pressure. Ultimately, the two films go in different emotional directions. The Way We Are ends with the three main characters gathered in the warm space where they belong, which is a fulfillment. In contrast, in Feng Shui, the son and mother's relationship breaks up, giving the film's ending a color of pity.

Attitudes toward male privilege/patriarchy/Confucianism:

In The Way We Are, Kwaijie's mother says that Kwaijie gave up her education and worked very hard to get her two younger brothers finished school. Moreover, she sent a portion of her salary to her original family to improve their lives after she got married. Because Kwaijie has two younger brothers, she loses her rights as a victim of male privilege that would otherwise be her own. Due to Kwaijie's gentle nature, she is under the influence of a patriarchal social structure and Confucianism that makes her believe that her family's well-being takes precedence over her own. The difference is that Li Baoli does not allow this patriarchal structure to be a barrier to her personal interests. Her not-so-soft personality frees her from the constraints of Confucianism on women and makes her a broader character than Kwaijie. She does not maintain a wife who conforms to the expectations of a patriarchal society for the sake of her husband, she does not easily give in to things that harm her own well-being, she is strong and has her own ideas. She tries to work as a pole carrier with mainly male workers, transferring part of the male privilege of this job to a strong woman. The representation of Li Baoli in Figure 6 is also a good proof.

Alternative Interpretation

Tin Shui Wai's rural area on the left, urban high-rises on the right, separated by the roadway.

In Chang’s article, the opening sequence of Hui’s insertion of black-and-white photographic footage and the establishing and reestablishing shots of Tin Shui Wai’s expansive rural and urban landscapes, distances viewers from protagonists’ perception, which replaced by the history of modern Hong Kong’s development toward industrialization and urbanization; For Lu, this sequence not only presents the peripheral status of Tin Shui Wai as camera moves away from the distant skyscrapers, the form of aesthetics also posits the film at the margins of the urban chaos of Hong Kong, which strengthens Lu’s analysis about space in the film that Ann Hui’s camera aims at a space that is marginal and periphery both geographically and culturally.

Two spaces separated by plastic curtain.

While in alternative thinking, a parallelism between Tin Shui Wai and the female figure Kwai could be found as they are both marginalized if we connect the opening sequence with the shots comes followed. After a horizontal pan where camera positioned on the pedestrian bridge mapping out the rural landscape to the urban high-rises from left to right, two disparate views separated by the roadway while connected by the bridge, which seems to imply that even within Tin Shui Wai the marginalization happened naturally as Tin Shui Wai itself being marginal as well according to scholars discussed above. Next shot turns to Kwai leaves home to the supermarket, gets changed in the small locker room for staff, passing the narrow hallway with noisy machine sound, and then goes out to the main shopping section through the plastic curtain. In order to create a more realistic, believable ambiance, direct sound used while revealing the actual environment hidden behind supermarket’s plastic curtain, and also the ordinary routine of every supermarket staff like Kwai. By drawing an analogy between Tin Shui Wai and Kwai, the roadway and the plastic curtain have the same function of separating the visible spaces. Internally, within Tin Shui Wai and the environment Kwai spent daily (supermarket), there is marginalization; Externally, which in broader context, Tin Shui Wai is marginalized geographically and culturally, and Kwai is marginalized by her family due to sorts of underlying reasons like confucian virtue, patriarchy or gender issues discussed above, and we can still see a continuity of these marginalization from both of them.

Conclusion

The Way We Are, mainly talks about even though Tin Shui Wai is the forgotten space through the marginalized, those lower class people like the widow woman live the positive and strong life in neoliberal post-handover Hong Kong. With the scholarly literature reviews, it's not hard for people to realize that The Way We Are represents an attitude of “coolness”, rather than “numbness” to express about the marginalized people who lived in the modern society of Hong Kong. By comparing Tin Shui Wai diptych —The Way We Are (2008) and Night and Fog (2009), people could see about the changes that the directors explored, especially like the marginal figures under patriarchy, like women from the lower classes were still marginalized in the society. But the director Ann Hui tries to provide a coolness gaze at these marginalized women, without a lot of pity but more understanding. The director Ann Hui also expressed that this was the life of his parents, and millions of other normal people in Hong Kong. I personally recommend this movie to people who want to explore the life of a marginal group of people such as women from the lower class. It’s not a miserable life as people may think, but a strength that a woman has with a deep positive attitude toward life. It’s the common people’s life and that’s also the meaning of life itself.

References

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