The first time I watched “The Wedding Banquet” was over a year ago, when a friend said the female lead Weiwei looked like me, so I was curious to find it and watch it, based on which I always thought I had a filter on Weiwei.
Recently, in order to popularize Chinese culture, I finally found a version with English subtitles and re-watched it with my friend in the UK.
At Weiwei’s wedding, my friend suddenly said Oh, I feel so sorry for her.
I was very puzzled by this.
I remember when I saw this series, I was thinking that Weiwei wanted to stay in America, and that this wedding would not only allow her to stay in America as she wanted, but also to go through the formalities of living with someone she loved and wanted nothing from a cramped basement to a big comfortable bed, and to get a lot of extra gifts and kindness from her “in-laws”. This is a very fortunate thing to have to pay a lot of money or be careful, as in many stories. However, she didn’t seem to be very happy throughout, and she seemed awkward and even a bit ungrateful, which is one of the reasons why many reviews don’t like this character.
So I was very surprised at my friend’s reaction.
So I paused the movie and asked him why.
He said he could tell Weiwei was looking forward to having a romantic intimacy and she seemed to be experiencing the scenario she was looking forward to, yet it was all, however, fake. She was a very kind girl, and her drifting days had made her feel at home for a long time, so the better Weiwei’s parents treated her, the more she felt guilty for lying to them. So many things and emotions piled up on her, but she could not bear to tell her parents, despite calling them, but as soon as she heard their voices, and pretended that everything was fine, but chose to bear it alone.
So it seems that Ang Lee actually set a fine background for these what I thought were twisted emotions long ago, but I surprisingly overlooked them all while watching the movie. When I heard a completely different interpretation from the mouth of this foreign boy, I felt very ashamed. Especially since I, who needed to be on my own in England, had many similar experiences to Weiwei, I actually showed no empathy for her.
At the end of the movie, I remembered my duty as a “cultural popularizer” and pretended to tell my friend, “Look at this movie, it seems that everyone gets a better ending, but in fact this is the result of everyone’s compromise, which reflects a very typical “Chinese philosophy”. “He was confused.
He was confused and asked me, “Did Weiwei get a good ending too?
I said she ended up staying in the US as she wanted.
He said, “But compared to the others, the price she paid was too high. She had to go through a long and painful pregnancy and delivery process, especially when you can see that she is the kind of person who seeks freedom and has her own artistic ideals.
I said she said that after this “wedding banquet”, she didn’t want to have a second such experience.
He said that Weiwei was obviously trying to be a strong and responsible person at the time, and to make everyone happy and comfort him. And falling in love doesn’t have to mean going through all that, either. Anyway, compared to others, her sacrifice is too big ……
A cultural popularization event just turned into a self-reflection ……
As a woman, I thought I had absorbed a lot of feminist ideas in recent years, and I have always tried my best to respect others and be more empathetic, but I never really seemed to bring myself into Weiwei’s situation throughout the movie.
I later thought that from the time when “Wendi Deng” was used as a symbol of “male dominance”, “green card”, “women without green cards”, “women with good families”, “women who have no green cards”, “women who have no green cards”, “women who have no green cards”, “women who have no green cards”, “women who have no green cards”, “women who have no green cards”. “These symbols, which have been given special connotations for a long time, seem to have pre-constructed the story for me. Here Weiwei has become a symbol for me, an “other”, rather than a person to be understood and empathized with. The “value” of women in a patriarchal society, such as marriage and children, seems to be a compromise that need not be overly concerned with.
And then I realized that the malice that I had latent in my consciousness towards Weiwei, the malicious scrutiny of facts, was also malice towards myself. In the current era, I am always afraid of falling into the traditional definition of “female”, demanding to be wise, strong, tough, and independent, while repeatedly ignoring the normal vulnerability and plight of me, and others, as human beings. I often deliberately isolate myself, wanting a self-fulfillment without relying on anyone, but always forgetting that accepting the care and help of others is also a kind of ability.
This malice, this perception of Weiwei’s image, is something I probably wouldn’t have discovered or changed for a long time if I hadn’t re-watched “The Wedding Banquet” with a friend.
Yet I found that my malice, the unintentional harm I may have caused to her people or unfairly judged them, was a product of a vast social consciousness, so my introspection could hardly go any deeper or farther in the short term. The last chapter of the book is titled “Can Misogyny be Transcended”, and I still didn’t find much to answer my confusion.
I suddenly remembered the short review I wrote on Douban when I first finished reading “The Wedding Banquet”: “I came to see it after being told that it looked like the heroine …… to Simon’s little cutie than the heart. Yes, I had never realized before that the female lead was unnamed in the reviews of the same movie, in my discussions with others.
With that, in writing this article, I consciously wrote Weiwei wherever she appeared, which was probably the first step I could take to change.