Saving Face: Daughters in Love

Even now, Wu says, she receives messages on a daily basis from queer viewers, thanking her for making a film that moved them toward self-acceptance and opened lines of communication with their families. If Saving Face premiered today, it would likely be met with a splashier reception and a bigger audience than it was twenty years ago. But back then, the film helped so many people who were otherwise finding no stories to call their own. “I’ve always been the kind of person who prefers to reach a smaller group of people very intensely rather than a large group of people a little bit,” Wu has said, and the film seems to have a way of reaching those who need it. The press around her long-awaited second feature, The Half of It (2020)—which also follows a queer, Chinese American protagonist’s escapades in life and love—amplified the afterlife of Saving Face by introducing a new generation to Wu’s filmmaking. Still, she remains surprised by the intensity of the audience response to a film made “very specifically because of something I was trying to say to my mom.”

But without that anchoring tenacity, Saving Face would never have been made. Bored at her job as a software engineer at Microsoft in the 1990s, Wu, on a whim, took a weekend writing class and began to write the story that would become Saving Face. She then enrolled in a screenwriting extension course offered by the University of Washington. In 1998, she moved to Brooklyn and set a five-year deadline for her silver-screen aspirations, the window in which she’d calculated that she could live off her tech savings. Saving Face premiered at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, then opened the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in 2005. There, Wu had an encounter that helps articulate what is so singular about the film. “I’ll never forget being in the Castro,” she told the New York Times in 2020, “in a huge audience of queer men in leather sitting next to old immigrant Chinese men who could barely speak English.”

The first time I watched Saving Face, I could focus only on the very miracle of its existence, the uncanny experience of being addressed by a story so specific to me that I could not rewatch it for years. It felt something like serendipity laced with suspicion, like walking past an old pay phone on an empty street and suddenly hearing it ring. Who, me? Even Wil’s ma seemed uncannily like my own, both still beautiful enough in middle age to have adolescent vanity, prone to shrieking accusations of ingratitude, loyal to pungent jars of fermented tofu, and in the habit of wearing plastic smocks, patterned with sun-bleached florals, as aprons. I could go on. The final piece of verisimilitude: despite some twenty years of living in the Anglophone West, both our mothers remain stubbornly monolingual. Hwei-lan speaks in Mandarin, and Wil replies in English—unless it really matters. Wu was warned that she’d struggle to find producers if she kept half the film in Mandarin, but she insisted on this degree of linguistic realism, absent even in the literary-turned-cinematic phenomenon that was The Joy Luck Club (1993).

“There is no way this community would be as conservative and insular as they are if they spoke English,” Wu told the Advocate in 2005. The detail also reveals how such insularity can complicate the demands of filial piety, arguably the central tenet of Chinese cultural identity. What does it mean to honor parental authority when you have been a child translator—and secretary, and legal consultant—for an otherwise capable young mother? How can you be expected to believe, after years and years of this, that you are still the child, clueless and green? An upended hierarchy; a scrambled timeline. Respect is earned only through seniority, but your parents have lost their footing and slipped back in time. When Hwei-lan shows up on Wil’s doorstep with all her things in tow, like a runaway teen, she seems suddenly helpless, utterly dependent. Only it’s actually not so sudden. “I’m going to be a terrible mother,” Hwei-lan confesses, later in the film. “You were different,” she tells Wil. “You sprung from the womb already grown up.” I suspect she has never really grasped all the trials that hastened her daughter into maturity.

By the 1980s, enough Asian American media had circulated in the mainstream for it to be legible as a category of minoritarian creative production. A fledgling fictional canon emerged, with Wayne Wang’s string of Chinese American family-comedy movies and the publication of the source novel for The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, in 1989. By the nineties, the generational conflicts rattling Chinese immigrant families had become a fairly standard theme, but it was Ang Lee’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet that first broached the issue of queerness as part of these cultural negotiations. Like Wil, The Wedding Banquet’s bisexual Taiwanese American protagonist, Wai-tung, leads a double life: happily domestic with his boyfriend in New York; single and closeted to his parents in Taiwan. Against the sense of riotous subversion that defined the films of the New Queer Cinema, the queer immigrant’s story seems to lack the bombast of radical refusal. If the hollow-eyed youths of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy locate their very identities in the flagrant perversity of the margins, characters like Wil and Wai-tung struggle to place themselves at all. They face a categorical ultimatum: where you are most Chinese—at the family hearth—you cannot also be queer.

Such is the obligation declared by the film’s titular translation of a Chinese idiom. If “losing face” refers to the ritual humiliation that follows a public faux pas, some perceived betrayal of family honor, to “save face” is to perform a kind of social triage, to try to reassemble what’s left of your reputation. This is the standard script of castigation favored by disappointed Chinese parents. When Hwei-lan’s father disavows her, it’s less for the substance of what she’s done than how it will play for others. “She can throw her own face away,” he yells, seething, “but it still comes back to me.” Shame is quick to bloom, contagious like rot. People will laugh at him, this professor who “speaks big words but can’t control his own daughter.” That she is forty-eight years old means nothing—because he knows everything. He even dismisses the symptoms of menopause as an “American” issue, one of many throwaway remarks in Wu’s script that deftly capture how misogyny masquerades as cultural difference. Divorce, queerness, a child born out of wedlock: trace the root of all deviancies back to Western corruption and there’s nothing left to discuss. Mother and daughter find themselves on the same inadvertent quest, swerving the collisions of family duty and personal desire.

If only they could talk about it. Wil and Hwei-lan exchange plenty of words, but Wu captures a strangeness in their dialogue. Beyond the bilingual call-and-response, their conversations often feel like a procession of non sequiturs. Late in the film, sinking deep in midnight heartbreak, Wil comes out to her mother—again, but as if for the first time. Hwei-lan is expressionless, unmoved. “I am not a bad mother,” she responds. The two women are trapped behind glass panes of incomprehension, each visible to the other, responding to what they think is being said instead of what is. For years, I fought with my mother like this, the words we hurled at each other flying at odd slants, each incredulous at the other’s absurd and impossible logic. It took me a long time to see that, in the elliptical account of an immigrant parent’s life, the biggest mystery is not who they were or what they did, but the kind of world that made them.

Still, there are unexpected moments of recognition that pierce the opacity between them—which is enough for a love like this. Almost halfway through the film, Wil intervenes as matchmaker, arranging as many suitors as she can for her reluctant mother. Amid reams of clothes and fuss before her first date, Hwei-lan is already moping, defeated by the seeming indignity of dating at her age. Wil leans in to fix her mother’s hair and pauses suddenly, taken aback by something in her face. “You’re beautiful,” she says, though what stuns her is not the fact of her mother’s beauty, which she has always known—but something new that she has just begun to recognize.

In the end, Wil and Hwei-lan both choose to live out the truth of their respective desires, each emboldened by the other’s conviction and shamelessness in love, and they are brought closer together as a result. There’s no pretense of total reconciliation in the wider community, no scene where a tearful Grandpa relents and takes his wayward daughter in his arms at last, nor one of thunderous applause from the community when Wil and Vivian finally kiss on the crowded dance floor. What happens is much truer to life, a diminuendo that doesn’t fully resolve. Grandpa winds up in a rickety chair, watching the revelers from the sidelines, bemoaning the state of a bewildering world that keeps on turning, and after Wil and Vivian’s public embrace, a handful of scandalized onlookers do leave the room, though others, including Vivian’s mother, observe with quiet affection. But it hardly matters, because Hwei-lan is still there, with her new partner, and the dance floor now belongs to the daughters in love.