Beneath the Gloss: Children of Invention Review
by emily yuA review on a movie that grapples with the often overlooked struggles of the Asian American community
The 27th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival took place over a span of ten days, starting March 12, 2009. The festival showcased movies that shared the lives and filmmaking of the Asian American community. One of the films Children of Invention played during this festival and was awarded the Special Jury Prize for the narrative category. And I got to watch it.
It was a good movie. But I confess – it was a blasé kind of good. The pace of the movie is slow, the pauses and silences between characters generous, and the conversations in each scene void of frivolous philosophy. That doesn’t make it bad (in fact, it makes the film realistic), since it deftly captures the rhythm of the lives of an immigrant mom and Chinese American children.
But as a Chinese American, I found it hard to identify with this Chinese American family’s struggle to make ends meet. I wonder - is this telling of a greater issue that the Chinese American and perhaps the Asian American community faces, one that is overlooked due to the almost pristine image of a model minority?
The plot revolves around a single working Chinese immigrant mom, Elaine Cheng, and her two kids, Raymond and Tina. Elaine tries to make ends meet by looking for any available sales position. She eventually gets involved in a pyramid scheme for which she gets caught and detained in prison for more than two days, unable to reach her kids. That leaves Raymond and Tina, who are presumably in elementary school, to their own devices – they end up going to Boston to withdraw their Chinese New Year money and decide to use that money to support themselves by selling their inventions made of marbles, egg cartons, and forks.
Children of Invention portrays the immigrant family struggle. We see the struggle most prominently in the mother, who works hard to make the next paycheck but gets duped by the money-making scheme she works for. She is detained in prison along with two other Chinese women. Based on the movie’s depiction, it appears that the system has it against the Asian immigrant. Elaine is taken advantage of by the scheme because as an immigrant with little financial stability, she is desperate to get by to support her two kids alone. At the prison, she is further detained for her illegal immigrant status because a background check reveals that her visa has expired. Clearly, the system is thorough in its inspection – some might argue, suspicion – of the immigrant perpetrator. But how exclusively Asian is this issue?
One of my issues with the film is whether these hardships are distinctly Asian American or more universal. What Children of Invention reveals is that the issue of the disadvantaged, struggling immigrant parent is racial to the extent that immigrant families are oftentimes the ones who begin at the bottom of the social ladder. They come with the hope of bettering their lives, but to get there requires the sacrifice and a degree of desperation we see in Elaine. The poor and desperate are the people who are preyed on by pyramid schemes, and that demographic will most likely be an immigrant one.
The consequences of these circumstances extend to the rest of the family, in which Elaine’s negligence as a parent becomes apparent. Raymond, the older brother, comes to believe that his mom has left him and his sister just as his father did. But we know that the reason behind the negligence is indirectly the result of the exploitation of her labor and circumstance. But to say that she was exploited because of her race would be a stretch – however, her race and accent were an indication of a greater problem, which is the immigrant one that struggles to scrape by out of hard, if not exploited, work.
Race was interestingly used in context of the struggle that the family faced. The quietness and detachment of Raymond and Tina from other white kids , the videogame playing at the toy store, and bargaining of inventions to the social service worker – all subtle stereotypes that served not to reinforce the stereotypes but play up the tension and difficulty that the characters faced as a family. But it is worth noting that these troubles trickled from Elaine’s need to work overtime to support her family. The struggle that the family grapples with is Asian American because it is immigrant.
What’s telling in my lukewarm reception of the film is my lack of shared experience. What’s even more telling is the ignorance, even within the Asian American community, of what another side of this community faces. In fact, the director of Children of Invention, Tze Chun, based the movie partly on his personal experience. Thus, it appropriately sheds light on the dangers and obstacles that many Asian American families face, as well as what is masked from the eyes of the rest of society. The immigrant struggle in America includes the Asian American community, and underneath the model minority appearance is a struggle worth acknowledging.