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Editor's note: This is a nostalgic theater.
If the majority of fans choose a Chinese film that discusses the cultural conflict between China and the United States, it is estimated that many people will think of "Gua Sha" 20 years ago.
Gua Sha poster
"Gua Sha" was inspired by a real case seen in american newspapers by the director Zheng Xiaolong and screenwriter Wang Xiaoping, a Chinese couple accidentally fell on their children while bathing their children, a "family affair" in the Middle Chinese environment in the United States caused the Child Welfare Bureau to intervene, shanggang online for 4 years to fight a lawsuit, as the director of the series "Beijingers in New York", Zheng Xiaolong is keenly aware of the story and topicality.
In the 1990s, Zheng Xiaolong and Chinese and American screenwriters created the story of the "illegal" gua sha in the United States Chinese: after taking root in the United States by game design, Xu Datong brought the old father who could not speak English to the younger son who could only speak English to live together, and one day the little grandson had a belly and the grandfather shaved the grandson according to the "old law", and the hospital accidentally found that the "sha" on the child suspected that he had been abused and reported to the Child Welfare Bureau, and the Datong couple had to start arguing with the US law for the child.
Stills from Gua Sha
Xu Datong, played by Leung Ka Fai, is the main character in "Gua Sha", he is involved by two driving forces at the same time, on the one hand, he is eager to integrate into American society as a new immigrant, and the wife played by Jiang Wenli even stipulates that his son can only speak English at home;
On the other side is his deep-rooted traditional thinking as a Chinese, and he sets the protagonist of the game listed in the United States as Sun Wukong, because he believes that Sun Wukong is the hero who best represents traditional Chinese values and morals. The rift between the two forces is Datong's dilemma: he struggled to become an American for half his life and realized his American dream, but he did not expect that one day the laws of the United States would not even believe that he loved his own son.
The reason why Gua Sha has become a rare work is that it not only raises the topic of such a large pattern as cultural conflicts, but more importantly, it also proposes a topic that everyone can participate in the discussion of " fatherly love " . Datong, who is in the cracks of culture, is also a creeper in the intergenerational gap, as he said in court, as a father, he loves his children more than everything in the world, and in order to see his son, he pretends to be Santa Claus and climbs the outer wall of the apartment with his bare hands and almost falls to his death. However, Datong is not a perfect father, his way of educating his children is quite old and rude, and the beginning of the movie is that Datong beats his son in public in order to protect the face of his boss.
Compared with the role of "father", Datong's performance in playing "son" is more moving. Datong adopts the Chinese style of filial piety for his father: reporting good news but not worrying, Dan Dan cannot go home after being taken away by the Child Welfare Bureau, and Datong is anxious but comforts his father that this is just a normal medical procedure in the United States. In order not to affect the approval of his father's US green card, Datong lied that Dan Dan Gua Sha was himself, and it was precisely because of his desire to protect his father that he became the target of judicial attack.
Datong is a typical middle-aged, middle-class, Chinese man who wants to be a father who makes his son proud and a son who makes his father proud. Under the pressure of the lawsuit, Datong fell out with the boss and resigned, in order to let the child go home and live with his wife, the former Chinese pride could only curl up in the cheap small hotel and drink day and night to dispel his worries.
Just when his life was in trouble again, it was his father who saved him. The grandfather played by Zhu Xu finds the American boss of Datong and compares it to prove that the "criminal" who gave Dan Dan Gua Sha is not Datong but him. The boss took half a day to find out the truth, and when he inexplicably asked Datong's wife why Datong wanted to tell such a lie, the answer was: "Because he is Chinese." ”
In the end, it was grandpa who took the initiative to give up his green card to return to China to live alone, and he considered that "I can't help my children here, and I will do my best to give them trouble." At the airport of farewell, Datong and Grandpa presented the strongest tear point scene in the whole film. Grandpa picked up Datong's face and said, "Let Daddy take a good look at you again, I'm old, I don't want to forget what you look like." "After saying that, I used my fingers to dot the tip of Daitong's nose like a child.
This passage made Datong, who had been proud for half a lifetime, collapse in an instant, and at that moment he understood that his son needed a father, and he also needed his own father. Realizing that he could no longer let his father live a decent life in the United States, he immediately "stole" his son from the Child Welfare Bureau and planned to "flee" the United States with his grandparents.
Datong's wayward behavior was stopped by his father: "If you go back like this, you are still a fugitive who has abused his child in the United States and run back to China." In the end, Datong listened to his father's words and stayed in the United States. After a tense chase with several police cars, Datong was kidnapped and kidnapped, but the grandson Dan Dan had a lot of fun during the whole process, and he also loved his father very much.
Gua Sha is not only a traditional means of health care, in the movie Gua Sha is a Chinese-style family metaphor, Americans have misunderstood both Gua Sha and misunderstood the Love of Chinese Fathers for Their Children, so Grandpa will issue that sigh in front of the grave of his deceased friend: "You said that Gua Sha has been in China for thousands of years, how did this come to the United States? ”
Could it be that Americans can't scratch sha? It is really not, the Prejudice of Americans against Chinese culture in the movie is finally solved by the Americans themselves, and the American boss of Datong found a Chinese medicine hall to experience a gua sha, suddenly felt the "true fragrance", and proved to the Child Welfare Bureau by example that gua sha is only a chinese medicine method rather than abuse, thus resolving the lawsuit.
20 years after the "pride and prejudice" caused by gua sha, today's tiktok and youtube are full of beauty, fashion bloggers holding pink and green fake jade scrapers to share their beauty dafa, and Amazon's scraper board bestseller list is even more praised.
Gua Sha, a foreign fan of the mysterious eastern power, even learned a variety of ways to play such as frozen gua sha, finger gua sha, spoon gua sha and so on. Internet celebrities all exaggerated the principle of gua sha, rolling their eyes and groaning while demonstrating the technique: "So good!" The excitement is no less than that of the stars who bring the sky-high beauty instrument on the live broadcast.
Twitter on tiktok introduced Gua Sha
Nowadays, it seems that "Gua Sha" is a misunderstanding of the times, and if the same thing is placed today, there must be a large number of Internet celebrities rushing to the court to prove Gua Sha. The cause of cultural conflict is that the interface of cultural output is wrong, and the best way to avoid cultural conflict is not to be tough, but to create cultural needs. Today's overseas "Gua Sha boom" is as all street health stores expect: sooner or later human beings will expose their true weakness in the depth of sha.
This issue is edited by Zhou Yuhua