Like I asked about in a previous post - is there a Joy Luck Club revival going on? I think there has to be, because more news, articles - and experiments keep on coming up:
Experiment: Take four Asian American women in 2008 who haven't seen The Joy Luck Club, and see what they think about it fifteen years after its original release.Check out the article down at Asia Pacific Arts for the discussion and what each has to say on the film as it's pretty interesting - although I had to ask the question of why there weren't any men in the experiment, especially seeing as how part of the criticism of the movie came from Asian American males.
The idea was partially inspired by David Henry Hwang's introduction to a new paperback edition of C.Y. Lee's novel Flower Drum Song. Rodger and Hammerstein's Broadway adaptation Flower Drum Song spawned the first ever Hollywood film to feature an all-Asian American cast, though it was criticized by many in the Asian American community for its representation of Chinatown and ethnicity. But in his 2002 essay, Hwang writes that, for him, seeing the film many decades later, there's something valuable and empowering in it that you could never have seen originally because everyone was blinded by the exotification debate.
Enter The Joy Luck Club. Different time period, similar stigmas.
Are we just not that important to the discussion?
