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Go Back to China Is a Surprisingly Tender Coming-of-Age Story

Go Back to China is Emily Ting‘s sophomore feature: a low-stakes, semi-autobiographical account of a hyper-affluent Chinese American woman navigating the turbulent uncertainties of young adulthood. Starring Anna Akana as Sasha Li, the film picks up immediately after our protagonist has graduated from art college with a degree in fashion design. This immediately situates us in a beloved coming-of-age subgenre—the post-graduate blues movie (Reality Bites, The Last Days of Disco, Kicking & Screaming, Tiny Furniture, St. Elmo’s Fire, etc.). Only this time we substitute white America with a wealthy Chinese lead, therefore infusing the story with a fresh cross-cultural spin.

The early scenes in which Sasha interviews with fashion designers across New York City nicely captures the frustrating liminality of this limbo phase in life. Post-graduate job hunting is literally the worst. You are forced to move from the teeming liberality of university into the rigidly hierarchical realm of professional drudgery. It is a time when you are brimming with energy, knowledge, and potential, and yet lack the resume for anyone to give you the time of day. For most, the only option is to intern, which is effectively a form of slave labor that should be abolished immediately. The notion of working for free is easily one of the gravest malpractices permitted in modern capitalism.

Sasha’s frustrations and sympathetic qualities are diluted a bit by the fact that she is extremely spoiled—wining and dining on her father Teddy’s (Richard Ng) expense. However, when her funds get cut off (after spending half a million dollars in a mere year, mostly on luxury club service and jean jackets), she is presented with a unsavory proposition by her estranged, money-making daddy: either return to Shenzen and work at the family’s manufacturing facility (which mass-produces plushies/stuffed animals) or survive on her own dime. Of course, she’s essentially got no choice— back to Mainland China it is.

What follows is a reverse fish-out-of-water story—a tale where the protagonist’s ostensible homeland is in fact more alien and unfamiliar than their adopted country. Essentially, it is not that much different from any post-graduate story about a young adult returning to their rural hometown (Young Adult, or Frances Ha, for instance). That said, the culture clash is a bit exaggerated in Sasha’s situation—viscerally felt the instant she hips into a Shenzen taxi. We witness her scoff at local Chinese eating at noodle stalls (later, she blasphemously disparages a hole-in-the-wall noodle haunt as “ghetto”). We witness her gawk at the larger-than-life murals of half-naked white women engraved into the shower tile at her father’s mansion. We witness her refusing to eat congee (“I don’t do carbs in the morning”), asking for egg whites with spinach instead (much to the chagrin of her father’s Filipino maid).

Sasha’s sassy yet sour demeanor feels both specific and stereotypical, personal and universal, nuanced and broad. She very neatly fits into the exclusive demographic of an ultra-rich Asian girl. In China, there are numerous terms for Sasha’s nouveau riche socioeconomic position, including Fuerdai. Her father, meanwhile, fits the bill of a Tuhao individual: “tu” meaning “crass” and “hao” meaning rich. Sasha is not off the mark in caustically referring to him as emperor. His gaudy, bawdy, unrefined taste (the chintzy gold décor and elevator in his mini mansion, for example), and his knack for marrying beautiful, impoverished wives very much reinforces these classifications. He’s very much a member of China’s ostentatious parvenu.

A scene from Go Back to China, wherein Teddy and his daughter, Sashi Li, argue at work.

Arriving to China with the entitled airs of an American arriviste, Sasha’s time working the assembly line, beside the local workers in their pastel scrubs and yellow caps, humbles her quickly. Sasha’s arc is often painted in general strokes. She complains “a monkey” could do the job of tagging stuffed animal ears on her first morning then finds herself in awe of the stamina of the assembly line workers by the day’s end. Later, she hesitantly decides to eat the mushy canteen food among the plebeians in the on-site cafeteria only to grow to be grateful for the sense of community.

These cumulative, hands-on experiences give Sasha insight into the plight of the proletarian, and by the end, she acts on her cultural and economic reawakening by forcing her father to add healthy fruits and veggies to the cafeteria menu. In an even bigger gesture, she donates her own savings to build an on-site day care at the factory. Equally satisfying to these altruistic victories is Sasha’s savvy application of “useless fashion degree” (as her father refers to it) to useful ends. After a major distributer leaves the factory uninterested by the upcoming Christmas season’s designs, Sasha takes initiative—leading m Teddy’s design team on a trip to Hong Kong (located just on the other side of the border from Shenzen) to scout and survey the latest fashion statements.

She quickly returns with a novel design strategy, successfully persuading her father to adopt a Kawaii  (the Japanese fad of ‘loveable’ ‘cute’, or ‘adorable’ novelty items) style and sensibility for the next season’s stuffed animal line (making pastel-hued reindeer and a hipster Santa). The moment nicely reconciles their differences—cultural, generational, professional—and proves Emily’s design acumen has serious potential. It also shows the potential advantages of fusing western and eastern qualities together. Teddy represents Chinese productivity and entrepreneurial expedience. Sasha represents American creativity and innovation. Together, they make a great team.

Ultimately, Go Back to China pulls off the delicate feat of humanizing the more vulgar aspects of China’s emergent aristocracy. Sure, a deep investigation of Teddy will reveal some hollow, self-centered, selfish underpinnings. Just look at his reaction to product recall of Sasha’s redesign of the kawaii holiday collection after she modifies a plain fabric scarf with sequins, thereby creating a choking hazard. Teddy’s unflattering first instinct is to cancel his employees’ holiday bonuses instead of, say, selling one of his gratuitous cars or refinancing his mansion. Sadly, there’s no level of equivocating to excuse the fact that he represents, all to well, the egregious prerogatives of a supposedly caring CEO that has no problem sacrificing employees’ basic necessities before forfeiting an opulent knickknack.

The patriarch of the family, Teddy, scolds an assembly line worker at his factory for stuffed animals as daughter, Sashi Li, frowns.

Consequently, the film’s attempts to make Teddy seem at all sympathetic are almost futile. Yes, it is understandable that he’d want his self-entitled daughter to work for slave wages to teach her lessons about luxury, gratitude, perseverance, and hard work. But he’s equal parts exploitative and misogynistic to others as well. He lambasts his underlings, demands excruciating hours from underpaid staff, clearly values crass material excesses, and ensnares economically vulnerable women. Teddy’s current wife reveals to Sasha she married to fund her brother’s education. Turns out, the latest trophy wife’s brother was born second, and due to China’s one-child policy, he can’t be officially registered. Clearly, this is not a loving marriage but a financial arrangement—an exchange of class ascendancy for sexual favors.

Worse of all is Teddy’s repeated reluctance to bear any responsibility for his tactless lifestyle and obdurate habits. Through Sasha, however, Teddy’s vile patterns are finally put to test. She repudiates his chauvinistic proclivities very explicitly. She informs him of his pettiness, his inhumanity, his coldness, his patriarchal plundering. She decries his failures as a father and a family man. Unlike her sister Carol, who conceals her bitterness in forced sympathy, Sasha puts Teddy through the long-deserve ringer. Thus, by the time Sasha decides to work freelance for him, it feels quite redemptive. It’s a reminder that the rich and powerful are flawed but forgivable, too.

What’s remarkable about Go Back to China is that we miraculously end up empathizing with not only Sasha but also Teddy—despite his egregiously backwards priorities and selfish misuse of money. Teddy may be temperamental, largely absent from his children’s lives, runs the factory with an iron fist, and apparently unfaithful. But he also seems to have a rudimentary level of decency—a willingness to listen, evolve, and sacrifice, within degrees, for the benefit of his family.

This somewhat old-fashioned optimism is a testament to the generosity of the filmmaker, Emily Ting. As in her debut, Always Tomorrow in Hong Kong, she has a knack for unearthing the latent similarities inherently residing within polar opposites; she seems to hold steady to the belief that people can change if they are stood up to with courage and shown an alternative perspective. It’s a charitable thesis—an ardent endorsement of the idea that enlightenment can be gained by confronting lifestyles, opinions, and norms at the antipodal end of the planet.

Written by Paul Keelan

Paul Keelan currently resides in Phoenix, AZ with his wife and cat. He has toured the continental US multiple times as a bassist playing rock jams, lived / traveled / taught abroad for over five years (primarily in Asia), and watched an unhealthy amount of movies.

When not writing about cinema for 25YL and Letterboxd, or working on his travel novels / novellas, he spends free time reenacting imaginary montage sequences as he records, edits, and cohosts the spectacular sports movie podcast Cinematic Underdogs.

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