The Issue of Race in Terminal USA

I found Terminal USA very bizarre yet fascinating, although I didn't necessarily understand many things. I wanted to point out the fact that the family does not talk about race unless there is an external force--for example, the father bringing home from work a note with racial slurs on them--that initiates the conversation about the ethnicity of the family. Although there are stereotypical Asian images throughout the movie, like the Asian female in porn and the computer nerd, the issue of race gets buried underneath other non-race specific problems such as drugs and sex , two issues that appear on typical nuclear family sitcoms. Terminal USA, however, takes the issue of drugs and sex to an extreme, releasing all the repressed feelings out of many characters. For example, the repressed homosexuality of Marvin, sex-addiction of Holly, frustration of the father over his ailing father-in-law all come to full manifestation by the end of the movie. The other two members of the family, Kazumi and Ma do not express their frustrations as much because they are constantly in and out of drugs. The issues of typical nuclear families are vastly exaggerated for the effect of emphasis in the movie, and I wonder if this falls under the category of the "exploitation film." 

The strangest part of the film is when Fagtoast, who is wearing priest-like garment, comes into kill Kazumi and Eightball and then starts praying (?). He says, "the pleasure must stop! the pleasure must stop!" Is he repressing his desire to kill? I didn't really understand that part at all (as well as the black liquid that Kazumi drinks then spits out).

Response to The Wedding Banquet

The Wedding Banquet raises several interesting questions regarding transnationalism, assimilation, diaspora, family, and of course masculinity/homosexuality. 
 
Wai-Tung, the queer and disaporic protagonist, is reconnected to his native Taiwan through a family reunion. His parents serve as the string that ties his American life style to his Taiwanese roots, thereby making him a transnational figure. In this process of becoming transnational, cultural differences regarding family and sexuality are negotiated. However, Wai-Tung attempts to forgo this negotiation process by putting up a fake marriage, so he would lead his parents to believe that he has retained the Taiwanese concept of family: a heterosexual relationship that reproduces to prolong the family name. To Wai-Tung's father, marriage and reproduction of children is a duty to the family, as he explains on the first day of his brief trip.
 
In one of the most interesting parts of the movie, Wai-Tung confesses to his mother that he is gay and that the marriage is a fraud. His stunned mother asks him, "Did Simon lead you astray?...Nonsense! You had girlfriends in college." That question seems to imply that such concept or existence of homosexuality does not exist within the Taiwanese culture, and Wai-Tung has adopted homosexuality as his when he arrived in the United States. As Wai-Tung argues, he was born gay yet it seems like the act of coming out did not take place until later in his life. Does this mean that the act of acknowledging one's homosexuality is part of assimilating to the American culture? What happens to Asian masculinity when men settle down in this country?
 
I think Wai-Tung's parents are uncomfortable with the homosexual relationship because they are afraid that the Gao line will end, as his son will be unable to biologically reproduce with Simon. Also, it seems like they believe that Wai-Tung loses his sense of masculinity because he cannot be a patriarch like his father. How can he be a patriarch if he cannot have children? But the presence of Wei-Wei in this situation facilitates the cultural negotiation--her pregnancy solves the problem of prolonging the family name, and her status as a tenant (in comparison to Wai-Tung's status as the landowner) confirms Wai-Tung's ability to be somewhat domineering like a patriarch. With Wei-Wei, Wai-Tung is very assertive, especially in the first scenes of the movie when he goes to collect the rent money. 
 
Although Wei-Wei uses Wai-Tung to obtain the green card, it also appears that she is being used a lot more to the advantage of the Gao family. At first she is used to mask Wai-Tung's homosexuality and then used as a surrogate mother and a mother. For whom is she having the baby? For Wai-Tung's parents? For Simon and Wai-Tung? For herself? Despite she is supposed to be a tough, female artist, Wei-Wei ultimately becomes a nobody but someone who produces a baby. 

AIDS: The Uninvited Guest at the Banquet

I was interested in the subtle presence of AIDS in the film. When we first see Simon, he is wearing a Keith Haring t-shirt underneath his white lab coat. Haring, who died of AIDS in 1990 (three years before Wedding Banquet’s release in the US), used his art, money, and time to increase awareness of the disease in both the gay and straight communities. Later in the film, we see that Simon’s choice of garb is more than a fashion statement: it signals that he, too, is an AIDS activist. In one scene, Simon is outdoors sharing info with others as he works at a small table that is draped with a cloth that reads “Silence = Death.” And, finally, when Simon learns that Wai-Tung has inadvertently fathered a child with Wei-wei, his anger is first directed at the fact that Wai-Tung engaged in unsafe sex.

In part Simon’s interests serve to further align him as the “feminine” half of the couple. Simon tends to the domestic front, cooks, and does charitable work in the community. In contrast Wai Tung conforms to the stereotypical “male” role of being consumed with his work and money-making. So, this relationship, despite its alternative sexual dimension, appears to be structured along very conventional, heterosexual norms.

As for Wei-wei, avant-garde artists’ lifestyles have frequently been associated with challenges to the dominant social order. Women artists in particular were seen as deviant because their creative energies were channeled away from baby-making into the “selfish” pursuit of individual expression. Thus, they were castigated as being loose or somehow degraded women.
This was also a time when fear of the foreign body (particularly the Haitian body) as carrier of disease increased.

This forms an interesting undercurrent to what Mark Chiang observes is the re-constitution of the potentially subversive expressions of gender identities into a new patriarchal order. Can the formation of what Chiang calls this new “multicultural, non-heterosexual family” be seen as a symbolic containment of the “promiscuous” gay and artistic lifestyles—lifestyles closely associated with AIDS in the 1980s—and thus containment of the disease through restoration of traditional nuclear family values?