#dearex

谁先爱上他

“Hatred makes it easier to heal.” “Bullshit.” “Love makes it easier to heal.”

i still miss you

I hope you’re doing good, smiling from ear to ear like you always did with me,I hope you still miss me when you think of going out at beaches, when you think of being lonely, when you think of gin or just whenever or maybe you don’t.

its been a month since we last fought, i kept angry hoping you’d come to make me, but when you didn’t come to make me, a lot of other feelings, emotions and realizations did.

i realized i wasn’t ever important to you. i realized i was trying too hard to hold it together, when you could see me everyday, you missed me, but now that were far may be you ceased to think of me.

i know you cared for me, made me feel at home, kept me in the best possible way anyone ever has, but meeting you everyday was a need new drug i was having hard trouble to let go. you’re my drug now, and you left me at a state i can only grow wanting more.

i missed you day and night, dreamt of you, imagined you pulling me close to yourself, kissing my forehead and sharing all our laughter.

its hard to erase those memories of you, i guess it takes time.

do you miss me the same way as i miss you? do you think of me while going to bed? do you feel we could have done better to each other? do you ever feel guilty for the things you said to me, that hurt me?

do you miss the way we hung around late nights making love? do you miss how i snorted while you made me laugh? do you...

i know you don’t, i know you will not miss me, but i really miss you, i hope to see you once again and make it all right but i am very angry with the way you let me go, so easily, dint even bother to ask me once if i was okkay.

you know i miss you,you surely do, and i do a lot, and i try not to but i fail every single time,

 i begin to relate all my romantic imaginations with you, i cherish the moments we spent laughing, giggling, smiling looking at each other. Sometimes when you made fun of things i did, it hurt-ed me, but i was too fond of the way you're eyes clinched while you smiled with you,re heart, to notice it.

dear ex, even if you don’t miss me, even if you’ve found another confidante, please know this, i still miss you, i am still you’re friend, and no matter what please be safe and healthy, and i wish i could hug you one last time again. in a relationship, but i my heart had already surrendered to your inner beauty, you’ve made me realize sometimes two people are too good to be with each other.

I hope you never read this.

Yours,

Dear EX is a Chinese comedy-drama movie co-directed by Mag Hsu and Hsu Chih-yen (Chu, 2019). The film nominated a lot of prize in Asian, it won the Best Narrative Feature Film of 20th Taipei Film Awards and Best Leading Actress of the 55th Golden Horse Awards. It received a lot of positive reviews in the Asian area and selected as the Taiwanese entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. The two-hour-long movie is built around the beneficiaries of insurance and centered with a thirteen-year-old boy called Song Cheng-xi. Song Cheng-xi’s father was died because of cancer several weeks ago when his mother Liu San-lian found that her husband Song Zheng-yuan left his insurance to his male lover Jay. Jay is a director and actor in a small theater and did not live in a very rich life. Jay met and fell in love with Song Zheng-yuan 17 years ago when they met each other in a college drama club. They broke up because Song Zheng-yuan wanted to have a “normal” life and got married to San-lian. San-lian believed that the insurance should be left to her son to study abroad and she brings her son together to get the money back. However, Song Cheng-xi stands on Jay’s side and lived with him to find some answer about his father’s relationship with Jay. The film shot from the child’s point of view to show audiences the story of queer, family, marriage and love.

The title of the film in Chinese is “谁先爱上他的”, the meaning of the title is “Who fell in love with him first?” which is a little bit of different from the English title. “Him” in the title represents Chengxi’s father Song Zheng-yuan, both San-lian and Jay believed that they are the people who first be in love with Song Zheng-yuan at the beginning of the movie. The movie did not begin in chronological clues, the director mixing the flashbacks with present-day screen to show Song Zheng-yuan’s relationship between neither Jay or San-lian. Using alternates between the three characters’ perspectives to show the characters’ identities, motivations. Each one back to their own life at the end of the film, Cheng-xi learned to get on well with his mother, Si-lian also gave up to hate Jay and her husband and Jay continued his life in a small theater with the insurance money. San-lian helped Song Zheng-yuan to get his package for the drama club, she fell in love with the handsome man for the first time they met. Jay attracted by Song Zheng-yuan when Song ran into the drama club and talked about theater issues. Director did not answer the question that “Who fell in love with him first,” the truth was that Song Zheng-yuan met Jay and San-lian on the same day.

Dear EX provides a look at homosexual people’s life in the Asian area. Under the context of Asian traditional culture, homosexuals still as a marginalized group in society faced a lot of social problems especially in morality and marriage issues. Dear Ex as a movie that enters the mainstream media and released to the pubic hope to make more people aware of the problem and understand this group.

Although the film and its actors received many accolades include nominations for Best Actor in Golden Horse Awards, it still failed in the casting issue since the homosexual characters are represented by cisgender people. Martin’s article stated that hiring LGBTQ people in the film is not only necessarily important for issues of representation and diversity but also important with respect to labor issues in the market (Martin, 2018). A cisgender actor represents homosexual role based on their heterosexual identity and experiences, audiences will take away roles from real gay men. It is not good for showing the image of the actual guy men in the movies.

Meanwhile, since Dear Ex is a Chinese movie we should critique the movie with the guide of an ethic of cultural humility. Caution must be taken to avoid imposing the worldview of researchers on the sense-making of participants whether under the guise of academic imperialism, gay imperialism, or the Western gaze (Goltz, Zingsheim, Mastin, & Murphy, 2016). The problem that hiring a cisgender actor to play homosexual roles is caused by the traditional Chinese culture. Although Taiwan is one of the most openly are in Asian toward LGBTQ issues, the LGBTQ group faced more pressures than in western countries. Actors as public figures and also people who have great influence cannot easily come out in China (Taiwan). Audiences will connect the actor with the character together that the image of the actors may be related to homosexual identity. Actors who used to play homosexual roles want to get rid of the “homosexual identity” tag on them.

While Dear EX did a good job of showing the real-life and pressures homosexual people have in Chinese society. The heteronormative almost through the entire movie that people see the world in a binary system and define heterosexual as a common behavior by default (Andersson, 2002). San-lian did not want his son to hear the quarrel between her and Jay because she thought that her son will get bad influenced when he knew that his father is a guy. Another plot is when San-lian told her friend that her husband gave the insurance money to the mistress in the office. Her friend cannot understand the reason San-lian did not sue until she knew that the mistress was a male. When San-lian spoke out that her husband was cheating on with her on a man, everyone in the office kept quiet. San-lian did not want others to know that her husband had a male lover because it was a kind of shame for the family. Sian-lian kept calling Jay as a mistress or a pervert before she reconciliation with Jay. The movie represents the real-world situation that most people in China still believed that heterosexual is the right or the more acceptance option under the idea of binary-sex.

The movie also reflects the common stereotypes of the LGBTQ community from the young kid and Sai-lian’s perspective. By the influences of heteronormative and traditional Chinese cultures, the young boy Cheng-xi thought that Jay must be on drugs because Jay wears his colorful pajamas every day and he is gay. However, Chengxi’s thought changed at the end of the movie because he found that Jay took good care of his father in his last time of life. For San-lian, she is the representative of the traditional Chinese mother who takes good care of the child’s everything in life and wants her child to put all efforts into the study. Her thoughts about homosexuals are also influenced by traditional cultures. When her husband told her the truth that he is gay and he decided to leave the home to live with the male lover. San-lian’s first idea was to take her husband to see a doctor and get him back to “normal.” Although homosexuals did not count as a disease in China since 2001, still a lot of people think homosexual as a disease and doctor can solve the problem through treatment.

Furthermore, Dear Ex also discussed the meaning of coming out through the change of main character Song Zheng-yuan’s perspective toward the issues. Coming out is a process that “the individual realization that one was homosexual, and acknowledgment of sexual identity to other gay people (Gross, 2001, p.22)” and it is also the growing of self-conscious among gays and lesbians. Song Zheng-yuan came out in the movie when he reappeared in Jay’s life 17 years after they broke up. However, from Jay’s memory, we can know that Song was afraid of coming out. Song prevented Jay from coming out to his mother and decided to hide their sexual orientation. Song said to Jay “I need a normal life and a normal marriage” when they broke up. In traditional chines cultural, people value the succession of the family. A “normal” life for Song means to marry a woman and have their child for the family. Song came out to his wife when he was diagnosed with cancer. He decided to be himself in the remaining days of his life. Coming out is still a serious issue for homosexual people in China. Coming out is not only related to the self-conscious to the person but also as opposed to the traditional content of marriage that being a homosexual person will lose the succession of the family. With the pressure from family and society, a lot of homosexual people did not have enough courage to come out in China. In the movie, Song had the courage to come out only after he knows that he did not have much time to live.

As a movie that entered the mainstream media and released in the theaters, the director uses a lot of doodles and bright colors to tell the story in a relaxed way. Dear EX discussed a sensitive topic in China which is called “TongQi.” “TongQi” means a woman who gets married to a gay man but she did not know his husband is gay. It can be said that the traditional concept of marriage led to this tragedy. Song deceived San-lian and got married to her but finally left the home. Jay and Song fell in love with each other but Jay been in Song’s company for a short time before he died. Everyone in the movie is a victim. The movie does not give the only answer to who is justice. The film was released in November in 2019, it was in the window between the court ruling that couples had the constitutional right to marry (May 2017) and the actual moment of legalization in May 2019 (Brown, 2019). The film wants people to think about the pressures and problems caused by the traditional Chinese contents, and to further explore the importance of legalization of same-sex marriage.

As a Chinese and a straight person, I was really happy to see a movie like Dear EX can be released in the theaters (Taiwan) and Netflix. My Chinese identity can help me understand the content of the movies very well since some words are hard to translate. After knowing more and more queer contents from our class, I have more thoughts on the movie when I saw it for the third time. I awarded the heteronormative in the movies and started to think about the relationship between traditional marriage content in China and coming out in China.

References

Andersson, Yvonne (2002). “Queer Media?: Or; What Has Queer Theory to do with Media Studies?” IAMCR, 1-10. 

Brown, C(2019). "This Film Is Blessed by the Gods": Talking with Mag Hsu, Director of Dear Ex. Retrieved from https://brightlightsfilm.com/this-film-is-blessed-by-the-gods-talking-with-mag-hsu-director-of-dear-ex-netflix-2018/#.Xbyqj5NKhaW.

Chu, K. (2019, September 16). Oscars: Taiwan Selects 'Dear Ex' for International Feature Film Category. Retrieved from 

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/2020-oscars-taiwan-selects-dear-international-feature-film-category-1239706.

Goltz, D. B., Zingsheim, J., Mastin, T., & Murphy, A. G. (2016). Discursive negotiations of Kenyan LGBTI identities: Cautions in cultural humility. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 9(2), 104-121. doi:10.1080/17513057.2016.1154182

Gross, Larry (2001). “Ch 2: Coming Out and Coming Together” and “Ch 3: Stonewall and Beyond” in Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America, 21-55. 

DEAR EX - AI YÊU ANH ẤY TRƯỚC ?

Mình nghe đến phim vào khoảng tháng 7 tháng 8 gì đấy nhưng mãi đến bây giờ mới xem được. Phim được đề cử giải Kim Mã nên mình đặt nhiều kì vọng vào phim. Xem xong mình chợt nghĩ “Chà, quả là không uổng kì vọng”. Nội dung của phim rất độc. Trái với những bộ phim xoay quanh chủ đề đồng tính thường đề cập đến sự đau khổ, trắc trở trong tình yêu, Dear ex khai thác khía cạnh mới lạ - người thân của người đồng tính mà cụ thể ở đây là vợ, con trai và người tình.

Ba con người được liên kết với nhau qua người chồng đồng tính. Tam Liên khi biết chồng mình đưa tên A Kiệt vào danh sách thụ hưởng thay vì tên con trai mình đã kịch liệt lên án A Kiệt là kẻ đồng tính ghê tởm, xấu xa phá hoại gia đình người khác. Chính Hi vì chán ghét những lời càm ràm, chì chiết của mẹ nên đã bỏ nhà đi đến chỗ A Kiệt. Mình thích cách mà những mâu thuẫn này được giải quyết thông qua việc đan xen tài tình giữa hiện tại và quá khứ; và cả thông qua những câu hỏi của Chính Hi. Cả ba con người đều là nạn nhân và thủ phạm. Họ đều ích kỉ và đáng thương. Nhưng họ đã giải quyết những mâu thuẫn tưởng chừng không thể xóa nhòa.

Nhân vật mình thích nhất là A Kiệt. A Kiệt không hề ghét Tam Liên dù cho người phụ nữ này đã lăng mạ anh nhiều lần. Khi Chính Hi hỗn xược với mẹ, A Kiệt đã ngăn cản cậu. A Kiệt còn là người si tình. Anh chứng kiến người yêu mình lấy vợ, chìm trong cơn say rượu để xóa đi nỗi buồn, khi người yêu quay trở về anh lại mở rộng vòng tay, anh ở bên cạnh chăm sóc những phút cuối đời của người yêu, anh vay tiền nóng để phẫu thuật cho người yêu. Cuộc đời của A Kiệt dường như chỉ xoay quanh người yêu. Giây phút mình thương A Kiệt nhất là khi anh nói:

“Mười ngàn năm là khi người bạn yêu nói muốn làm người bình thường rồi bỏ bạn. Từ đó về sau, mỗi ngày trở thành mười ngàn năm.”

Ngoài ra, mình cũng rất thích màu phim. Nó có một chút gì đó của Vương Gia Vệ, của Hongkong. Những hình họa trong phim cũng góp phần tạo nên sự khác biệt của phim. Nhạc phim: “xuất sắc”. Dạo gần đây, mình reply chục lần soundtrack của Dear ex.

I know your heart still aches

You thought I would never leave

But I did

I haven't looked back ever since

For me, it has been liberating

For you, it's been misery

Misery loves company except I don't want any of it

I gave you my best years

I gave you all of me

You chose to take advantage of it

You never appreciated me until I decided to leave

Now it's your loss and my gain