#stererotype

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.