“A Pan-Asian Cinema of Allusion: Going Home and Dumplings"

Abstract

The notion of “pan‐Asian cinema” crystallized in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the downturn experienced by the film industries of Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Its inception thus coincides with a broader tendency towards “market‐led” regionalization in Northeast and Southeast Asia, which saw an increasingly “integrative market for culture.” This essay grapples with an apparent contradiction: Going Home (dir. Peter Ho-Sun Chan, 2002) and Dumplings (dir. Fruit Chan, 2004), both of which originated as episodes in the anthology franchise Three and Three...Extremes, fly in the face of pan-Asian cinema's tendency to de-emphasize cultural specificity in the hopes of luring regional and global audiences. Whereas most pan‐Asian films deracinate, deliberately minimizing cultural and historical specificity in order to maximize broad market appeal, Going Home and Dumplings, both early examples of Applause Pictures’ pan-Asian filmmaking, foreground cultural and historical embeddedness through their allusions. The two horror films deploy a bifurcated mode of address: first, in an inclusive gesture, films like Dumplings and Going Home attempt to consolidate regional viewership and speak to translocal audiences through their play with genre. Simultaneously, both films offer a second, more exclusive layer of perceptual pleasures to select “insider” audiences in possession of relevant cultural competencies and reading protocols. In contrast to the deracinative quality of most pan‐Asian filmmaking, Going Home and Dumplings are so culturally specific that key elements – traditional Chinese medicine, Maoist and post‐Maoist Chinese history, and Cantonese/ Mandarin bilingualism – are likely to be at least partially opaque or illegible to audiences who are not cultural insiders.