Our abiding thought was this: If we could make a movie that seemed honest and true, a movie about real people who happened to be Chinese-American, we would have a better shot at making a movie that people would want to see, that they would be moved by, that would get them talking to their friends and so give the movie legs. It might thus bring in enough receipts to change Hollywood’s mind that movies about Asian-Americans can’t be successful. Maybe, just maybe, many negative assumptions about Asian-Americans on the big screen might be rethought.
I’m encouraged by the reactions to the movie among test audiences. By far, the predominant response is to the universal aspects of the movie, the heart of mother-daughter relations. This seems to leave people feeling that Asian-Americans are not so different—not so “inscrutable” or “mysterious.” One blond young man in a focus group commented, “I never had sisters, but after seeing this movie, I feel I have four of them.”
I know there will be people on the watch for political correctness. “Why was she married to a Caucasian?” “Why aren’t there more positive male role models?” “Why isn’t there more having to do with the matter of American versus Chinese culture?” I know from reactions to my fiction that there are people who believe that the raison d’être of any story with an ethnic angle is to provide an educational lesson on culture. I find that attitude restrictive, as though an Asian-American artist has license to create only something that specifically addresses a cultural hot point, and not a work about human nature that happens to depict that through Asian-Americans.
I also understand why the attitude prevails. There are very few Asian-American artists heard or seen by the mainstream. And so people naturally believe that those who have the limelight have the responsibility to address the problems.
I’m curious to see how critics review the movie. With the book, there was a general tendency to compare my work with that of other Asian-American authors. A reviewer at The New York Times compared it with Shogun, The Good Earth, Bette Bao Lord’s Spring Moon, The Woman Warrior—in other words, any book that had to do with Asia at large. Will our movie be compared with Flower Drum Song, The Last Emperor, The Karate Kid, The World of Suzie Wong, M Butterfly—purely on the basis of face and race? Would it ever be compared with other stories largely about women, say, Terms of Endearment, Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes?
The Truth About Disney
Obviously, I’d be in a bad spot if I had to discuss my work with the people at Disney and I had loathed it. Happily, that wasn’t the case. Disney said we had creative control, and that’s what we got. Sure, they gave us notes on the rough cut. But Ricardo Mestres and Jeffrey Katzenberg seemed to go out of their way to assure us that the notes were only suggestions. We had the final say. We did take some of their suggestions, of course, but there was never any pressure that we do so. Could we tighten the pacing here? We looked at it—sure. Would the scene be better if the mother lashed out in anger at the daughter as well? Let’s try it and find out.
From the beginning, they appeared very supportive and enthusiastic. We were included on marketing and distribution plans, as well as publicity and such details as the making of the trailer. By “included,” I mean that people from Disney frequently called me, not just Wayne and Ron and Patrick. I was also invited to a lot of business meetings, most of which I declined to attend.
The budget was a problem. It would have been nice, certainly, to have had $20 million like most mainstream movies, instead of $10.6 million, some of which was eaten up by acts of God and the union. For one thing, California’s seven-year drought decided to go on hiatus right when we started filming. It rained nearly every day. And then we went to China and nearly froze in the rain there. One scene in the script called for a family to leave their home in the midst of a drought. Sitting in a downpour, I X’ed out “drought” in the script and wrote in “flood.” A lot of the cast and crew became sick, yet we had to keep shooting. We couldn’t afford not to, especially after we’d lost time when peasants in some of our locations staged riots. Riots? Later I learned that’s standard fare for shooting in China.
To sum up, Disney was a terrific studio to work with. The people were great in giving us support and creative control; they were watchful about money. We got a little extra in the end, though no sports cars as bonuses. After all, this is a business. And the Disney people did believe wholeheartedly in this movie, when others had doubts.
Mr. Wang, I’m Ready for My Close-Up
I had heard stories of writers who were banned from coming to the sets of movies based on their books. Security guards were on the lookout for them. Authors were supposed to sell their “properties,” shake hands, disinfect when they got home, and then forget about the whole deal until the movie came out, at which time they could proclaim it an abomination.
I remembered this when I was called to attend yet another meeting, whether it was about schedules or music. I had never figured I would be that involved with production. Where was that famous reluctance to include the writer? Moviemaking was all-consuming. My fiction writing was suffering from frequent interruptions.
With the cast of The Joy Luck Club (top row); actual Joy Luck Club members (bottom row).
Soon we were into casting, and I was receiving tapes of auditions. I heard that among those attending tryouts were members of the real Joy Luck Club and their friends, the aunties and uncles I had known since childhood. I asked that I not be included in any final casting decisions. I didn’t know anything about acting, I reasoned, and more important, I needed to be able to honestly tell those who did not make the cut that I had nothing to do with it. Can you imagine me telling one of the real Joy Luck aunties she didn’t get the part? Fortunately, some of these women were cast as extras with more than a few blurred seconds of screen time next to a potted plant, which is what my husband’s role was reduced to. My four-year-old niece, Melissa, received a speaking part as the daughter of Rose (Rosalind Chao). Auntie Jayne and Uncle Tuck were dinner guests at the dinner in which Waverly’s boyfriend pours soy sauce over Lindo’s favorite dish. Best of all, my mother and her boyfriend, a dapper eighty-six-year-old named T. C. Lee, had substantial parts as extras in the party scene shown at the beginning and the end of the movie. T.C. played to the hilt a narcoleptic guest at the crab dinner. Did nepotism have anything to do with this? Of course not. (Absolutely!)
I should mention that I too landed a part as an extra—or rather, two parts. One required me to dress in 1940s garb and wear a Betty Grable hairdo. I looked hideous and pleaded with the editor to excise the scene. My other appearance stayed in the movie. In the opening scene, Ron and I walk into a party with his two daughters, Sasha and Jennifer. Ron is talking on a cellular phone, and I’m apologizing for being late, then nagging Ron to call his lawyer back later. None of this was in the script, of course. I see how extras can get carried away with their bit parts and try to steal the scene.
After seeing take after take of one particular scene I can never watch it without developing a stomachache. In it, a character named Harold (played by Michael Paul Chan) is eating from a container of ice cream. In the filming, he ate, take after take after take. Then Wayne called for another setup. Michael Paul ate again, take after take after take. After six setups, I was sure he was going to explode.
I now have enormous respect for what actors do. And I have great respect for how Wayne treated them—always with gentleness, yet persistent in obtaining their best performance. In that ice cream–eating scene, Harold’s wife, Lena (played by Lauren Tom), gets angry, then rumbles emotionally with fear and confusion. I thought each take was perfect, but Wayne would find some element of her performance—a tentativeness, or her stumbling over a word—and ask her to keep exactly that, that vulnerability. They’d do another take, and it would be even better.
Quiet on the Set
The day I first saw the sets, we drove to Richmond, where a former candy factory and warehouse had been converted into something befitting Hollywood. I
walked through the doors, and there was my fully furnished imagination—interiors of houses in San Francisco and China built by Don Burt, the production designer.
How easily I had penned the details, compared with what it had apparently taken to build them. In fiction, you can throw in a few interior-decorator touches—the plastic on the furniture, the framed photo of a dead ancestor—but the production designer has to put in everything, including the fingerprints next to the light switch. I felt guilty seeing the work done on the sets, as though I hadn’t written about the details with as much care and devotion.
Don came to me for props. Wayne had asked that we include as many of my family photos as possible. In this way, my father and older brother, who died long ago, were also able to be part of the movie. Wayne told me to rummage through my jewelry for a necklace we had written into the script: a green jade pendant that June’s mother gives her, telling her that it’s not best quality but she is.
I went to the set maybe once a week in the beginning, then almost every day during the last two weeks of principal photography in the United States. That’s when Wayne anticipated he would need Ron and me to make fast changes to the script, which we did indeed have to do daily. To stay on schedule, Wayne was shooting six or seven pages of script a day—which I understood to be a lot.
In March 1993, I went to China at my own expense and attended almost all the filming there. If Wayne asked me to make script changes, I told him he had to give me a chit for breakfast.
Filming in China presented unanticipated hardships. First, there was the cold. I had been in Guilin before, when it was hot and humid. The weather there is described as “perpetual spring.” Well, when I was there this time, that was spring in Minnesota. I wore seven layers of clothing and was still freezing, chilled to the bone. On one occasion, I was shaking so hard I knew I’d develop hypothermia if I didn’t get out of the wind. So I went and sat in a van. Wayne and the rest of the cast and crew continued filming. I would have stayed out there if he really needed me, but I figured I shouldn’t have to die just to prove I was dedicated.
Then there was the funeral we had not factored into the schedule. On the day we were to film refugees fleeing an invading Japanese army, the people living in our location were holding a funeral for a woman who reportedly lived to be a hundred before she died. It was either bad luck or bad manners—probably both—for them to allow a film crew into their village that day. The procession was long; obviously, this ceremony was going to take hours. A casket was being carried, and dancing on top was a live rooster, supposedly to chase off evil spirits like movie directors, cast, and crew. But to delay shooting even one day would cost us $70,000, money we could ill afford on our budget. Discussions were held with the family, a generous “donation” was made in honor of the dead woman, and suddenly, the gods smiled upon us. The film crew was welcomed and the villagers rejoiced at the infusion of cash. The old woman, we overheard, had brought her comrades good luck.
In our second village, we learned that the location fee, the equivalent of $5,000, had not been transferred from the middleman to the village coffers but had gone off to Hong Kong in the hands of those who had absconded with it. The village chieftain was demanding payment. What could we do? We agreed to pay the original amount: $5,000. No, said the leader, not American dollars, but renmenbi, the local money, which foreigners were forbidden to carry. We tried to argue that American dollars were just as good as renmenbi (and in fact better, $5,000 being the equivalent of 40,000 renmenbi). We even hinted that on the black market those same dollars could fetch double the usual exchange. No dice, no dollars, they said.
One villager then brought up the question of the amount itself. The people didn’t want us to tell them what the shooting day was worth, they would tell us individually. This villager wanted one chicken and twenty renmenbi (about $2.50). Another villager piped up that he wanted a part in the movie and fifty renmenbi. A man argued that his pathway was being used more than others’, so he should receive enough to buy more bales of hay to soak up the mud. Wayne said that he could not negotiate three hundred separate deals.
An old woman raised the hatchet that she used for chopping twigs into kindling. Then more hatchets went up, as did canes. The shouts flew, and I heard a distinctive ugly tone that signaled danger. Earlier that week we had learned that this village had seen five executions the previous year—two for rape, one for robbery, two for murder. The figure shocked us: the death penalty here was used often and swiftly. Now we considered that the number suggested also that this village was more violent than most. We observed the number of villagers staring at us with birth defects, notably a blind walleye, seen in scores of them, babies through elderly, which indicated inbreeding. I recalled someone had mentioned that this village might have taken up cannibalism during the lean years of the Cultural Revolution. That actually did happen, but whether it was this particular village was pure speculation. Nonetheless, we thought we should not test the limits of these people’s endurance.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Wayne. The crew packed the essentials, for shooting scenes on the fly. As it happened, we found a waste dump, a giant pit where garbage had been tilled under. At the top was a ridge lined with trees standing against mountains. It was perfect, stark but epic. There we filmed a line of people walking into oblivion, Suyuan begging for help as she clutches her twin babies.
When we returned to the village, lo and behold, the matter had been settled. The villagers presented us with a bill itemizing each of their demands, and all this was tallied to the grand sum of a little more than 5,000 renmenbi. That was one-eighth of what we had offered in U.S. dollars. Someone tactfully pointed out the error, but whether out of pride or a deep suspicion of American dollars, the villagers stuck to the lesser sum. Among our Chinese crew, we were able to scrounge together enough to pay them off. All were happy and filming began.
In our final village, we wound up restarting World War II. The location was a huge pasture with hills in the background that looked like gigantic ancient fish stuck tail-down into the earth. A long dirt road bisected this valley. A thousand extras were on hand, some in 1940s clothes and clinging to their most precious worldly possessions, a sack of rice, a suitcase, a pair of babies. The rest were in the uniforms of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist army, defeated by the Japanese in Kweilin (Guilin). Some walked by with bandages around their heads. Some had limbs missing and were on crutches. A burning jeep lay upturned. Watching the shoot were some locals, as well as members of the People’s Army, who served as security.
Food arrived, box lunches for a thousand catered by the Sheraton Hotel in Guilin. It was pretty fancy fare by local standards, a meal that cost an average week’s salary. When lunch was over, we had a few dozen boxes left, and someone from the American crew thoughtfully called out to onlookers that they were welcome to take them. Shouts immediately erupted among the extras. They wanted the leftovers: they had earned them, and they would keep them. All at once, fists were flying, people were being shoved, and the Kuomintang was fighting the People’s Army. It was war all over again. Luckily, no one was seriously injured. Filming resumed with our extras looking even more tattered than before. Talk about Method acting.
Months later, one of the most curious comments I heard during a test-audience focus-group session involved the scenes shot in China. To me, these scenes are stunning—so stunning they strain credibility. A woman in the focus group said, “All the scenes were gorgeous—until we got to China. You should get rid of those matte paintings. You can tell they’re fake.” I turned to Wayne and poked him. “See? We didn’t have to suffer in China. We could have used better matte paintings.”
I Cried My Eyes Out
Moviemaking, I learned, is an emotionally draining experience. I was moved by seeing the realism of the sets, the authentic touches, and hearing the private revelations made to me by the actors, stars as well as extras, about why being in this movie meant so much to them.
 
; During filming in the States, I began each day by popping in a videotape of the previous day’s filming that had been delivered to me at home by messenger, and then I would cry my eyes out. I was amazed that the scenes I had seen enacted before me had assumed that real movie quality on film. A strange transformation had taken place, as if this reel life were more real than real life. But that’s what movies are all about.
At major stages, Ron and I worked with Wayne and the editor, Maysie Hoy, as the movie was being cut. That process was fascinating but tedious, a matter of deciding over milliseconds. Our movie was running way too long, and to get it into theaters meant every one of those cuts was essential. Through meticulous editing, milliseconds could add up to minutes, and in the end it would seem as if nothing had been cut. I ended up thinking Maysie was a saint.
Around April, I saw the first rough cut. I was supposed to take notes of problem areas and such. Yet I was too mesmerized to do anything but watch it like an ordinary moviegoer. I laughed, I cried. The second time I saw it, I told Wayne: “I want you to remember this day. We’re going to get a lot of different reactions to this film later. But I want us to remember that on this day, you, Ron, and I were proud of what we’d accomplished. We made our vision.”
Ron insisted that I come to test previews because there, seeing how a real audience reacted, I’d get some of the biggest highs—or lows—of my life. Fortunately, it was the former. I was surprised, though, when people laughed during scenes I never considered funny. I suppose those were ironic laughs, in response to recognizing the pain of some past humiliation.