Pushing Hands (film)

Chu is an elderly Chinese Taiji Quan teacher who has recently emigrated from Beijing to New York City to live with his son, Alex, and his family. Chu finds life in America difficult and alienating, he doesn't speak English and his American daughter-in-law Martha doesn't speak Mandarin, making mutual comprehension and communication nearly impossible, with the bilingual Alex forced to act as interpreter. Martha, meanwhile, finds Chu increasingly insufferable, his noisy and obscure daily routine distracting her from writing her second novel. Every Sunday, Chu teaches tai chi classes at the local Chinese cultural center. During one such class, he meets Mrs. Chen, a cooking teacher and fellow expatriate from Beijing. The two begin to bond over their shared background and similar stations in life.

Tensions between Chu and Martha escalate during an attempt by him to cure her stomach cramp using chi inadvertently causes internal bleeding and forces her to be briefly hospitalized. Martha tells her husband that she can't stand being Chu's de facto caregiver, and tries to convince them to take her mother's offer to buy them a larger house so Chu and her don't have to share a space. Alex explains that he feels obligated to take care of his father in the tradition of Confucian familial relations, where a child will take care of a parent when they grow old as they once took care of them.

One night while Alex is out, Chu goes on a walk against Martha's wishes. When he doesn't return home before Alex does, the son assumes he's lost and goes looking for him. When he can't find him, he suffers a nervous breakdown, blaming Martha and trashing his kitchen before leaving.[3] Chu eventually returns home without incident, and despite his and Martha's inability to understand each other, they manage to communicate and clean up the mess in the kitchen. Alex returns home hours later, intoxicated, and attempts to smash his head into the bathroom wall before ranting to Jeremy about how neither Chu nor Martha care about him. After Alex sobers up, he resolves to Martha to send his father to a retirement home, but when he goes to tell his father, he finds him emotionally distraught over a photograph of his wife. Chu admits that during the Cultural Revolution, a roving group of Red Guards attacked his family instead of him because he was a T'ai chi ch'uan master and they feared challenging him. Chu protected Alex but his wife was fatally injured, and he blames himself for her death.[4]

The Chu and Chen families go on a picnic. The groups go hiking, but the elderly lag behind. Chen then has a breakdown and admits to the Chu that her daughter does not want her to be around anymore, that she overheard the two parties talking about setting their parents up together so they would leave their families.[4] Realizing his son can't live with him, Chu moves out in the middle of the night, leaving behind a note telling his son he intends to spend the rest of his life alone practicing self-discipline.

Chu moves to a small apartment in Chinatown and finds employment at a restaurant as a dishwasher, but is quickly chastised for his age and slow work rate. Eventually, the restaurant owner attempts to fire him, but Chu refuses to leave and challenges the owner to move him half a step. The owner attempts to do so, but quickly realizes that Chu is a tai chi master and can't be moved easily. He orders the rest of his staff to move him, but they are unable to despite their hardest efforts. Already disgusted by the owner's callous treatment of the elderly Chu, they all quit in protest. The owner proceeds to summon a band of local thugs to try and remove Chu, but he easily fends them all off. It takes a small army of police officers several hours to finally remove Chu and take him into custody.

Alex sees the story of his father's arrest on the news, and he rushes to the precinct where he's being held to bring him home. Chu steadfastly refuses to live with his son because he doesn't want to be a burden, and Alex emotionally admits that all these years he tried to earn enough money to bring his father to the United States so he could finally have the happy life he was always denied in China.

Sometime later, Alex, Martha, and Jeremy have purchased the larger house and moved in, with Alex believing that his father will come to visit so he can see his grandson. Alex, who up until now has displayed ignorance of his father's martial arts, demonstrates a pushing hands technique to his wife. Meanwhile, the elderly Chu teaches a tai chi class in Chinatown, where Mrs. Chen comes to visit him. She tells him that his fending off the thugs and police have made him a local hero, and people come from all over the city to attend his classes. She tells him that she's moved out and is living alone in an apartment across the street from him. She leaves, but Chu follows her and asks her if she's doing anything that afternoon. She replies no.

• Sihung Lung as Mr. Chu (C: 朱老, P: Zhū-lǎo), a T'ai chi ch'uan master who travels to the United States.[5]
• Bo Z. Wang as Alex Chu (T: 朱曉生, S: 朱晓生, P: Zhū Xiǎoshēng), Chu's son, he acts as an interpreter between Mr. Chu and Martha, but he deliberately mistranslates to reduce tensions between the two parties.[6]
• Deb Snyder as Martha Chu (T: 瑪莎, S: 玛莎, P: Mǎshā), Alex's European American wife. Martha, who does not speak or understand Chinese.[5]
• Wang Lai as Mrs. Chen (T: 陳太太, S: 陈太太, P: Chén-tàitai), a widow who is a cooking instructor at the area Chinese community center.[4]
• Haan Lee as Jeremy Chu (C: 吉米, P: Jímǐ), Alex and Martha's son.
• Fanny De Luz as Linda (T: 琳達, C: 琳达, P: Líndá), Martha's friend.
• Hung-Chang Wang as Boss Huang, the owner of a Chinatown restaurant where Chu ends up working.
• Emily Yi-Ming Liu as Chen Yi-quan, Mrs. Chen's adult daughter.

The title of the film refers to the [pushing hands] training that is part of the grandfather's t'ai chi routine. Pushing hands is a two-person training which teaches Taiji students to yield in the face of brute force. Taiji Quan teachers were persecuted in China during the Cultural Revolution, and the grandfather's family was broken up as a result. He sent his son to the West several years earlier and when he could he came to live with his family with the expectation of picking up where they left off, but he was unprepared for the very different atmosphere of the West. "Pushing Hands" thereby alludes to the process of adaptation to culture shock felt by a traditional teacher in moving to the United States.

The film was critically acclaimed in both Taiwan and the United States.[9][10][11] Donald Lyons wrote that Lee's filming style displayed "a mastery of the visual dynamics of interior spaces and their psychic pressures."[5]

• The Wedding Banquet
• Eat Drink Man Woman

• Pushing Hands at IMDb

• Dariotis, Wei Ming and Eileen Fung. "Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and Displacement in the Films of Ang Lee." in: Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng (Xiaopeng) (editor). Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. University of Hawaii Press, January 1, 1997. ISBN 0824818458, 9780824818456.