Manifestation of Chinese and American Values in The Wedding Banquet

Abstract

This paper mainly focuses on various cultural values and conflicts represented in the film The Wedding Banquet. In contrast with the civil marriage ceremony of American style performed in a Registry Office, the Chinese wedding is much more luxurious, filled with lots of over-elaborated formalities that are necessary in Chinese culture. The ceremony itself is considered more important than the notarization. Taking the subject of sexual orientation as a metaphor for larger cultural issues, the film is examined as identity confusion and inevitably, the pursuit of identity reconstruction. Through Wei-Tung’s psychological struggles between Chinese traditional values and his homosexual desires, the film explores the possibility of a re-considered perception of identity for an Asian diasporic gay. Given the historical baggage brings with them, the process of the construction of identity for the immigrant is continuously dynamic and ongoing. After the implicit negotiations between ethnicity, sexuality, and patriarchy, the film story moves to reconciliation. This suggests that in such an era of multiculturalism, people had better come to realize their individual identities of diversity and complexity.