Word: banqueters
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...harbingers of a new Chinese-American cinema. With their glimpses of swirling silks, their rapid clatter of languages, their arranged marriages, fatal renunciations, invocations of ghosts and ancestors, aphorisms straight out of a fortune cookie from one of the better Chinese restaurants, The Joy Luck Club and The Wedding Banquet look beautifully alien. But this is all a trick, to entice you with a vision of novelty. The Western viewer shortly, delightedly, discovers tales of universal savor and significance. Only the garnish is regional...
...Wedding Banquet is slimmer, more anecdotal, but has the same theme: the sacrifices that old-fashioned parents and modern kids make for one another. Handsome, Taiwan-born Wai-tung (Winston Chao) is doing well in Manhattan real estate and has a loving lover, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). But his parents back home -- the General (Sihung Lung) and Mrs. Gao (Ah-leh Gua) -- urgently want a grandchild. How do you arrange a marriage if your son is gay? Not so hard, if he doesn't tell you. Easier still, if he arranges it himself, after Simon suggests that Wai-tung...
More conventionally than The Joy Luck Club, The Wedding Banquet plays with images of the Eastern character. "Fifth Avenue is too expensive," Mrs. Gao complains after a shopping tour. "And when we find something suitable, it's made in Taiwan." But as the movie ripens from Green Card situation comedy into mellow drama, it finds human wrinkles in its stock figures. There's no gay baiting or Taipei typecasting. The old folks possess hidden reserves of sagacity; the young folks can bend to meet them before saying a last, wistful goodbye...
...just want to get more feeling back." His voice is meek, beaten, almost hollow. When talk turns to football and basketball, he makes gulping, swallowing noises. Among cards and photos taped to the wall of his hospital bed, an old award certificate is proudly displayed. It reads, BANQUET OF CHAMPIONS FOR LITTLE PRO BASKETBALL. BOYS' CLUB OF OMAHA. 1984. "I always loved sports, you know. I mean I was pretty good." He pauses for air. "I had speed," he murmurs. He is too tired to continue. The nurse pulls the trachea plug so he can breathe...
...Tuesday's hearing, Ginsburg told of being shut out of Lamont library, which was closed to women when she was a student at Harvard Law School in 1956 to 1958. She said women guests were not invited to the Harvard Law Review banquet, and that women were not given space in the Law School dormitories...