Conflicts within a family, a clan, or an ethnicity often demonstrate personal aspiration, anxiety, and duties that make cinematic narratives captivating. Traditional Chinese family structures can induce an imbalanced power hierarchy between parents, children, and siblings. Social expectations of familial roles and behaviours might create tensions among family members. This panel investigates the intergenerational conflicts through diverse cultural practices in the lesser-known Sinophone films produced in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. The discussion will contribute to the current debates of conflictual kinship and its negotiation portrayed in contemporary Sinophone cinema.

Jessica Tsui-yan Li will begin by examining the Hong Kong film, The Greatest Wedding on Earth (1962), written by Eileen Chang (1920-1995). Li argues that the film depicts the linguistic and cultural conflicts between the Mandarin-speaking Chinese northern immigrants and the Cantonese-speaking southerners in Hong Kong in the early 1960s. The younger generation of Chinese in Hong Kong with various linguistic and cultural backgrounds resolve the conflicts of their parents migrated from different regions of China through mutual understanding. Li analyzes how the film re-evaluates various Cantonese, Mandarin, and Shanghainese cultural issues in depicting Chinese cultural diversities. Li also examines the Hollywood cinematic techniques of screwball conventions in portraying the mid-twentieth century Chinese modernity. Moreover, Li argues that while the geopolitical tensions between mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia set the transcultural tone of the film, the socio-historical background of the film studio, Motion Picture & General Investment Co. Ltd., played a crucial role in shaping the Mandarin cinema in postwar Hong Kong.

Hsiu-Chuang Deppman analyzes the depiction of struggling female laborers in Taiwan in Ho Chao-ti’s acclaimed documentary Sock’n Roll (2013). Ho captures both the public suffering and private pain of ordinary workers, straining to care for older parents and support school-aged children. These women are part of the “neglected middle”—middle age and middle generation— whose personal aspirations, displaced by the demands of survival, are overlooked in society. Often unseen and unheard, they work low-wage, unskilled jobs that render them expendable in the labor force. Deppman studies Ho’s portrayal of Hsu Yueh-Chun, a woman whose life is unraveled after a series of personal losses that reinforce her resolve to strengthen family ties. Her story exposes the gendered power structures that bind women to self-sacrifice within an exploitative and unjust system. Deppman argues that Ho’s nuanced treatment of this important subject positions the director as a Foucauldian public intellectual—one who, with “conscience, consciousness, and eloquence,” constructs a critical discourse to reveal “particular truths” about the collisions of money, family, and love.

Alvin K. Wong builds on existing scholarship on queering Chinese kinship (Tan 2014; Wong 2014) by unpacking the ways Sinophone films within the People’s Republic of China and in other Sinophone locations represent queer kinship trouble. In taking this geographically expansive approach, Wong builds on Shu-mei Shih’s framework of the Sinophone, which describes “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness” (2007: 4). Wong explores the different queer logics and temporal and spatial queer cognitive mappings in Cui Zi’en’s queering of the claustrophobic home in Old Testament (2002); in Hong Kong lesbian filmmaker Yau Ching’s queer reimagination of lesbian desire within gentrification in Let’s Love Hong Kong (2002); and in Tsai Ming-liang’s The River(1997) through its queer kinship trouble within postmodern urban cruising. Ultimately, Wong argues that queer Sinophone cinema offers an abundance of queer kinship trouble within the polylocality of urbanism and neoliberalism in the global cities of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei.

These papers examine the complexity of conflicts and kinship in relation to geopolitical ordeal, traditional gender power relations, and diverse sexual orientations. By delving into intergenerational linguistic and cultural conflicts, the panelists envision the prospect of re-establishing new familial relationship by articulating individual desires and values to contest family obligations, financial burdens, and social expectations. We invite the audience to ask questions about the possibility of reconciliating familial conflicts while maintaining individuality in contemporary Sinophone cinema.

This session will include a 3-minute introduction, three 13-minute presentations, a 13-minute scheduled response, and a 20-minute discussion. The panelists are from different gender, ranks, institutions, and nations with diverse geopolitical focus on mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in their current research. Their research also represents a range of perspectives including intergenerational conflicts, family responsibilities, and queer desires intertwined with languages, cultural practices, and economic power. The respondent Carlos Rojas is a renowned specialist in Sinophone cinema, gender studies, and Chinese culture.