filial piety in Saving Face (2004)

Saving Face (2004), Dir. Alice Wu

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With Saving Face (2004), Alice Wu (the director) is able to highlight the struggles of Wil, a promising American doctor of Chinese descent, and her mother Gao. Both have to face the pressure of cultural expectations and the responsibilities of saving face within their Chinese-American community. In the movie, Wil is shown struggling to disclose her sexual orientation as a lesbian to her mother. Gao (Ma), at the same time, is also pressured to restore the reputation of the family after being shamed for having a baby out of wedlock and is struggling to accept Wil’s homosexuality. After going through several events of disputes, Wil and Ma finally understand each other and decide to embrace each other’s respective situations.

One of the prominent matters portrayed in the movie is the pressure of filial piety rooted in Confucianism, which exists in the Chinese-American community, that puts a huge burden on the shoulders of the women in the community and prevents them from taking thorough control of their own lives.

Filial piety is a Confucian moral value in which the children are expected to be a source of pride to their elders as an act of expressing their gratitude towards the elders’ sacrifices. This virtue corresponds with the concept of saving face in traditional Chinese culture in which one’s dignity and reputation can be influenced by the actions of others who are relationally related to them. This means that the younger generations have to bear the burden of repaying the elders by fulfilling their demands and not bringing disgrace to the family. As depicted in Saving Face, when finding out about Gao’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, Gao’s father harshly condemns her with a rant about his sacrifice of “[giving] you kids a better life.” To repay this, Gao has to go against her own will, hide her romantic desire for a much younger man, Little Yu, and marry Cho to please her father and save his reputation. Similarly, Wil (Gao’s daughter) is also subjected to the responsibility of honoring Ma’s devotion to singly raising her to be a successful person. Therefore, Wil has to conform to her mother’s wish by reluctantly going on set-up dates with some Chinese-American men and hiding her homosexuality from Ma and the public.

When immigrating to America, Chinese people have brought with them the virtues and traditions of patriarchal Confucianism, especially filial piety. Additionally, living in a new land with a close-knit community in which the practice of Confucianism is much present, the pressure of having to maintain filial values is even more intense for a Chinese-American woman as her actions are now being monitored by the patriarchy-favored community as a whole. The perpetuation of those filial mores done by the Chinese-American women is not only to repay and show respect to their elders but also to maintain the sense of belonging to their community even though these actions go against their own wishes and put a heavier burden on their own shoulders. In other words, because of the norms of Confucian filial piety, women in the Chinese-American community are forced to be stuck in the place of digging their own graves in the patriarchy graveyard of which they could hardly get out. In Saving Face, had it not been for the help of Wil and the reciprocal understanding from Ma, both Wil and Ma would not have been able to get out of that toxic patriarchal trap of filial piety to live and pursue their own paths.

With the pressure and the responsibilities of filial piety, combined with the existence and the maintenance of the patriarchy, women in the Chinese-American community such as Gao and Wil have to give up their personal life to live up to the expectations and demands of others and of the community. They do not seem to have control over their own faith, even their own body, and they are forced to be in the dilemma of always being alert about every step of their own moves so as not to shame the traditions of filial piety and the patriarchal values of Confucian ideology practiced in their community.