Hong Kong film goes to America

Abstract

In John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow II (1987), Ken (Chow Yun-Fat) plays the mistreated Asian immigrant coping with the arrogance of an ItalianAmerican thug complaining about the food and extorting money from the restaurant manager. Ken gains the upper hand, however, and in a memorable scene he sermonises about the disrespect given to Asian immigrants in the United States holding a gun to the thug’s head hissing, ‘For you, rice is nothing, but for me, it’s just like my mother and father’. In a moment of cross-racial bonding a black police officer insists that the white man eat Ken’s rice before he’s arrested. This Hong Kong film is one of many that hold a mirror up to ‘Americans’ and US society and the images the audience sees – distorted, comic, tragic, familiar, bizarre, disconcerting, or comforting – merit a closer look.