A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS
Directed by Wayne Wang
Produced by Yukie Kito, Rich Cowan & Wang
Written by Yiyun Li, based on her short story
Released by Magnolia Pictures
In English, Mandarin & Farsi with English subtitles
USA. 83 min. Not Rated
With Henry O, Faye Yu & Vida Ghahremani  
 

Once upon a time, immigrants to the United States left their parents and the Old Country behind and never expected to see them again. They could reinvent themselves as Americans. But nowadays, as seen in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers from the opening airport scene on, the past is only an airplane away.

Director Wayne Wang explores the changes facing a new generation of Chinese-American families at the same scale of his delightful films 25 years ago before he went mainstream Hollywood, starting with the still fresh Chan is Missing, where he looked at Chinatown families roiled between Taiwan and the People’s Republic. Here, a widower father, Mr. Shi (Henry O), arrives from China to visit his grown daughter, quiet librarian Yilan (Faye Yu, seen in Wang’s The Joy Luck Club), in her suburban apartment complex in Spokane. In their 12 years apart, she’s graduated from college and married, and now he’s decided she needs his help to cope with her divorce.

In filming Yiyun Li’s adaptation of her story, part of a collection that is particularly sensitive to the changes older Chinese have experienced from the Cultural Revolution to capitalism, Wang uses the settings around the father and his daughter to accent all the complicated aspects of their strained relationship as they struggle through gaps of culture, language, gender, and historical context. For him, a Red Guard scarf is a handy luggage marker, and a Russian CD and a set of nesting dolls are nostalgic reminders of his years loyally trying to be a rocket scientist in good standing. She sees in these objects failures, by him and a system. When he buys a wok and solicitously piles up her rice bowl with huge home cooked stir fry meals, she is reminded of all the things he didn’t do for her mother.   

Ever jotting phrases in his notebook, Mr. Shi tries to understand idioms (like the meaning of “Indian summer”), while his daughter deepens her silent treatment by coming home from work later and later and not telling him where she is or with whom. Chatting up everyone else he meets as a learning opportunity, sometimes with comic non sequiturs, he befriends an Iranian woman his age on a park bench who he calls “Madam” (Vida Ghahremani). In a mixture of gestures, Pidgin English, Mandarin, and Farsi, they barely comprehend each other as they compare their families, but somehow share enough to confide cross-cultural emotional truths.

Snooping around and following Yilan, he begs her to talk to him about her relationships. But English has empowered her to challenge him in a way he can’t reciprocate. The touching A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is less about the stressful conflicts between old and new world communication and more about the understanding for when personal decisions intersect with historical pressures. (The title refers to a saying that means there is a reason for every relationship.) The theme’s universality, despite this very particular cultural setting, parallels the very different French Jewish milieu of Claude Miller’s A Secret.

My cousin once sneered at an antique family portrait because his ancestors posed so stiffly. Even with my explanation of the restrictions on photographic technology at that time, he still could not appreciate the effort that must have gone into making that group picture. Wayne Wang would understand. Nora Lee Mandel
September 19, 2008