What's cooking is a movie that would be great to show to high school students for the following reasons:
1. It deals in part with teenage issues of Asian youth growing up in America under Asian rules at home.
2. It is a great icebreaker to speak about stereotypes of different cultures.
3. It has a feel good quality about the differences, despite the misconceptions of others.
The movie is about four families living in the Fairfax area in Los Angeles. The main character is a Mexican American woman putting together a thanksgiving dinner for her college age children. One of her children brings in an Asian boyfriend and he fits quite well. This Asian boyfriend however, struggles fitting in his own family because he does not give his parents the benefit of the doubt about them being able to accept his Mexican American girlfriend. At home of the Asian family there are also two teenagers, going through their own identiy issues and trying to fit in within their multi etnic community.
This film is also great because kids would be able to see the struggle of the older generation trying to tie their backgrounds with the American traditions in order to please their kids. At this Asian family for example, the mother cooks a turkey parted right in the middle with one side American seasonings and the other half a red paste found in Asian foods. This woman also puts french fries at the table for her little boy, and next to the fries the father eats seeweed.
My apologies for calling this family Asian all the time and not being able to pinpoint a country where they come from, I'm sure they mentioned it,
but right now it escapes my mind.
This film is rated pg13 so it should be fine to show in a high school classroom. There is a lesbian couple in this movie, and kids in high school are usually pretty open with this topic, but some adults are not so there is my little "adult material" caution bit for you.
Enjoy..!
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Film review "What's Cooking?"
06/24/2012 05:31 AM
#1
Film review "What's Cooking?"
This movie seems very interesting. Most of my students are second generation Asian Americans. They receive American educations and identify with American values, but often have to follow Asian rules at home. They are caught between two cultures and values.
I watched this movie’s trailer online and saw the turkey with one side American seasoning and the other half Asian seasoning you mentioned. It’s quite amusing. Some of my students said that they ate Beijing Roast Duck or Roast Chicken on Thanksgiving. I know some Chinese restaurants prepare turkey the Chinese style, i.e. turkey with sticky rice stuffing.
Many years ago I went to this Korean Cultural Conference and there I heard that the suicide rate is high for many Asian student due to this whole issue of beign caught between two cultures and values.
Having been one of those kids, it's interesting to see how different branches of my family handled it. When my older cousins came in the late 60s and early 70s, their parents didn't let them speak Chinese in the home or eat with chopsticks. It was all about assimilation. When I came to America, things had changed a little bit, but there definitely was a tension between what my world was like at home vs. what my world was like at school. I was fortunate though that my parents were relatively liberal.
I saw this film after seeing Eat Drink Man Woman and while I enjoyed the adaptation to the Latino culture I still prefer the original. Just as the Japanese version of Shall We Dance resonates more profoundly than the American version, I found that there was something far more compelling about the Taiwanese version of "What's Cooking?" The intricacy and artistry of watching Chinese and Japanese chefs at work is indescribable. I suppose this is one of the reasons that the popular tv show Iron Chef originated in Japan.
I have not seen any of the above mentioned movies but would like to. They sound very interesting.