As a cinephile from Taiwan, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with Ang Lee’s work. His aren’t the greatest Taiwanese films ever made by a long stretch, but the Oscar win for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will always be a source of national pride. My relationship with his breakout hit, The Wedding Banquet, about a gay Taiwanese American entering a heteronormative sham marriage to appease his “traditional” parents, is just as complicated.
Long before pronouns in bio were under attack, I self-identified as a girl all through kindergarten. My Crying Game reveal came amid a head lice infestation, when the school mandated that all “boys” have their heads shaved. I was happily oblivious to gays or the euphemism “comrades,” and believed Rock Hudson was just dying of actual cancer for a long time. The controversy surrounding the 1986 release of Yu Kan-ping’s Outcasts, the film adaptation of Pai Hsien-yung’s serialized novel Crystal Boys, originally Sinful Sons—translated by Howard Goldblatt and published by Gay Sunshine Press in the U.S. in 1990—changed all that.
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Underneath a starry open sky, half a dozen men stood in silence, hands in pockets, by the bushes in the dark.
Three years later, the 1993 release of The Wedding Banquet had a consequential role in normalizing LGBTQIA+ in Taiwan. The film’s popularity and commercial success shifted public opinion markedly. Sure, A City of Sadness claimed the Golden Lion at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, but The Wedding Banquet actually clinched the island nation’s first Oscar nomination. In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.
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I lived in Canada when Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, um, came out, and a few things about its international rollout didn’t sit well with me. I’ve long been suspicious of producer James Schamus — who has publicly admitted not knowing Mandarin — for potentially taking screenwriting credits for work done by people of color. Similarly, the credit block specifically highlighted Mitchell Lichtenstein, who went on to direct Teeth (2007), over actors well established in Taiwan. The back cover of the Laserdisc release included tidbits on actress May Chin’s pop stardom, which came off as patronizing considering she nailed the Shanghainese dialect required for this particular role like an Asian Meryl Streep.
To me, Lee’s five Mandarin-language features have all pandered to a Western audience, and apparently, I am not alone in this opinion. At the 2007 Lust, Caution junket roundtable designated for New York’s Chinese press, I asked Lee in Mandarin if he made movies primarily for those not ethnically Chinese. “They are meant for human beings,” he snapped, uncharacteristically. Other journalists from the table pulled me aside afterward and whispered, “he’s been asked that a lot.”
To me, Lee’s queer oeuvre, which includes the much-lauded Brokeback Mountain, has equally pandered to a hetero audience. He’s a humanist and a compassionate filmmaker, and that’s genuinely admirable. But somehow his movies about people like me invariably end up making me feel othered.
Worse, they have perhaps spurred other marginalized filmmakers to pander to gain wider acceptance. Case in point: Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004). In a review for Westender, the now-defunct Vancouver, Canada, alt-weekly, I wrote: “More so than Lee, Wu panders to the dominant ethnic and cultural myths and exoticisms in the Western world that only serve to compartmentalize already disenfranchised minorities further into convenient and marginalized fringe segments of society.” She’s gone on to make Netflix’s The Half of It (2020), and good on her for it.
Really, I would never have known what it feels like to be centered by a narrative if not for Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island (2022). I recognized its every nuance: the gaysians, the microaggressions, the rice queens, the yellow fever, the sexual racism, and more. Finally, a movie set out to tell a story about people like me instead of presenting another opportunity for the filmmaker and the audience to virtue signal.
So imagine my surprise at the announcement of Ahn’s taking on The Wedding Banquet…with Schamus’s involvement (insert eyeroll emoji). Adapting Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) as Tortilla Soup (2001) worked out for Maria Ripoll, so if this choice was inevitable, I’m glad Ahn is on board.
The fact that it’s not a, um, straight remake has alleviated a lot of my misgivings. Truly, the initial announcement had me worried about the Taiwanese potentially being characterized as uncivilized rubes in 2025. But the remake’s groom-to-be, Min (Han Gi-chan), is from South Korea, where homosexuality still seems much stigmatized. Its popular culture is obsessed with “kkonminam,” or flower boys, who are blasé about wearing makeup, displaying platonic affection (what they call “skinship”), and crossdressing for laughs. Yet one can count the out-gay celebrities in South Korea on one hand.
This time around, Min’s boyfriend is also Asian: Chris, played by Bowen Yang. Ahn and Yang—collaborators on Fire Island—deserve all the flowers for normalizing gaysians outside Asia dating each other. (For those curious about why this is so revolutionary, again, please revisit this essay.)
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There’s finally somewhere that I can escape to without having to imagine I were someone else.
Ahn’s most radical change to the script is that this time around, the gay couple’s ploy involves not one cishet woman, but a lesbian couple: Lily Gladstone’s Lee and Kelly Marie Tran’s Angela. Looking back, many Asian lesbians were the first ones to extend welcoming hands to me when I dipped my toe in LGBTQIA+ communities at McGill and Indiana universities. I deeply regret not cultivating and maintaining those friendships like Chris and Angela in the remake. Though spoiler alert: as in the original, there’s alcohol-fueled heterosexual copulation. No matter how tipsy I get, that’s still something I just can’t get with.
Rounding out the all-star cast are Youn Yuh-jung from Minari as Min’s grandmother, Ja-young, and Joan Chen from Twin Peaks as Angela’s mother, May. Chen has been typecast into this sort of first-gen mom role for a while now, including in last year’s Dìdi and the aforementioned Saving Face. But May’s character is far from stereotypical in the remake, and she takes literal pride in Angela. And despite May winning accolades for her contributions to the local PFLAG chapter, Angela finds her overbearing all the same. It’s a cute spin on a well-worn dynamic. Ahn has updated and fine-tuned The Wedding Banquet sufficiently so that I find it relatable, even if much of it remains implausible. Most importantly, it speaks to me the way that Fire Island did.
But as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Youn’s and Han’s family and given names are mixed up on two different versions of the remake’s poster. Someone involved with the release must surely have caught this. Don’t Asians matter enough in 2025 to warrant a simple fix?♦
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