9/10 because of the beautiful and tragic storytelling of what it’s like to fall out of love without blaming fault on either partner
Spoiler Alert: They don’t end up together. Just joking, they told us that in the first scene.
Us and Them, my favorite romantic drama that was a directorial debut for a famous Taiwanese singer known as “Milk Tea.” Here is the story of two lovers that navigate through stages of life together and sometimes not together. An interesting visual decision by the director is that the film constantly switches perspective from the past -where the scenes are in color- and the present -black and white.
The title Us and Them refer to them as sophisticated and mature middle-aged adults looking back on the youthful charming college students they once were 10 years ago. They retell the story of their relationship, piecing together scenes for the audience to analyze where their relationship went wrong and how they ended up two completely different people in the end.
As I’m watching the film, the story seems like an ordinary tragic love story except that it takes place in China. I start to wonder if there are Chinese elements in the story that curated this story’s ending. Analyzing the poverty of China and Chinese family customs, I wanted to find out what made this story so tragic to be my favorite romantic movie.
The ending of Us and Them conveys that no matter how much love you have for someone, societal issues such as economic burdens and family conflict will eventually separate each partner to adapt and grow on their own.
The film starts in the present when Xiaoxiao (girl) and Jianqing (boy), both successful working adults, run into each other on a plane back home for New Year’s Eve. The encounter is slightly awkward but soon we have the impression that they share a long history. A scene in the past juxtaposes when the two broke college students first meet as strangers on a train that breaks down, and they are forced to spend New Years’ Eve together.
40 days before Chinese New Year, China has the Spring Festival Traveling Period or Chunyun Period. Much like Times Square, China is bustling with families trying to get home in time for New Year however the Chunyun period is known as the largest annual animal migration in the world every year. As the economy rises in China and rural areas are being swapped out for more transportation space, the Chunyun Period gets more chaotic as years go on. Temporary trains are created in response to the overwhelming number of people that try to board, and ‘standing tickets’ are made for desperate passengers to stand in already overcrowded trains for transport. This influx of customers every year stresses out the trains which in effect frequently breakdown, which is how our love story starts.
Not only does the film discuss love in romantic relationships but also in family dynamics. In China, New Year is taken very seriously as a reunion for families to gather and celebrate new fortunes to come. Living with these cultural expectations, it was necessary to travel back home under any means even if you had to pay for an expensive train ticket with the budget of a broke university student. However, these family morals are questioned later in the film when Jianqing starts to make excuses about not being able to go to his father’s restaurant back home for the New Year. His inability to buy a ticket references the high demand during the Chunyun period and the problem that many Chinese have to face when going back home during this chaotic time. The first time we see the father sitting alone in his family-owned restaurant on New Years gets more depressing when you realize that many Chinese elders have faced that same scenario due to their children and grandchildren working away from home. This specific New Years places a strain on their relationship that isn’t based on their ‘love’ for one another but Chinese customs that evaluate their love.
Before 2007 when the Chinese government stepped in, these transportation systems used to inflate their ticket prices right before the holidays. The two scenes of the main characters’ transportation juxtapose their financial stability and growth. The college students riding a broken down train and the mature adults flying on a high-class airplane lets us know how much time has passed during their story. With Chinese price regulations on the airline tickets and their now steady income, the airline tickets were much less of an expense to them now than to when they were university students struggling to make ends meet. Already we see they both have experienced financial development while they were away from each other, and they have experienced major stages of growth between the beginning of their relationship and the end. Financial adversity is something many couples need to face to continue a prosperous relationship. This adversity gets easier to deal with the older you are, but these main characters were already struggling with this problem before their relationship had even started.
The two instantly connect when they realize they are working towards the same life goal: become rich and live in Beijing. To achieve this dream, Jianqing wants to be a videogame developer while Xiaoxiao wants to marry rich. Xiaoxiao pursues different suitable men that Jianqing doesn’t approve of but eventually they realize that their feelings for each other are no longer platonic and start dating. Here the movie is at a high note, the two aspire to share a long life of fortune despite the reality of barely paying rent and living off ramen. The most charming scenes are when we see them together as young adults dreaming of a life outside their small tenant basement house while working hard in their shady black market business and small tech store. When Jianqing gets fired from his low-income job and starts to fully invest all his time in his video game, we see how his commitment eventually leaves both of them feeling unsatisfied with juggling their relationship on top of their work. Jianqing’s addiction to playing video games drives Xiaoxiao away because of his lack of attention towards her.
Jianqing’s dream of becoming a millionaire from his game is a laborious grueling process. We see how the majority of his twenties are spent wallowing away in his basement apartment that is filmed in mute dark colors to give a sense of claustrophobia. Jianqing is seen as a ‘dreamer’ by his friends for wanting to be rich off video games because back then, video games were not considered a sustainable market. Simple games such as Tetris or Pong were popular because they appealed to children and seen as a cheap distraction that parents could buy. But soon videogames were seen for their potential of immersing users in an alternate reality, the largest gaming company in the world is China-owned Tencent that has invested and largely profited off games such as Fortnite and League of Legends. Now Chinese gaming competitions are filled with experienced young players all around the world training to win millions of dollars in prize money. These E-Sport Chinese organizations such as World Elite Gaming or Invictus Gaming are run by the richest millionaires for the entertainment of millions to watch. Here’s an interview of Xianhan Chen, the creative director of ThatGameCompany who describes his latest game, Flower, with other opinions on how the gaming community has evolved in the past few years. Back then, our reality today seemed more of a fantasy that may have discouraged Jianqing to dream big.
有房有车有钱 is a famous Chinese mantra that insists that a man must have a house, a car, and money to sustain a happy and healthy marriage. Along with Jianqing’s love for video games, his obsession with providing financial stability for Xiaoxiao is what drove him to completely isolating her from his work. Chinese culture instills that a relationship must be supported through the man’s wallet, and if he didn’t have a steady job soon, then Xiaoxiao wouldn’t marry him but would marry rich as she said in the beginning. We see in the end that Xiaoxiao confesses that she never dated him for his money but for him which destroys Jianqing into realizing he messed up his own future with Xiaoxiao.
It’s hard to believe the stress that Jianqing gave himself while he was working hours on end for his video game, but it was normal back then for women to marry into wealth. With the exponential growth of the Chinese economy, it’s typical for Chinese men to feel inadequate with their income when compared to the young millionaires that are reaching their peaks in their twenties. Sweatshops and high suicide rates are typically associated when we think about China’s working population, but an article on the subject of Chinese employees says that China is now cutting back their work hours and introducing a two-day weekend. This surely improved the morale of the Chinese men that were slaving away hours at work for fortune and happy lives, so how would this love story have played out once these laws were implemented?
Old fashion methods such as dowries or arranged marriages were a societal norm in traditionally charged areas that made couples feel they needed to marry early. This site is a collection of studies in China about how they interpret love within their culture. A quote about the relationship between marriage and family is that “Asians have traditionally regarded marriages as bonding of families rather than individuals.” The first Chinese new year that Xiaoxiao and Jianqing are broken up, his father asks about Xiaoxiao and if the two are still together. Knowing that Jianqing’s father is an elder that was brought up by these traditions, it’s appropriate to assume that he was expecting them to be married already. Xiaoxiao also is very young when she says that she wants to marry rich as if society has already imprinted their expectation for her before she could pursue a passion or job of her own.
Recently around the world, people have started postponing their marriages later into their lives. Now that society has made the freedom of deciding when to marry based on love, couples deal with less stress on ‘setting the date’ than the generations before them. Shows like 90-Day Fiance or The Bachelor have recently gotten popular in Western culture, but these relationships don’t usually last beyond the show which highlights the claim that marriages don’t work under external stress. Knowing that marriage can wait, Xiaoxiao would not have set her goal to marry so quickly, and Jianqing would have had more balance within his work and life to appreciate Xiaoxiao more. Xiaoxiao was ultimately not ready for marriage in her twenties (Even in the present, Xiaoxiao is still single), but because of societal norms, she felt she needed to speed up the process. With Jianqing ignoring her and not pursuing marriage until after his videogame was complete, the other suitable men in China were off marrying other women.
If they were older and were oblivious to Chinese customs of marriage, then their relationship wouldn’t have burned out so quickly in hopes of fulfilling the quota. Now in the present, they have adult responsibilities such as Jianqing’s wife and children that prevent them from seeing each other as anything more than platonic. Luck and time are as important as love in a relationship, and if they had met in a different stage in their life, then they would have worked out in the end.