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Reviewed by:
  • The Year of the Fish
  • Aiko Yamashiro (bio)
The Year of the Fish. Written and directed by David Kaplan. Performed by An Nguyen, Ken Leung, Tsai Chin, and Randall Duk Kim. Gigantic Pictures, 2007. DVD.

The Year of the Fish is a small film with large ambitions, beautiful in its subtlety and provocative in its weaving of magic into a harsher immigrant reality. Writer and director David Kaplan is no stranger to fairy-tale film, and in his feature film debut he adapts the Chinese Cinderella story to modern-day Chinatown in New York City, challenging the contemporary fairy tale to raise issues of human trafficking and human worth. Though the film offers these complications, it also refuses to pass a heavy moral judgment, preferring, rather, to let the questions hang quietly in the air.

The film tells the story of Ye Xian (An Nguyen, in her feature film debut), a young and inexperienced woman from China who is sent to work at Mrs. Su's beauty salon in NYC Chinatown to make some money for her ailing father back home. Immediately a few initial enchantments are derailed. In actuality, [End Page 178] Mrs. Su (the accomplished Tsai Chin), called "Ma" by the bevy of young Chinese women who work for her, runs a massage parlor where the male customers expect more than massage. Ye Xian goes through her first transformation—decked out in tight U.S.-brand-name clothes and raucous eye shadow, she is incorporated into a system of prostitution. She gets an identifying call number and a new name, "Betty," that will be easier for the American customers to pronounce. Besides changing both her appearance and identity to adapt to this new U.S. world, Ye Xian must also adapt to a new system of family, one based not in care but in capitalism and competition for male desire.

Ma makes the issue of money and self-worth explicit: "In America, without money, there is no dignity." When Ye Xian cannot bring herself to perform sexual services to the paying customers, Ma screams that she is worthless, gives her the more menial tasks of cooking and cleaning, and alienates her from the other workers. Conditions worsen for Ye Xian as Ma and Katty, a jealous worker, conspire to hurt and punish her, and Ma's lecherous brother makes repeatedly insistent and unwanted sexual advances. Ma does not stop reminding Ye Xian that as an illegal immigrant she has no other place to go—that personhood and agency, particularly for women immigrants, are fantasies best forgotten.

There are two points of hope for Ye Xian outside the massage parlor. The first is a magical fish she receives from a frightening hag of a fortune-teller, Auntie Yaga (the veteran actor Randall Duk Kim), who is also the alleged owner of a mysterious sweatshop that is the most horrible in all of Chinatown. The fish's unnatural growth cultivates a sense of wonder in Ye Xian that allows her to continue to dream of freedom and a different life. He becomes Ye Xian's only friend in her increasingly imprisoned life, but a friend whose own life is also at the mercy of Ma.

The second is the obligatory love interest—a handsome young musician named Johnny (the up-and-coming Ken Leung). Johnny's character is the one decent guy in the film—upstanding, devoted (taking care of his grandmother), and, importantly, not interested in the sexual services provided by Ma's massage parlor. In this last respect, he is strongly contrasted with all the other men in the film as a model of a "good guy"—someone who values real love over just sex. Although their romance is sweet and Leung as Johnny is extremely likable, he and Ye Xian share a total of maybe ten to fifteen minutes of actual face-to-face interaction. Some may object to the simplicity of this expected love story. I was a little disappointed with the simplicity of this romantic plot, but was also quite captivated with the actors' effortless portrayals of these believable, regular people.

The story itself seemed at times awkwardly divided between the story of...

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