Review of Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, directed by Wayne Wang

If I can briefly not be humble for a moment, I think one of my most endearing qualities when it comes to the movies I watch and the books I read is that I’m too open minded for what kind of things I consume.

Sure, running a pretty decent blog with really good traffic (I see all of you) makes you really aware of what kind of books and movies you like on a daily basis, but I do tend to go outside of my comfort zone more than people realize.

One day I was sitting on the couch, bored and wanting to procrastinate on my work, so I opened up Kanopy and started scrolling.

I like to play this game where I close my eyes and whatever movie I land on is what I watch for the day, and today it was this movie.

I had never heard of it before, which shocked me because an Asian American movie in the mid-eighties feels like something I should have known about before this moment.

Wayne Wang did The Joy Luck Club, but I had no idea about is earlier works like this film. So I took a leap of faith and pressed play, glueing my eyes onto the screen. And I will say: this movie does have a little bit of heart to it.

Let’s get into the review!

As the New Year arrives, a Chinese widow grapples with the fact she might die.

Set in San Francisco, specifically the Chinatown where many immigrants gathered in the city, Dim Sum is about a mother, widowed and an immigrant, who realizes that this is the year predicted where she will pass on. A fortune teller told this, and now she believes it to be true despite only being sixty-two.

Most would think they would have quite a bit of life still left in them at that age—my mother, who is that age when I am writing this, would agree with this statement.

Anyways, she takes it to heart and decides she wants to return home to China to pay respects to the family and their ancestors, and there’s another big problem: her daughter, Geraldine, still isn’t married yet.

Sure, she has a boyfriend all the way in Los Angeles, but the fact she isn’t married and hasn’t given her ailing mother a grandchild yet is a big problem, especially if her mother isn’t going to make it through the year.

Geraldine is acutely aware that she doesn’t want to get married yet, as she thinks she’s not ready, but it doesn’t really matter what she thinks if we’re going to be honest.

While her mother is deeply unhappy with the fact she might die soon and might not achieve these two goals she’s set out in what she believes to be her final year, their interactions are interspersed with the broader community and family coming into the home to see them.

I see why this movie is titled Dim Sum, as it’s basically a series of vignettes tied together by this overarching premise.

We meet other characters, like Uncle Tam, throughout the movie, like little serving sizes of dim sum. Their time together might be small on-screen, but it is savory and delicious to watch visually.

The movie also glides back and forth between English and Cantonese, refusing to play up for an American audience that might be on the other side of the screen watching this.

Overall Thoughts

I’m so glad I watched this, as I now know Wayne Wang was a pioneer in Asian American cinema.

I was surprised to see a movie like this had come out in the eighties, and now that I know there are other works like this in existence, I am definitely going to seek them out.

All in all, this was a cute little film to watch while I was procrastinating on other things, and there was a lot of heart and tender stories packed into it.

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