Tag: Beijing

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Joy Ride

(l to r) Sabrina Wu, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, and Ashley Park

The road trip comedy is an ancient and hallowed form of trash cinema, encompassing everything from It Happened One Night to Bob Hope’s career to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Adele Lim knows a good road trip story when she sees one. Crazy Rich Asians, the film she wrote in 2018, was a light romp about Asian-American immigrants going back to discover their roots. That’s the same territory she explores with her directorial debut, Joy Ride — only this time, she explores it with exploding rectal cocaine balloons. 

Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) have been best friends since they met as primary-schoolers in their suburb, White Hills. True to the name, Audrey and Lolo are the only Asian kids in their school. Audrey is the adopted daughter of white parents, while Lolo’s parents own the local Chinese restaurant. The friends, who never miss an opportunity to turn a photo op into a flippy, are a perfect match. Audrey’s the overachiever brought out of her shell by Lolo’s free spirit, and in turn she keeps Lolo from diving off the deep end. Together, they terrorize White Hills until they leave for college and go their separate ways. 

Lim and writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao set the plate for the adult hijinks to ensue with such verve, I would have watched an entire film of the adventures of Young Audrey and Lolo. 

Flash forward to the present day, where Audrey is an overachieving associate at a white-shoe law firm who regularly bests her office of hard-charging white males on the squash court. Her boss Frank (Timothy Simons) taps her for a crucial trip to Beijing, where she will close big deal with Chao (Ronny Chieng), a Chinese tycoon. Lolo is living rent-free in Audrey’s garage while she pursues her art projects, which include an “adult playground” with vagina-shaped slides. Audrey takes Lolo along as her translator, warning that this is not a fun-filled girl’s trip, but a serious business venture. But Lolo has already invited her cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), a nonbinary Gen Z K-pop stan. 

In Beijing, Audrey meets up with her college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a successful actress on the set of her TV show The Emperor’s Daughter. Lolo, as Audrey’s childhood best friend, is instantly jealous of her college best friend. When the fast friends learn that Audrey is meeting Chao in a swanky nightclub, they tag along. Audrey first struggles to keep Chao on task, and then struggles to not vomit from the Thousand Year Old Egg shots. When she loses that struggle, the only way to salvage the deal is to accept Chao’s invitation to his mother’s birthday party. He insists she bring her birth mother, whom Audrey has never met. The gang sets out on a high-speed train trip through “real China” to find Audrey’s parentage, which results in one raunchy comedic misunderstanding after another. 

Joy Ride is the kind of post-Animal House comedy Hollywood used to mass-produce, with a difference. Lim’s directorial style is an unapologetically female gaze — this film is filled with good-looking men with their shirts off. She’s at her best when playing in the Bridesmaids mode of women finding freedom through over-the-top raunch, such as when our heroes disable a basketball team with a night of cocaine-crazed sex, or the Cardi B-inspired musical number that results when the gang is forced to impersonate a K-pop band. The only reason it doesn’t fall into a pit of sentimentality when the search for Audrey’s mom gets serious is that the excellent ensemble cast steps up to sell it. It’s that camaraderie that makes Joy Ride worth it.

Categories
From My Seat Sports

My Beijing

Frank Murtaugh in China in October 1994

A point of emphasis: I share these sentiments with the same aversion to China’s human-rights atrocities that has the United States boycotting the Beijing Olympics on a government level. A place and its people can be appreciated without endorsing a nation’s restrictive, to say nothing of racist, policies. 

I feel a kinship to the Winter Olympics in Beijing. I feel this connection despite being unable to perform virtually every athletic feat we’ll witness over the next two weeks. The Summer Olympics are easy for imagining a personal place in competition: we can all run, most of us can swim, and lots of us can dribble a basketball (if not guarded by a defender). But luge? Biathlon? Aerial skiing, for crying out loud? Yet I feel closer than usual with these winter Games.

I visited China, you see, in October 1994. Part of a press junket organized by the Wonders Series, I immersed myself in a land, quite literally, “on the other side of the globe,” and it was one of my life’s grand adventures. Sharing stories of the 1995 Wonders exhibition — “Imperial Tombs of China” — was my glorious obligation, but the return on my journalistic investment has been a monumental profit of spirit.

Our group spent some time in Hong Kong (then still a British colony), and Xi’an (site of the famed Terracotta Army, buried more than 2,000 years ago to protect the afterlife of emperor Qin Shi Huang). But Beijing and its surroundings are as colorful in my mind’s eye today as they were 28 years ago. Tiananmen Square, where pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred merely five years before my trip. The Forbidden City, home to Chinese royalty in the way Disney likes to dream of palaces and such. Then there was the Great Wall, a short bus ride northwest of Beijing. You spend your youth nodding your head when told how big — how long! — the Great Wall of China is, then one day you find yourself climbing stairs. Lots of stairs. And feeling like this structure just might be visible from the moon.

These memories danced in my head when Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008 (the Michael Phelps Games). But another decade and my life’s first pandemic have a way of refocusing the moments that have truly mattered on my journey. And being part of Beijing — part of China — for two weeks is among those moments for me.

A college friend (who lived in Tokyo at the time) joined me for part of our time in Beijing. A singular experience: dining like princes (if not kings) in a small Beijing restaurant for a total cost of ten American dollars. If you want to measure the difference between “east and west,” start with economics. My buddy told me something wise near the end of his visit: “You’ll never read or hear about China again without feeling like it’s part of you.”

So here we are in 2022. Chloe Kim is primed to dominate her snowboard competition while Mikaela Shiffrin makes the alpine slopes her own. I’ve never been on a snowboard, and the one day I spent on a mountain with skis strapped to my feet can hardly be described as “skiing.” (I scored points with my future wife. Another investment in spirit.) But yes, I feel like Beijing is a part of me. Still. And maybe forever. I’ll enjoy cheering the world’s finest winter athletes, but it will have less to do with gold medals than the gleam — across decades now — of a gorgeous, history-rich place I wish we all could call our own.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Red August

I spent 10 days in China in October 1994 as a member of a press junket previewing the Wonders exhibition “Imperial Tombs of China.” It was the closest thing to a “red October” I’ll likely see. That journey is as distant from Western perceptions of communism as my memory can recall. Needless to say, the government officials who hosted our wide-eyed party of journalists were on their A game, just as all of China should be when the Olympic Games open in Beijing Friday. But whatever lengths may have been pursued 14 years ago to close the gap between East and West — between perception and reality, one might argue — are among the components of the continued efforts to bridge opposite sides of the world and balance the relationship between the last two “super powers” our planet is likely to host.

Whether in Hong Kong (then still a British territory), Xi’an (where jaw met floor as my party walked among the long-buried terra-cotta army of Emperor Qin Shi-huang-di), or Beijing (we took a short bus ride to the Great Wall), my memories of China start with the crowds. Walking around the Forbidden City one afternoon, it always seemed like a ball game had just finished, with the departing fans filling sidewalks and streets, cars and cabs bumper-to-bumper, pedestrians young and old eager to get to their next destination.

But the crowds were invariably friendly. My group stood out in China, even with a contingent of guides and translators. Adding a significant language barrier, those of us from the Mid-South were curiosities but only until the first smile was exchanged.

I call on these happy reflections, because I’d like to believe that the controversy that follows any Western discussion of China — be it over Tibet, Darfur, or human rights in general — can become part of the international hug that every Olympic gathering aims to be and not the central distraction (violent or otherwise) we remember from Beijing ’08. China has room for improvement as it gains ground on the developed world — and it’s gaining fast — but so does every nation with interests that stretch global harmony. An open mind on the part of Olympic athletes should be enough to inspire open minds on the part of traveling sports fans, journalists, dare I say even diplomats and heads of state. Yes, China must improve its treatment of all its people. That improvement will come quicker through dialogue — which starts with a visit to Beijing — than it will through finger-pointing or threats of international action.

A significant bonus during my visit to Beijing was a college friend joining me from his home in Tokyo. A Japanese native, Tamio moved to America in elementary school, graduated with a degree in economics from Tufts, and returned to Japan not long before my press junket. He emphasized during our travels that wherever I go, wherever I live, when I read about China now, it will feel closer to home. And he was absolutely right.

There was a free night we had in Beijing, in which Tamio and I bravely took to the streets without our formal supervisors or translators. We happened upon a small restaurant (maybe five tables) not too far from the Forbidden City. If there were other diners in that restaurant, I don’t remember them. What I do recall is the most energetic and friendly wait staff I’ve seen before or since (and, alas, a bathroom upstairs that was outdoors and alongside a fire escape). Tamio and I enjoyed a full meal — rice, dumplings, some chicken and vegetables, and a tasty bottle of red wine. All for five American dollars. I’ve tried to do the economics on this for 14 years now and still can’t grasp how fundamentally different two societies are when a meal in one would cost 10 times what it does in another.

Suffice to say, that same meal in central Beijing would cost more than $5 today, and it’ll cost much more 14 years from now. It’s but a tiny sample of a gap being closed, a bridge being slowly built between East and West. And over the next two weeks, as, couch-bound, I watch runners, swimmers, and gymnasts compete for the world’s attention, China will, indeed, feel quite close to home.

Frank Murtaugh is managing editor of Memphis magazine and writes the “From My Seat” column for memphisflyer.com.