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Towards the conclusion of Vincent Chow’s poignant drama Little Red Sweet (紅豆), the heroine says she thinks her family’s sweet soup shop is important because it helps people hang on to memories through food. Like many, May (Stephy Tang) seems to be displaced in a Hong Kong that’s changing all around her while other things stay frustratingly the same from her father’s (Simon Yam) refusal to teach her the family recipe because he wanted to pass the shop onto his son to her brother’s sexist assumptions that the housework is her responsibility while staying home playing games rather than helping in the shop.
Indeed, it’s not until matriarch Lin (Mimi Kung) suffers a stroke that everything she did for the family is thrown into stark relief. It’s clear she did most of the heavy lifting at the shop, especially when it comes to customer interactions which are not May’s father’s forte. He doesn’t speak English and has to fetch Lin when a pair of tourists want to pay. Unable to run the shop alone, he asks his son Boyo (Jeffrey Ngai) to help, but he refuses despite having no other obligations as a cram school student who mainly stays home and plays games. Boyo doesn’t help with the housework either, simply expecting that May will take care of it and him despite his ongoing obnoxiousness.
Because of his refusal, May finds herself giving up her dream job as an air stewardess to help out in the shop though her father won’t let her near the kitchen and seems as if he’d still ideally like to hand the shop down to his son or perhaps close it for good to free both children from the burden of caring for its legacy. May’s job as an air stewardess may have symbolised her desire for escape but also reflects her rootlessness and sense of displacement. Before her mother was taken ill, she’d suggested using her staff discount to go on a family holiday which would have been their first because her father never wanted to close the shop though it was obviously not to be nor could she repair their familial bonds through her work. Both she and her tentative love interest (Kevin Chu) recall how low the planes seemed to fly when they were children and how distant they seem now reflecting not a broadening of their horizons but the impossibility of escape along with a loss of intimacy and the widening spaces between people.
But as Canadian-Hong Kong travel writer Soar says, it’s the people not the place and it’s the sense of community that May values in the old-fashioned shopping arcade that is inevitably targeted for redevelopment threatening the future of the shop. First trying to resist the march of progress, May eventually starts looking at new spaces but the ones she sees are slick, modern, and devoid of both warmth and character. A journalist who comes to interview May asks her why she wants to carry on a shop selling traditional desserts that might not be so popular among the younger generation but May says that it’s important as they help people hang on to their memories as if she were also talking about an older Hong Kong that is fast disappearing the soul of which lies in the sense of comfort this sweet bean soup provides. Eventually she’s presented with a choice, like many of her generation wondering whether to take her memories somewhere else or stay and try to salvage something from rapidly receding past.
Her father’s eventual capitulation in agreeing to teach her how to make the family’s iconic sweet red bean soup is akin to a baton being passed, but also a sign of progress in accepting her as his heir rather than insisting on the feckless Boyo whom he also takes to task for his reluctance to look after himself and assumption that it’s his sister’s job to cook and clean for him. Though perhaps bittersweet, there is indeed something poignant in May’s determination to remake a home in a shrinking Hong Kong where community matters and kindnesses are repaid with interest years after they’d seemingly been forgotten. As Soar had said, it’s the people not the place or in another sense perhaps it amounts to the same thing and the taste of home you only find in the warming sweetness of red bean soup.
Little Red Sweet screens Nov. 8/11 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 