Eat Drink Man Woman Analysis

As someone who was raised with traditional Chinese values and was greatly influenced by Western culture, his characters in this film I think reflect his personal experience. The father, Chu, a master-chef and father of three daughters, struggles throughout the story to adapt to and accept his daughters transition from a strictly traditional way of life to a modern lifestyle. The main focus is the changes in the conventional ideas of family, gender roles, and the modernization or globalization that provoked them. Chu raised his daughters in a not so typical environment because of the loss of his wife and their mother. He takes on the role of being a father and a mother in certain ways. Stepping outside of his traditional role as a father, Chu cooks for his family, cleans, wakes his daughters up in the morning, and folds their laundry. Chu prepares an elaborate traditional dinner every Sunday in attempt to

Even Chu eventually embraces a nontraditional lifestyle by starting a new life and family with his much younger neighbor. Jia-Chien is the best example of finding balance between traditional and modern values. She kept her career with an international airline and maintained her father 's old house and carried on her father 's tradition of family dinners. She kept her independence and stayed committed to her family. In this film, technology and modern culture sometimes conflict with traditional Chinese culture, but the family learns to compromise between tradition and change. By pursuing the lives they desired separately they found happiness. Although their traditional family was broken apart into separate pieces they came together in the end and formed a new, unconventional, and healthier