✅My Favorite Movie of All Time: “The Bride With White Hair ” (1993)

✅Asian Cinema: A Cult Classic

✅To listen to a story, click the [LISTEN] button at the top right side of the screen. Enjoy!

Choose the voice you like, Male or Female. Once you tap [LISTEN], the player will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. From there, you can play and pause the audio.

✅For over 30 years, I taught a special class: Chinese Ghost Tales, and students loved it.

The film was about two lovers who were madly obsessed with each other, but they came from different clans. Sound familiar? If Shakespeare were Chinese, this would be his version of Romeo and Juliet. However, things are not what they seem, so I had to decode Asian symbolism. When someone dies in Asia, they do not wear black. That would be disrespectful. Instead, they wear white as a sign of purity to funerals. Without giving too much away, everything that could go wrong does in this cult classic of Asian Horror. The white hair is not old age. . .

The film also mirrors the real-life struggles of my parents, who were from different races. In the movie, they are actually from different species. It is traumatic to be treated like an alien. Indeed, I worked at a racist university and was treated terribly. Someone who had lived in Africa reached out to me and became my closest friend ever because she saw the injustice of how I was treated. Without her, it would have been unbearable.

However, the film goes deeper than that, for my father became my rebel hero. Why? Because of love, he broke the law just by marrying my mother. In America, especially in the South, it was against the law to marry between two races. Then in 1967, the Supreme Court, in Loving vs Virginia, stuck down all miscegenation laws. We did not enter America until 1969.

✅ Thank you!

I will discuss more about the meaning of the film in part 2 and how it changed how I viewed America. My mother told me to shut up and that I don’t have freedom of speech, for she told me to just watch the news and see what they do to people of color, for she remembers hiding from the KKK in Mississippi. What major struggles did your family go through? Share with me in the comments.