Lung Sihung makes paternal authority difficult to dismiss because we can feel the affection behind it. His work with Ang Lee is quietly persuasive, especially when a family's efforts to keep everyone happy are making everyone uncomfortable.
Fi1m perspective
In The Wedding Banquet (1993), Lung Sihung's Mr. Gao helps make keeping a parent happy look like hard work. Alongside Gua Ah-leh's Mrs. Gao, he gives the parental expectations enough tenderness that a simple refusal would feel cruel. We were moved by the effort this family puts into appearing comfortable with the arrangement, because Lung and Gua make the affection behind that effort credible. The comedy occasionally labours when it turns to broader farce, but these two give us a reason to stay with it.
The difficulty for an actor in such a part is making the father matter without making the son's discomfort seem trivial. Winston Chao keeps Wai-Tung's unease visible, and Lung gives us enough feeling on the other side to understand why pleasing his parents matters. That is where we value Lung most: he lets us understand a demand without asking us to approve of it. Lee can make jokes about the arrangement without making the parents merely figures of fun.
This gentleness was a change from a career that had included frequent casting as tough men and heavies in Chinese-language films and Taiwanese television. Lee brought him out of retirement for Pushing Hands (1991), beginning the collaboration that also produced The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). The latter cast him as a master chef and widowed father, another variation on the paternal roles that came to define his international reputation. Those parts give only a partial account of the work he had done before Lee.
His preparation for Pushing Hands was exacting: he took tai chi classes at five in the morning despite having no previous experience. That preparation matters when we are tempted to assume he was simply being himself. His understated performances avoid pushing us towards sentimentality, though the tenderness is there. In The Wedding Banquet, that restraint lets the humour survive without making the family's feelings seem negligible.
The temptation is to remember only the authority, particularly when so much of his later reputation rests on fathers. Start with The Wedding Banquet for the feeling beneath it, and for the way he and Gua make parental pressure feel personal. Forgive the broader jokes; the family is worth staying for.
Biography
Sihung Lung (also credited as Lung Sihung or Lang Sihung) was a Taiwanese actor who appeared in over 100 films and television series. He was born in 1930 in Suqian, Jiangsu, and died on 2 May 2002 in Taipei.
Lung began his career after enlisting in the Nationalist army as a teenager and later joining an army-sponsored acting troupe in Taiwan. He became known for paternal roles in Ang Lee's films, including Mr Chu in Pushing Hands (1991) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Mr Gao in The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Sir Te in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). He received several Golden Horse Awards, including for best supporting actor in The Wedding Banquet and a lifetime achievement award in 2002.
