May Chin

In The Wedding Banquet (1993), May Chin’s Wei-Wei learns to stir-fry from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Simon. There is room for a joke, but neither actor insists on making one. We found the cooking lesson unexpectedly moving because the attention Simon gives her feels considerate despite the dishonesty surrounding their arrangement. Chin helps keep the scene small, allowing that care to register without turning it into a declaration. It is a good place to see what we value in her acting: she makes us interested in someone the plot might otherwise hurry along.

Her earlier television work included Love (1990), in which she played the hard-working mother Ding Yuenü. The devoted mothers and strong-willed women of her Taiwanese dramas gave her parts built around responsibility and pressure. Ang Lee’s film brought her international notice, with a character whose needs could easily have been lost in the business of arranging a marriage. Wei-Wei is a mainland Chinese artist seeking a green card through a sham marriage. Chin gives her enough personality that we remember she has a reason of her own for agreeing to it.

That matters alongside Winston Chao’s Gao Wai-Tung, whose discomfort keeps the arrangement’s difficulties visible. Gua Ah-leh and Lung Sihung make Mrs and Mr Gao’s expectations hard to dismiss, so the comedy needs actors who can show the effort of appearing at ease. Chin belongs in that company. The broader farce sometimes labours, and we prefer her exchanges with Lichtenstein to the film’s harder attempts to be funny. Her contribution matters because Wei-Wei never becomes merely the person required to make somebody else’s story work.

Chin subsequently played May Jean in May Jane (1994), among her later leading film roles, while her work continued largely in local films and television. We would be wary of treating her international breakthrough as a complete account of what she could do. What it does establish is how well she handles a part that requires her to be practical without becoming impersonal. Start with The Wedding Banquet for the cast, and accept that the louder comedy is not always where its actors do their best work.