She should not have refused to kiss her lover the next morning using the silly excuse that “kisses are intimate.” Immediately we saw the face of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman sliding over hers like a mask in a bank robbery, borrowed where it wasn’t needed. She probably shouldn’t have played with the yellow bandana either, because the rag failed to be her story’s falcon. But the doses of naivety were necessary. After all, it wasn’t Shakespeare retold by simply adding non-European cast. The allusions to Faulkner didn’t make the girl Quentin Compson’s Caddy as she lightly leaped off the pedestal (got out of the car and started walking towards the city).
If we take Asian Americans to be a ‘model minority’ – well-educated, staying out of trouble, quiet – then we should think of this movie as something made with a magnifying glass. The quotes and mis-quotes would then help us see what would otherwise be doubly invisible, because it is a story about Asian American women.
There are few things that are as translucent as girls trained in meekness. Their fingers pick through heaps of trash and no one comes to their aid. Joy Dietrich’s movie doesn’t scream about this, it simply says this is the case. We see a girl picking through garbage when everyone else is asleep, a college student in both pre-law and pre-med whose perfect body is no comfort but yet another duty, and finally the protagonist who refuses to be her brother’s incestuous fantasy and turns back. The keepers of their stories, the white landlady and the demanding parents who say volumes with meaningful pauses, cannot be slain like dragons. Years of silencing cannot be likened to a dragon and therefore a brave knight is absolutely out of place. When the protagonist’s brother appears at her door trying to play that role, his quest slowly dissipates into a drive around New Jersey. It’s up to Jenny to end it and head back to what she left behind. There are no songs of triumph in this picture, just a mix CD playing in the car during Jenny’s unfinished escape. Listening to it, she is not daydreaming about romantic fulfillment but figuring out a way to speak in and to the world. By that time she knows she will have to learn to speak for herself rather than let Joe guard their story and carry it off into the fields surrounding the road. She’s a photographer, not a model.
Beatrice is the model. She is also the meek girl eventually found dead in the bathtub, because she does not manage to break out of the canvas on which others projected their fantasies of her. Quite literally, in the beginning of the story, Dietrich has her posing as one living element in a painting of fields stretching towards a lonely farm. She plays a crawling invalid, thus prefiguring that she will be trapped in that momentary pose for the rest of the movie. Her demanding parents and abusive boyfriend make her crawl from one form of perfection to another. In the end, her stunning beauty, undeniable intelligence, and dedication are meaningless. She is ridiculous standing on the parapet in a silk nightgown as if she were slipping into yet another familiar role even when considering suicide. When Jenny pulls her corpse out of the bathtub, the pretty dress and lightly smudged make-up cake the person who suffocated underneath. A person who didn’t know herself and in her textbooks, which she read out loud, didn’t find a way to speak her self. Beatrice’s death is not meant as a mere warning. We are aware that there was a person underneath the make-up. Her suicide is the dotted i of her presence; it’s the only outlet for the otherwise incessantly curbed will. The banality of her death and the borrowing involved in the story are necessary. In her white nightgown moment on the parapet, Beatrice refers us to the cliché image of Emily Dickinson.* If you can recall a line or two, you can hang on to them as hints at the story which Beatrice – an unfulfilled creative writer – cannot tell. The poem she does leave as her suicide note is neither good nor enlightening and, to my mind, could have been left out just like the clumsy allusion to Pretty Woman.
The girls in Tie a Yellow Ribbon do not speak magic spells or start revolutions with declarations full of fire. The act of speaking is here practical and concrete. Towards the end of the movie Beatrice and Jenny’s neighbor finally plucks up courage to talk back to the landlady who made her sort the garbage. Jenny calls her foster mother whom she hadn’t talked to in years. After much consideration, they put together sentences through which they can become actors and not recipients of their own story. Does this sound like a description of a cheap assertiveness course? It should not. Dietrich’s juggling with banality brings us to a place where banality matters. The patterns of everyday become no less real because of their familiarity or similarity to random novels or movies. Just because so much has been written about identity search, feminism, depression, doesn’t mean that all is resolved. On the contrary, the seemingly resolved slips back into invisibility. Although this is not the age of sentimental heroines, meek girls drown in bathtubs, as quietly beautiful as when they were still alive.
I do not quite understand why the title is Tie a Yellow Ribbon, maybe because for me the motif of the bandana misfired. The German title, Die Koreanerin, makes even less sense to me, because although the main character is Korean American, the two other girls are of Japanese (I think) and Chinese descent, and the bonding of these three women lies at the heart of the tale. It is where the connecting and disconnecting that Jenny repeatedly mentions takes on a different form.
It would be misguided to liken it to male bonding as presented in, for instance, Moby Dick. It’s not a myth but one of those unseen, untold everyday affairs. My friend Junyoung (who happens to be a Korean New Yorker like Dietrich’s Jenny) made me realize this when she told me about a movie called Take Care of My Cat. “There are no movies about single women in their twenties,” she said. “They begin to exist in popular imagination when they turn thirty. Before that, they are always presented in relation to men in their environment.” I have been coming back to her point ever since. With Tie a Yellow Ribbon I found my tentative response.
Not only are the three girls dogged by the stereotype of the meek Asian woman but, because of their age, they lack the privilege of experience. Speaking therefore means in their case breaking not just the cultural taboo but entering a gray area between experience and innocence. Which is to say, disappearing. However, through their bond they escape invisibility as they see one another. While I am not denying that it is a movie about identity and about problems facing Asian Americans, problems I may not be fully grasping, not being touched by them, I think that this aspect is equally significant. I am impressed by Dietrich’s ability to give those twenty-year-olds voices and bodies. Throughout the story she lets the audience know that she could easily make her characters slip into ready-made roles. But even with one girl drowned, she didn’t make them a threesome of amateur Ophelias. There is a story within, between, and beyond the borrowing.
*I would like to thank Asia for hissing “Emily Dickinson” into my ear during that scene.
