Home Is the Place That Lets Us Leave

While finishing Why Set Out Again After Coming Home?, the sea and homecoming in The Odyssey led me to Life of Pi, and from there back to Ang Lee.

Nolan asks why a person, once home, still has to leave again. Lee turns the question around: how does a real home give someone the courage to go? I rewatched Eat Drink Man Woman with that thought in mind.

Filmmakers who have built a world of their own often seem to carry a few sentences they cannot finish in a lifetime. They make different stories in different forms, yet eventually return to the same deep place.

Christopher Nolan repeatedly sends a person through time, war, dreams, and enormous systems, only to have him keep searching for home. Meng Jinghui’s theater speaks in another register, but under its absurd, fractured, sometimes despairing stages there remains the hope that a person can still rise from the ruins.

Ang Lee is harder to reduce to one sentence.

He also films departure and return, though “home” in his work rarely waits quietly at the end. It is a person’s first shelter and the order that presses upon him; it gives language, feeling, and safety while assigning an identity that cannot easily be shed. Again and again, Lee follows someone who wants to become a self but cannot bear to destroy the relationship from which that self emerged. He seems more interested in how freedom can grow inside a relationship than in escape by itself.

That subject is probably connected to his own life. Lee grew up in a traditional family that valued education and ethical order. His father was an educator, and academic achievement carried great weight. Lee later left Taiwan to study theater and film in the United States, entering a social world very different from the one that formed him.

The America he encountered had already passed through the sexual revolution, feminism, and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. By the time he entered its universities and artistic institutions, those changes no longer belonged only to the street. They had entered intimate relationships, family ethics, identity, and artistic expression.

The American experience taught more than the possibility of greater sexual freedom. It showed that body, desire, and identity could be serious subjects: the life a person truly wants may diverge from the role assigned by the family; marriage may not equal love; an orderly household may contain a hidden emotional reality.

Yet Lee’s Chinese family experience made it impossible for him to equate the release of desire with liberation in any simple way. He does not treat desire as sin, but neither does he imagine that naming it solves everything. People do not exist alone. One person’s freedom lands inside another person’s pain. When a hidden desire is acknowledged, the whole arrangement of a family changes.

He repeatedly brings his characters to the same moment: desire has been spoken—what happens to the relationship now?

That question grew stronger each time I re-entered Eat Drink Man Woman.

I

Few films have been discussed from as many angles. Food and sexuality, tradition and modernity, the dissolution of patriarchal family, the father’s lost and recovered sense of taste, the kitchen as a field of power, one Sunday dinner after another—critics have returned to all of them.

For that reason, searching for a wholly unprecedented interpretation may not be useful. I would rather record what genuinely moved me, especially details that touched my own experience of family.

First, I love the way the film is made. I have always liked ensemble stories. Following one person for two or three hours can become exhausting. People are complicated, and society exists through the interaction of many different people and relationships. A contradiction that would take one protagonist years to reveal may emerge naturally when it is distributed across a group.

Eat Drink Man Woman is an exceptionally mature ensemble film. It also has the lucid architecture of theater. Each Sunday dinner feels like the stage lights rising on another act: the father spends hours preparing a feast; the family sits down; everyone carries news but no one can truly speak; someone finally makes an announcement; the household changes; and then another dinner begins, with each person apparently back in place.

Nothing, however, is the same.

The film rarely explains a character directly, yet wastes almost no image. Who sits where, who enters the kitchen, who may cook and who may only eat, who speaks first, who lowers her eyes, who handles the consequences—each detail maps the household.

The father cooks alone as the camera pulls back to reveal the portrait of his late wife. Jia-Chien argues with him relentlessly but stands beside him when something truly has to be done. Family members discuss another person’s marriage or life and unknowingly describe themselves. The film is dense with information without ever seeming rushed.

It never gives us a monologue saying, “I love this home, but it suffocates me.” Lee breaks the sentence apart and places it in a dinner, a glance, a kitchen door, and a remark that stops halfway.

II

Lee once recalled that some viewers thought he had made Taiwan look too much like the 1970s. The criticism helps explain why the film may not have been embraced locally in the way it is now.

It was made in the early 1990s, when Taiwan had become one of the Four Asian Tigers. The city, commercial life, and young people’s values were changing quickly. That modern world is present in the film: an airline, international transfers, property speculation, fast-food chains, professional women, and freer arrangements of love and sex.

The Chu household, however, seems to inhabit an earlier time. The old house, Sunday dinners, paternal authority, the daughter barred from the kitchen, affection that cannot be spoken, and inherited family ethics make the home feel as though it still lives in the 1970s.

The film did not merely make 1990s Taiwan look old. It superimposed two Taiwans moving at different speeds. Outside, society was entering the modern world at a run. Inside, the family’s time moved slowly through an older order.

Lee had been away for years when he returned to film it. His Taiwan may not be the island of 1994 alone, but the place formed when remembered Taiwan and present Taiwan occupied the same frame. Local audiences could see it as dated, even as a Chinese family composed for foreign expectations. Three decades later, that untimeliness has become one of the film’s treasures.

It also makes me think of contemporary Chinese-language works set in the late 1990s or around the millennium. Those years have become a shared emotional memory: cities and daily life changing rapidly, ordinary people able to picture a better future, human connections still retaining an unpolished texture.

A film set there now does not necessarily evoke backwardness. Familiar details can summon longing. This is not identical to a Taiwanese audience in 1994 looking at a Chu family that seemed stranded in the 1970s. Both experiences, however, reveal something about fast-changing societies: people often least want to see the age they have just left. When it is truly gone, they begin searching for it.

What once looked obsolete becomes what was lost.

III

What stays with me most is the way each daughter possesses the home and then leaves it. All three love the family; each has learned a different meaning of home.

The eldest, Jia-Jen, experiences home through responsibility. After her mother dies, she assumes the part of elder sister and something of a mother. Her position is clear: eldest daughter, teacher, guardian of moral order, the person expected to sacrifice and understand. She may not have fully experienced the freedom of being loved and chosen as an independent woman, but she knows the binding force of family—responsibility, constraint, position, and the security of knowing she cannot simply disappear from the relation.

Her departure, though explosive after years of repression, need not be read as a rejection of home. Some people leave because a family can no longer contain them. Others can leave because they are certain that distance will not make the family vanish.

The youngest, Jia-Ning, experiences home as an atmosphere of care. The youngest child enters a household already crowded with experienced parents and older siblings. From the beginning, she lives inside a more complete network of relations. Home is like air: always present, and therefore not something she must repeatedly verify.

She also carries the least responsibility, so her departure is the most natural. She has neither Jia-Jen’s accumulated repression nor Jia-Chien’s need to locate herself through conflict. Life happens, and she follows it forward.

Jia-Chien is different from both.

She experiences home through conflict.

She appears the freest. She was the first to build a career, life, and intimate world beyond the household. She is capable, decisive, and unafraid of confronting her father. From the outside, she seems the most distant daughter.

In fact, her bond may be the deepest.

IV

Jia-Chien resembles both parents. She resembles her mother because she cooks best and has inherited the mother’s latent place in the kitchen and family. She resembles her father through formidable professional competence and practical judgment. Both take charge when something happens, and both struggle to speak feeling. The more they care, the more readily care comes out as force or argument.

They clash not because they are opposites, but because they are alike.

When the family faces a real event—Uncle Wen’s illness and death, or any practical crisis—Jia-Chien is the person who naturally stands beside her father. In his mind she is not merely a daughter to be arranged, but the only member of the household with whom he can deliberate and share responsibility as an equal.

His refusal to let her cook in his kitchen is therefore more than a traditional father dismissing a daughter’s ability. The kitchen is his last territory of authority. As long as he can produce the feast, he remains the center of the home. Keeping Jia-Chien out contains control, perhaps protection, and a fear of aging and replacement.

He may not want her confined to the role that once bound her mother. He also fears that if she truly takes over the kitchen, she will prove capable of replacing him. His feeling toward her is always divided. He respects her most and most needs to stop her; understands her best and has the least idea how to draw close.

V

On this viewing, I kept returning to one small sentence. Jia-Chien’s property investment has collapsed. She means to announce at dinner that she is leaving for Amsterdam, but before she can speak, her father tells her he has read about the building in the newspaper.

He does not condemn her. He does not say, “You never should have gone out and taken those risks.” He only tells her:

You can still live here.

It is a quiet line, and perhaps the warmest in the film. He knows she has failed and that the world outside has hurt her. He asks for neither explanation nor confession. Her failure has not canceled her place in the house.

It is a recognizably East Asian form of paternal love. It may never embrace you or know how to console you, yet it keeps trying to stand between you and the weather.

I think of the father in The Bicycle. He may be unable to say many tender things in a lifetime, but the old black bicycle waits after school each day. You may leave, ride far on your own, or unexpectedly sit behind him again. If you return, the bicycle is still ready to carry you home.

The security a family gives a child may begin with something simple: permission to return after a mistake. From birth onward, a child is destined to move gradually away from the parents. Outside the home there will be failure, betrayal, loss, and error. A household that can accept only a successful child has never really granted the freedom to leave.

Without intending to, the father’s sentence announces a new family rule to all three daughters: you may make your own decisions; if they fail, you will not be expelled.

Perhaps the eldest and youngest daughters’ swift departures are not unrelated. The film never claims they leave because they saw their father accept Jia-Chien, but family rules are rarely established by proclamation. Children watch how parents respond to another child’s failure and infer how far the household will allow any of them to go.

They see the second daughter venture outward, lose the apartment, and watch her life fall out of order. Their father does not withdraw his acceptance. So they know that trying the world beyond the home need not mean losing the home forever.

A traditional father may believe he can preserve the family only by keeping the children from leaving. Master Chu finally preserves it in the opposite way: he lets his daughters know that they can go.

The more a family permits departure, the less likely it is to disappear.

This points to a paradox that feels true. The more secure the home, the more confidently a person may leave. The less secure it is, the more a person may spend a lifetime chasing home—or fleeing it.

Secure attachment does not abolish the need for intimacy. It can, however, quiet the urge to make another relationship fill a childhood absence. Exploration becomes easier because failure does not threaten every source of belonging.

VI

Uncle Wen’s death is another turning point for Jia-Chien. Their relationship is warm. I used to think that was simply because he was more open than her father and better able to speak with the young. This time I noticed something else: she may be close to him because she is so much like her father.

Uncle Wen is her father’s lifelong friend. He knows Master Chu not only as a silent parent, but as a chef, friend, and man. Through him, Jia-Chien approaches a person larger than the role of “father.”

At home Master Chu must be authority, the parent who cannot easily show weakness. With Uncle Wen he has a past, jokes, friendship, dependence, and ordinary feeling. Uncle Wen has therefore served as a translator between father and daughter. What the father cannot say, the friend makes intelligible; the affection Jia-Chien cannot give directly can pass through him first.

When he dies, their translator is gone. Father and daughter must face each other without mediation.

Seeing the father’s grief may also make Jia-Chien understand, for the first time in concrete terms, that he will not always be there. Uncle Wen’s death not only takes away a beloved elder; it gives her an advance image of what losing her father might mean. She had believed she needed above all to escape him. In the presence of death, she discovers that she may be unable to imagine life without him.

VII

Jia-Chien’s decision to remain is often summarized this way: the daughter most determined to leave was the family’s true heir. That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The more interesting question is why it had to be her.

In some families with several daughters, I have noticed that long-term care eventually falls to a daughter somewhere in the middle. My mother’s family offers one example. My grandmother had five children; the daughter who cared for her over the long term was one of the middle daughters. I have seen similar arrangements elsewhere.

This is not a law of birth order. Rank does not determine care. Gender, distance, work, marriage, resources, relationship quality, and decades of family expectations matter. Still, the middle daughter’s structural position deserves attention.

The eldest has a defined place. She is the first child, receives concentrated attention early, and takes responsibility early. The youngest also has a defined place: the one cared for, the person toward whom the existing network turns. A middle child is caught between those two settled roles and must keep finding her own position.

She may therefore learn early to observe: who is angry, who needs comfort, when to retreat, and when someone must step forward. Such a child may not become the adult most dependent on family, but she can become the one who best understands how the family works.

In the repeated work of locating herself, a middle daughter may become the most practiced coordinator, the quickest actor, and the most fluent reader of everyone else. Birth order is not a cause by itself. It simply draws attention to the way a family structure can train the ability to coordinate.

Whenever something happens, everyone turns to her. Whenever the pieces must be gathered, she steps in. Eventually she becomes the person who seems most eager to escape and least able to sever the bond.

That is Jia-Chien. She pushed outward first because, unlike her sisters, she did not inherit a stable position. She had to prove herself elsewhere. Yet leaving gave her fluency in two worlds. She understands her father’s language and the modern workplace; the kitchen and the international conference room; family obligation and the lives people build beyond it.

She belongs inside and has lived outside. When a family needs to be gathered again, the person best able to do it may be the one who has left and still understands what remains.

Only someone who has left a family can fully choose it again. Only someone who has stood both within and beyond it can turn an old household into a new relation.

This also resembles Lee himself. Traditional family shaped him, and he traveled far from it. He could not simply return, yet never truly abandoned it. He knows why a father must defend order and why a child must escape.

Lee moves back and forth across the family’s threshold. He sees the pressure of its structure without casually cutting through the feeling it contains. He loosens the house enough for those inside to breathe.

VIII

At the last major dinner, the father is the one who makes the announcement. Madame Liang’s sequence of expectation, misunderstanding, shock, and attempts to preserve dignity is among the film’s funniest and most finely judged performances. The scene is so brief that I wish it lasted longer; its timing and restraint belong to an older school of acting.

After the laughter, the father’s choice completes the largest reversal. The daughters have always announced their lives at the table while he absorbs the impact. Now he demands that they accept him not only as their father, but as a person who still possesses desire, love, and a right to life.

He releases his control of his daughters and releases himself from the role of father. The three sisters depart. He begins again. The old form of the Chu household collapses, but the relationships do not.

This is Lee at his most moving. He does not keep everyone at one table in order to prove that love survives. Only when no one is forced to play the old role can the household become a genuine relationship for the first time.

In the final scene Jia-Chien returns to the kitchen and cooks for her father. Once, the father held the family together through food. Now the daughter’s cooking awakens his sense of taste.

It can be read as an inheritance. Yet Jia-Chien has not returned to her mother’s position or surrendered to the old family order. The direction of care has changed. What was once one-way provision becomes mutual giving. He need not be only a father; she need not replace a mother. For the first time, two people who need one another sit together.

He tastes again. Perhaps what returns is not only flavor, but the capacity to feel a relationship.

IX

After Eat Drink Man Woman, one sentence keeps returning to me: home should give a person the courage to leave.

Strength does not come from holding everyone in place. A child knows that trying, choosing differently, and failing are all possible; after failure, the child’s place remains.

Of course, no one is required to return, and no daughter should have to sacrifice herself for the family. Leaving must first become a real freedom before staying can carry the weight of choice.

Jia-Chien has seen the world outside and knows she can live there. Her movement toward the family therefore carries the weight of an active decision.

The freedom in Lee’s films always feels the pull of relationship. A person admits desire and still tries to preserve the ability to love. Old roles loosen, and people choose their distance from one another again.

The father can love. The daughters can leave. Those who leave can return. Failure need not bring exile. And the person most determined to escape may, once she truly possesses freedom, choose to receive the family into her hands.

What Eat Drink Man Woman leaves behind is a family that has been rearranged. It survives, but no longer requires everyone to live as before. Father and daughters each receive one chance to become themselves.