The Home Song Stories and the mothers we have to explain

The first time I watched The Home Song Stories I was angry at it for a whole day afterward, and it took me most of that day to work out that I was not angry at the film. I was angry at being seen.

Tony Ayres made it in 2007, from his own childhood, and changed the names but not, I think, very much else. The boy at the centre is called Tom, played by Joel Lok with the watchful flatness of a child who has learned that watching is safer than asking. His mother is Rose, a nightclub singer who comes out of Hong Kong and Shanghai trailing two children and a talent for making men believe they have rescued her. Joan Chen plays Rose, and the performance won her the AFI that year, and I will get to it, but I want to start with what the film does not do, because what it does not do is the brave part.

It does not redeem her.

The redemption we are trained to expect

I grew up on a particular kind of migrant story, the one where the difficult parent is difficult because of sacrifice, where the coldness turns out to be love speaking a language the child will only decode in the final act, usually over a deathbed or a bowl of soup. Those films exist to forgive. They hand the second-generation viewer a tidy absolution: your mother was hard because the world was hard to her, and now you understand, and now you can stop being angry.

The Home Song Stories withholds that. Rose is selfish. Rose is theatrical, manipulative, cruel to her daughter, careless with her son, and she uses the men around her, including the decent, baffled Australian sailor Bill she marries for somewhere to land, played by Steven Vidler as a man permanently three steps behind his own marriage. She takes a lover half her age, a cook named Joe, and conducts the affair in front of her children with a recklessness that the film refuses to excuse. When she reaches for the gas oven, and she reaches for it more than once, the film does not frame it as a cry the world should have answered. It frames it as a thing that happened, again, in a kitchen, with two children in the next room learning to listen for it.

What I mean is that the film loves Rose without pardoning her, and I did not know, until I saw it, that those two things could happen in the same frame.

What Joan Chen is doing

Chen’s performance is the engine of this, and it is worth being specific about how. She does not play Rose as a victim and she does not play her as a monster; she plays her as a woman who has decided that being looked at is the only currency she has left, and who is running out of it. There is a way she enters a room, chin first, already performing for an audience that may or may not be there, that I recognised in my bones. Country does this to women, or rather displacement does, the loss of the place where you knew the rules. Rose was someone, once, in a city that no longer wants her. In suburban Melbourne she is a foreigner with a fading act, and Chen lets you see her doing the arithmetic of her own diminishment in real time.

The cruelty in the performance is not gratuitous. It is the cruelty of a person who can only feel her own size by making someone smaller, and the someone is usually her daughter May, or her son, the boy holding the camera of memory steady so the rest of us can watch.

Watch her sing, though, and you understand the whole woman. The film gives Rose the nightclub stage as the one place her performance is wanted rather than endured, and Chen plays those numbers as a kind of oxygen, a person breathing properly for the first time in the scene. The songs are in Mandarin, and they are addressed to a room of Australians who cannot follow a word and have come anyway, and that gap, between the feeling she is pouring out and the audience receiving only the shape of it, is the film’s whole condition in miniature. She is most herself when she is least understood. The home in the title is a song nobody around her can translate.

Ayres frames the whole film as Tom’s recollection, with an adult narration that keeps a careful distance, and that distance is the film’s deepest formal idea. The man telling the story has decided not to soften the woman at the centre of it. He has decided that the most loving thing he can do for his mother is to tell the truth about her.

The narration and its cost

I keep thinking about that narration, because it names the burden every diaspora child carries and few films will admit. We become the narrators of our parents. We are the ones who can move between the two languages, the two countries, the before and the after, and so the job of explaining the parent to the world, and sometimes to themselves, falls to us. It is a kind of power and it is a kind of theft. To narrate someone is to fix them in a frame they did not choose.

Ayres knows this, and the film is partly about the guilt of it. The adult Tom is doing the very thing the child Tom learned to do, watching, recording, withholding, and the film does not pretend this is neutral. There is a cost to being the one who survives to tell it. You survive by becoming an observer of your own family, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to climb back into the picture you watched from the doorway.

This is why I was angry that first day. The film had reached into the specific architecture of my own watching and shown it to me from outside. It had said: this is what you did to live, and it cost you something, and the someone you narrated never got to read your version.

Why it should be watched now

The Home Song Stories swept the AFIs in 2007 and premiered at Berlin and was, briefly, the film everyone meant when they said Australian cinema was finally letting a Chinese-Australian story be a story rather than a lesson. Then it did what most of these films do, which is slip out of circulation while louder pictures took the shelf space. Nigel Bluck’s photography, all that warm domestic light pulled tight around a cold house, deserves to be seen properly. Antony Partos’s score deserves it. Joan Chen’s Rose deserves an audience that did not arrive in 2007 and has not really arrived since.

But the reason I would put it in front of anyone now is simpler. We are, at last, getting more migrant stories on Australian screens, and a lot of them are kind. Kindness is not the same as honesty. The films that forgive the difficult mother are easier to watch and easier to forget. The Home Song Stories does the harder thing. It lets her be unforgivable and grieves her anyway, which is, I have come to believe, the only way any of us ever actually loves a parent like that.