Eat a Bowl of Tea-Derek Boyle

The film Eat a Bowl of Tea highlighted the struggles and changes that oppressed Asian immigrants as they sought to be accepted into the American culture. The movie starts out by saying that Chinatown was dying because of the low number of women in America, and Strangers from a different shore states that there was 1 woman for every 1,685 Chinese men. That changed after World War 2 when Chinese-American soldiers were permitted to bring wives from China, sparking a growth in Chinatown.

Ben Loy was a second generation Chinese-American who had adapted himself to both his American and Chinese cultures by being bilingual in Chinese and English, joining the US Armed Forces during World War 2 and stayed strongly connected to the other Chinese men who lived around him. He had learned the ways of both cultures through learning the traditional ways of his ancestors, yet had become Americanized by becoming a soldier, living an average American life-style and behaving like his fellow Americans by the way he courted women, smoked and talked.

These traits showed that Ben has multiple pieces to his identity, one of the CRT tenets, because he is a very complex and compound man as a result of the influences that the two cultures had on him while he grew up. However, he felt great amounts of pressure from his Chinese relatives and friends to have a family even though he had only been married for a few months. Ben had developed a mind-set from Americans that he should take his time and have a family when he and his wife Mei Oi wanted to and not when his father and friends wanted them to, yet Ben still felt tremendous pressure from his peers and that compromised his marriage with Mei Oi.

Ben's strong ties to his Chinese culture helped him secure jobs that he would not have been given had he not been so close to the Wang Family Corporation, which helped him find jobs so that he could support his family. However, the values and habits that he had developed from his exposure to American culture conflicted with the Chinese traditions and ways that Mei Oi had grown up in. For example, Ben placed more value in material possessions like a TV, and believed that his wife could be happy with the TV, but she believed that "a TV does not take the place of a husband."

While Mei Oi and Ben had different views on what a marriage should and can look like, they both loved each other and wanted to stay together despite all that had happened between them. This faith and commitment showed that their cultures could be merged together and helped keep them together. Ben and Mei Oi moved to San Francisco to escape the pressures and expectations forced upon them in New York so that they could start anew and work together to merge their ideologies.