Eat a Bowl of Tea

I appreciated watching “Eat a Bowl of Tea” because I felt that it showed a different type of immigration story.  While Takaki does mention that Chinese men used to travel to China to find a wife, he didn’t go into much detail about the wives or their lives.  In this film, we were able to see the story of a young women, Mei Oi, leaving the only country that she had ever known to live with her new husband, who had a completely different childhood and background.  She represents a whole group of Chinese women who came to the United States.  I feel as though her story perfectly fits the CRT tenet that every group has a unique story to tell that contributes to U.S history.

When Mei Oi and Ben are together in China, she says how much she wants to go to America.  When they arrive at the train station in New York, she again expresses how excited she is.  She clearly had heard much about the United States, and wanted to go there enough that she was willing to leave her family and her village, which I’m sure took an incredible amount of courage.  New York is a culture shock for her, and she is delighted by the running water and stove in her apartment.  It is much different from what she had been used to in China.  Also, as a result of being new to the country as well as a woman, she spends a lot of time in her apartment.  This, combined with Ben working a lot, lead to her being very lonely.  As seen in Takaki and Bold Words, this happened to many women who were brought to the country like Mei Oi was.  Normally, in those situations, that was when the couples started to have children.   Then, even though the husband would be working a lot, the wife would have a child at home to spend time with.  However, Mei Oi and Ben have trouble conceiving for a very long time.  That is a big factor that leads to Mei Oi eventually sleeping with someone else.  From this point on, the plot strays from a typical immigration story.  It is pretty unique to have your father-in-law cut off the ear of the man you cheated with, and I don’t think it happened to many of the women brought to the United States from China, but I could always be wrong.  

Mei Oi’s bravery and struggles in “Eat a Bowl of Tea” reflect a side of immigration that is underrepresented in U.S history.  This is specifically seen and summed up in one of the ending scenes, when Ben and Mei Oi’s father are talking, Ben says “it’s all my fault.”  When Mei Oi’s father says no, Ben insists that it is, because “she didn’t know.”  No matter how excited Mei Oi was to go to America, she didn’t truly know what it was going to be like.  However, like many other women in her situation, she went, not knowing what was waiting for her until she got there.