Saving Face

In Saving Face, the character that undergoes the most change is Ma. She tries very hard to follow in the footsteps of Chinese-American traditions, but her deviation from tradition is the catalyst that sets Wil's story forward. A letter at the end of the film reveals that Ma married her first husband merely to please her father and her community, but later gets pregnant by another man whom she truly loves. When Ma's father finds out, he shames her by blaming her generation (for she is a second-generation Chinese) and says that she should have never left the mainland and come to America. From the beginning, Ma wants to break from Chinese-American tradition (as shown by her fascination with American romantic comedies) but, like her daughter, is afraid to fully separate herself. While she struggles to break free from tradition in her own personal life, she firmly adheres to it when she discovers her daughter is gay. By the end of the film, both Ma and Wil fully embrace Americanism without fear or shame while the traditional males grumble in the background about how the world is going crazy.

Vivian, Wil, and Ma are all trying to follow the "model minority myth" in their own way (whether consciously or unconsciously) by attempting to please their elders. Vivian, for example, is a ballet dancer according to her father's wishes, and suppresses her real desire to embrace modern dance. By moving their character arcs away from the "model minority," the film boldly challenges the stereotype that Asians are hardworking and intelligent. Saving Face is similar to Monji's story "Kim," in that it features a homoerotic female relationship that supports the antiessentialist tenets of Critical Race Theory.  In Monji's story, Kim turns out to be a man, but it does not change the homoerotic status of the relationship, according to the CRT tenet of antiessentialism. While Kim and Vivian both play the male substitute in a homoerotic relationship between two women, they challenge the ideas of masculinity and sexuality purported by traditional Chinese-American culture.