Joy Ride Movie Review

Alright, this is my first time writing a movie review, so you’re going to have to bare with me if I do a bad job at it.

I’ll start with my general overall impression, that this definitely…um…doesn’t seem like a movie that really tried to appeal to an Asian audience at all. It seems a very typical R-rated white movie that’s raunchy, but just safe enough that white people can enjoy it. The Asianness seems just like a tacked on exotic factor. I feel like the plot of the movie can more or less stay exactly the same if it had been about a group of white friends searching for one member’s birth parents in, like, Poland or something. In fact, it might even make a lot more sense?

I can tell that a small, small, small portion of this movie was based on a true story. I don’t know if the Korean girl who was raised Chinese by uneducated white parents was just an internet meme or if it actually happened in real life, but I remember hearing about something like that. I also definitely know that a couple of years back, a Chinese girl who had been adopted by Canadian parents came searching for her birth parents in China, and it got on the news as a feel good family values kind of story and raised a lot of controversy in China.

And the unanimous mainstream opinion was that she was an idiotic, ungrateful bitch for wanting to find her birth mother, because she had abandoned her. She didn’t want her. She probably didn’t want her because of sexism. Even if she had kept her, she would’ve exploited her for a brother. It was her adoptive parents who invested in her, who raised her, who put her through school and supported her through her career. And a lot of people were genuinely mad that despite having unimaginably great parents, she still didn’t feel like it was enough and wanted to find her birth parents.

I remember a lot of people being all like, “Just imagining putting my heart and soul into raising a kid, just for them to be more interested in some stranger they’ve never met who squeezed them out two decades ago makes my liver hurt.”

And I get it. I get it a lot. I remember the first hug I ever got in my life. I was hospitalised for 2 weeks when I was 8 years old, super sick with something, missing the first week of Second Grade as a result. When I finally got better and got out of the hospital and showed up at school, my English teacher gave me a hug and said she was happy to see me. For years afterwards, remembering that would make me cry, because it was the only bit of positive human physical contact I’d had in my life. My sister is going through the same thing. She was so touch-starved that when I held her cheek in my hands, she burst into tears.

I hung out with a completely western friend at her place for the first time around high school, and her dad came into her room at some point to ask what she wanted for dinner. And when he left, he casually said, “Okay, love you.” And I remember that to this day, because my parents had never, ever said “love you” to me even once up to that point. I didn’t say anything at the time, but I remember thinking that I would literally kill to have parents who loved me. I was so jealous, it physically hurt. For a split second, I genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, hated her. Because she had parents who fucking loved her, and she thought it was embarrassing and cringey.

I can’t imagine being lucky enough to be adopted by parents who casually say that they love me. I think a lot of Chinese people feel the same way as me—they’d kill for the opportunity. So it’s particularly disgusting then for someone who was already that fortunate to still want more. To still care about their birth parents. To think what they already had wasn’t enough.

Sure, Chinese people believe that dragons birth dragons, and phoenixes birth phoenixes, and the children of rats know how to dig holes. But they also believe that the people who raised you are more important than the people who birthed you. 养恩大于生恩，生而不养则无恩. If someone birthed you and never raised you, you owe them nothing.

So the business man who have never asked to see her birth parent to begin with. He would only care what kind of people her adoptive parents were.

The movie also seems entirely unaware just how much of a Serious Business drugs are in China. The cops let them go because he, “didn’t want to search buttholes”??? A webnovel I read in China once put it very succinctly when it said, “In China, we treat people who do marijuana like America treat paedophiles. And we treat paedophiles like America treats people who do marijuana.” If he managed to confiscate that amount of drugs, he would be eligible for at least a Second Rank Honour (二等功), if not First Rank. What does that mean? It means you go from making 16K a year working on the most dangerous front lines of duty to being taken care of for the rest of your life by the government. Your children will get to add a straight up 10 points to their high school exam. Search six buttholes?? There are people who will fight each other for the opportunity to search six thousand buttholes to find that amount of drugs.

This sort of, “Ahhh, I’m not paid enough for this shit,” when it comes to drugs is such a western attitude. It’s almost as strange to watch for me, as it is to see a movie where (trigger warning here: grotesque comparison coming up) a guy shows up stabbed to death in the bathroom of the train, and the police find a train car with someone wearing a blood-splattered shirt, and just being like, “But I don’t wanna run DNA though~ Let’s just kick them off the train. Problem solved.” It’s…so weird.

Not that any of this would’ve happened if they were actually in China, because trains in China have just as strict of a TSA as planes. You have to run all of your luggage through an X-ray machine. How did she even bring that many packets of drugs onto the train to begin with? There are plenty of stories of people getting tackled at the train station by cops for bringing pre-portioned baggies of baby formula onto the train, because they have a baby.

The whole concept of a super empty rural airport with one run way, one plane, and one customs agent is also a very, very western thing. The wealth gap in China is big enough that rural people can’t even afford to get passports, and may very well be too illiterate to try to apply for them, so there’s no need for rural airports to exist. You just fly to a major city’s airport, and then drive.

Speaking of, the aesthetics of the whole movie is incredibly western too. I’m not surprised at all to find that the whole thing is filmed in Vancouver. Just the night club scene in Beijing is all wrong. I happen to have sat in on a couple of business deals in China, and from what I can tell, business deals are not talked about in night clubs, for the obvious reason that they’re kind of….loud. If you’ve ever been to a nightclub before, you know how much you have to scream to be heard. And the very basics of politeness in China, when it comes to any kind of social event, is you have to treat people to food. The two combined means every business deal I’ve ever heard of has been discussed and nailed at a restaurant table.

The nightclub is where you go to celebrate your partnership and mutual success afterwards. And if he’s really so important and the order is so big to warrant this much effort and attention, then he would have a private room in the night club to party at, not mixing in the common area with peasants :P And instead of drinking games, there would be whores. Going whoring together is the primary way businessmen bond with each other.

As soon as the protagonists go into the countryside, it’s even more obvious. It’s sort of like how my husband claims he can tell what state in America random photos of the countryside were taken in, just by looking at the type of vegetation and the way the highways are built. It was obvious to me at first glance that that is a western countryside. There’s too much random fields where people are just growing hay as the lowest effort farm that exists. I have never seen such a thing in China, and I have seen a LOT of Chinese countryside. There’s 1.4 billion people there—even in the most backwaters of backwaters, there is an unimaginable amount of population density for westerners. Towns may be 27 kilometres apart, sure, I buy that. But where I grew up in the rural countryside, you could reach small rural villages every 40 minutes of walking at a brisk pace on flat land, and every 3-4 hours of walking at a brisk pace in hilly areas. These villages may only have five to ten families, but every inch of the countryside is being farmed. And Chinese farms look extremely obvious and unique compared to western farms, because big agricultural companies haven’t really gotten around to monopolising the industry yet. So you see very small pockets of farms everywhere, where the crops are spaced very widely apart, because people still lack farming machinery and are doing everything by hand, so they need to leave enough space for human beings to work. And because they’re doing everything by hand, there’s almost always someone actually in the field itself.

Even in the countryside, you’d only be able to walk for hours without encountering another human being if it’s 2AM, not 2PM.

Also, I think, out of all my years of living in China, I can count on one hand the number of times the smog has been light enough that I can actually see all the way to the distant mountains on the horizon. The sky is too blue in this movie. The air too clear. Even in the rural countryside, the smog in my hometown is bad enough that I can stare directly at the sun with my naked eye at 11AM on most days, and not even get spots in my vision. It’s literally just a dull white orb in the sky, like looking at a matte light bulb.

The characterisation of the entire main cast is extremely western too. For Audrey, at least they lampshaded it, since she was, you know, raised by white people. And I buy it. It’s a lot weirder when it comes to Lolo. But fine, I’ll accept it. Maybe despite otherwise seeming pretty traditionally Chinese, her parents are actually highly westernised, and are totally willing to put up with her flipping people off as a young girl and not beat the shit out of her. Maybe they put up with her being an artist because they’re one of the rare Chinese people actually capable of love (just kidding).

But what the hell is up with Kat’s characterisation??

This is a girl who’s supposedly born in China, raised in China, works in China, and you couldn’t really tell she’s any different from any other members of the cast, can you? And more importantly, she’s an actress?? Unless she’s the sort of billionaire wealthy enough to throw money at a doomed TV show just for the chance of hanging out with the celebrities of her dreams and make them act like they’re in love with her, I have a hard time believing that someone with her looks and her figure could actually find work in the Chinese film industry to act in fluffy romance shows. This is a country that tells actresses who are only 40kg that they need to eat less. This is a country that call girls who look like this ugly and fat.

And China is a lot more puritanical than America. I don’t think you realise how much internet bullying actresses face for inviting friends over to her house to celebrate her birthday, and then happening to allow a male friend of hers to wipe a bit of cake frosting off on her face. I don’t think you realise how much even normal Chinese people who aren’t celebrities do not do public displays of affection. I literally got made fun of by everyone I knew in China when I went back with my husband, and while waiting for the elevator at a shopping mall, bored, I leaned over and kissed him for a split second, just because I did it in front of a crowd of people waiting for the elevator. I remember a couple of years back, they ran a promotion in Beijing for movie theatres, where you’d get free tickets for Valentine’s Day if you kissed with your girlfriend for 30 seconds in the lobby, and they could not get a single couple to do it. Not a single one.

She doesn’t have to wait until her pussy tattoo was revealed to lose her career. Just kissing her boyfriend at the movie set would be enough. Not just because people aren’t okay with PDA, but because people aren’t okay with celebrities actually dating each other. It is a huge blow to any celebrity’s career to publicly start dating, much less get married and have kids. There are rappers! Rappers, I’m serious! in China who’ve almost lost their careers because they were exposed by the paparazzi for having premarital sex!!

It’s not just that people are fans of you because they fantasise about being your girlfriend/boyfriend, and they hate having that fantasy dashed. It’s also because China’s much more obsessed about virginity. And it applies equally to women and to men. If you’re writing romances in China, you have to put a trigger warning before your story if either of the protagonists have even had a vague crush on someone other than each other before in their life. As soon as people suspect you may not be a virgin anymore, they don’t even want to fantasise about dating you, because why would you date somebody who’s okay sleeping with just anybody?

For how much they pushed the weird, stiff Aesop about how Asians face weird fetishisation at the beginning of the movie, the whole plot just made me feel like this was a movie that’s based on the weird fetishisation of Asians, and that’s super uncomfortable to watch.

Also, I accept that this is obviously primarily a movie aimed towards white people, and therefore they’re obviously going to create a cast of Chinese people who are suspiciously good at speaking English. I get it, really. But did you really have to make a poor rural Chinese grandma speak perfect English too?

Lastly, I sometimes joke about being racist towards Koreans, but honestly, the older generation of Chinese people aren’t that racist towards Koreans at all. And although a lot of them are much more hostile towards Japanese people, I don’t think they would hate an adopted girl who’s never even been to Japan for happening to have Japanese blood in her, much less Korean blood. I don’t think the kindly Chinese grandma would demand her qipao back just because she found out Audrey was of Korean-descent instead. China really doesn’t have much of a problem against Koreans, except that they culturally appropriate a lot from China, and the older generation who isn’t on the internet all the time wouldn’t even know about that. It’s mostly the young, internet literate generation that’s pissy about it.

I know this is a rambling review, like I said, it’s my first time. And obviously, I can’t comment on the Korean section. I don’t know anything about Korea. I’ve never been (although I do actually really want to go).

I’ll just finish up by saying that, uh, is it just me? Because I don’t think Audrey did literally anything wrong. I’m totally on her side—Lolo way overstepped her boundaries just deciding to look for her birth mom without her. What if she hadn’t been lucky, and her birth mom’s parents weren’t mental patients who somehow thought it was a good idea to have their daughter deliver a baby in a country that performs C-sections without anaesthesia? Lolo has Chinese parents herself. She has a large rural extended family. I don’t believe she doesn’t know a single case of a female baby thrown into the river, abandoned out in the middle of winter. I don’t believe she doesn’t know a single girl in her village who’d been hastily married off at 15 so her brother can afford a house. I don’t believe she doesn’t know women in her life who’ve never eaten at the dinner table, because their place is eating on a little stool in the kitchen.

Why would she think it was a good idea to look for this birth parent? Best case scenario, she just has no interest in getting to know Audrey. But what if she’d given Audrey up because she wanted a boy, and needed to lie that she hadn’t broken the one child policy? What if now, her son is all grown up and needing money to get a wife? What if her only interest in Audrey then is exploiting her for her money? That seems a much more likely scenario for a perfectly healthy baby girl to be given up for adoption, than that she’d sincerely loved her and couldn’t help it for some reason. After all, this is the reason the Chinese internet was so mad at the Canadian girl for wanting to find her birth parents. Because there are so, so, so, so few families who wouldn’t sacrifice a girl to have a son.

And yeah, she should be grateful to have a friend who’s willing to let her live in their garage for free while she works on art. She probably should actually have a job and support herself while she’s building a career in art. I don’t see how any of that is an unreasonable demand, from my personal point of view. I don’t see at all how Audrey’s meant to be a selfish, bad friend?? She’s even right about Kat. Kat was the one who made the choice to tattoo her vagina. Kat was the one who lied to her boyfriend. Kat ruined her own life. Audrey was completely innocent in having her career torpedo’d in that incident too. Of course she has a right to be angry. Right?

And finally finally (I swear it’s actually finally this time), the part of the movie that made me say out loud, “that’s so true”, is the airport scene, where Lolo points out you can easily identify who’s from Hong Kong, who’s from Shanghai, who’s from Taiwan, just by how they dress and act. And it’s true. Audrey (and also Kat) are so obviously from America it’s painful. It’s the way she applies her makeup. It’s the way Americans always does Asian make up. There’s a weird emphasis on the cheekbones that’s very unique to Hollywood. It works for western celebrities—they do in fact look good in it. But it couldn’t be further from the Chinese standard of beauty.

Here’s a comparison of western standards of beauty versus China’s

You can tell the difference here: China is much more about an almost anime-like look. Large, strongly emphasised eyes, weaker, fainter brow, baby cheeks that are very rounded. The emphasis is much more strongly on looking “child-like” and delicate.

For example, the example I posted before is the best example of natural beauty, but here’s the most successful example of plastic surgery in China. The best purposely designed face for beauty:

Here’s a more obvious comparison of the same famous person [Olympic skier], and how Hollywood makeup artists pretty her up, versus how Chinese makeup artists pretty her up. You can see how much America way over-emphasises her cheekbones and exaggerates her brow, and gives her an extra slant to her eyes that doesn’t actually naturally exist.

This tendency is why China’s always been suspicious of Hollywood for being secretly (not so secretly??) racist against Chinese people, because they apply make up to make all Chinese actresses there look like Asian caricatures with slanty eyes and high cheekbones. But I think they’re just putting the same make up they put on western actresses on Chinese people, and it looks weird because they have very different bone structures.

They put plenty of contouring beneath the cheekbones and exaggerated brow and eye make up on western actresses too. It just looks better on them, because that’s the skeletal structure that style of make up was meant to compliment. And I guess Hollywood make up artists haven’t figured out what to do with Asians yet, so they’re just using the old routine.

And in this movie, Audrey has such obviously western makeup, I would be able to tell at a glance she’s ABC too—the kind so immersed in American culture I definitely wouldn’t expect her to be able to speak Chinese.

Aright, sorry for rambling so much. I hope you enjoyed the review. If there are other movies you’re interested in my thoughts on, I’m more than happy to do more of these in the future :)