Saving Face

When 48-year-old widow Hwei-Lan Gao (Joan Chen) informs her less-than understanding father she’s pregnant, he banishes her from Flushing until she remarries or proves Immaculate Conception. With nowhere else to go, Hwei-Lan moves in with her grown daughter, Wil (Michelle Krusiec), a Manhattan doctor who isn’t thrilled about rooming with her mom. So Wil does what any dutiful child with an expectant, unmarried mother on her hands would do: she proceeds to set Hwei-Lan up with every eligible bachelor in town—while delicately negotiating her own budding relationship with Vivian (Lynn Chen), a dancer. Released in 2004, Alice Wu’s Saving Face was the first Hollywood film to focus on Chinese-American life since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club.