In 19th-century China, seven year old girls Snow Flower and Lily are matched as laotong – or “old sames” – bound together for eternity. Isolated by their families, they furtively communicate by taking turns writing in a secret language, nu shu, between the folds of a white silk fan. In a parallel story in present day Shanghai, the laotong’s descendants, Nina and Sophia, struggle to maintain the intimacy of their own childhood friendship in the face of demanding careers, complicated love lives, and a relentlessly evolving Shanghai. Drawing on the lessons of the past, the two modern women must understand the story of their ancestral connection, hidden from them in the folds of the antique white silk fan, or risk losing one another forever. What unfolds are two stories, generations apart, but everlasting in their universal notion of love, hope and friendship. (Source)
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Inspired by the bestselling novel SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN by Lisa See, the film is a timeless portrait of female friendship. In 19th-century China, seven-year-old girls Snow Flower and Lily are matched as laotong – or “old sames” – bound together for eternity. Isolated by their families, they furtively communicate by taking turns writing in a secret language, nu shu, between the folds of a white silk fan. In a parallel story in present day Shanghai, the laotong’s descendants, Nina and Sophia, struggle to maintain the intimacy of their own childhood friendship in the face of demanding careers, complicated love lives, and a relentlessly evolving Shanghai. Drawing on the lessons of the past, the two modern women must understand the story of their ancestral connection, hidden from them in the folds of the antique white silk fan, or risk losing one another forever. What unfolds are two stories, generations apart, but everlasting in their universal notion of love, hope and friendship. (
Mr. Shi is a retired widower from Beijing. When his daughter Yilan, who lives in the US, divorces, he decides to visit her in the small town where she works as a librarian. His intention is to stay with her until he helps her recover from the trauma. Mr. Shi likes to tell the people he meets in America that he’s a “rocket scientist,” enjoying their attention. But Yilan is less enthusiastic about his showing off, nor is she interested in his plan to rescue her marriage and reconstruct her life. When Mr. Shi insists on finding out the reason for the divorce, Yilan starts to avoid him. (
In A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS, elderly Mr. Shi (Henry O) arrives from China to spend time with his divorced daughter, Yilan (Faye Yu), hoping to help her sort out her life in this strange new country. That, after all, is his duty as a parent. Yilan, although polite, doesn’t feel like being the dutiful daughter. Unlike Geraldine in DIM SUM, Yilan can’t wait to be rid of her parent, whose need to pry into and control her like becomes a nuisance – even if he does lovingly cook up multi-course meals for her at the end of the workday. Where sharing meals served as familial and cultural bonding in DIM SUM, it is seen as an intrusion for Yilan, who longs to have her own private life back again. Despite going through Yilan’s things while she’s at work and trying to pry information from her, Mr. Shi cannot understand his daughter or the rift between them. The only person he shares some connection with in this cold new universe is Madam (Vida Ghahremani), an elderly but vivacious Iranian woman living with her son and his family. They begin to meet regularly on a local park bench. Without a common language, they resort to expressing themselves to one another in a mix of their respective languages and broken English. While they seem to communicate with each other easily, Mr. Shi and his daughter find themselves at an impasse. The problem is generational and geographical; it is also in the language, as one day Yilan reveals to her father that expressing herself in English is far easier than in Chinese. There is wry humor in Mr. Shi trying to understand his daughter, as well as this country she has adopted as her own. There is also a sense of seeking clues to a mystery. As Wang explains, “I wanted it to be a mystery that Shi comes to solve. Arriving in a strange land to visit a strange daughter he hasn’t seen in many years, Shi begins to peel back the layers of the life like he takes apart the Russian nesting dolls on her dressing table.” (