THE BIG MIX : Chinese Videos Reinforce Culture

Don’t let the video-jammed racks and posters of ravishing Asian starlets fool you. A Chinese-American video rental shop is a lot like the communal well of a traditional Chinese village.

The only difference is that the Southland’s rapidly growing Chinese community gets its juicy stories told on magnetized tape instead of by word of mouth. Still, customers, shop owners and distributors agree, these videos from home reinforce Chinese language and culture with a wide array of choices, including Hong Kong detective thrillers, Mandarin-subtitled Japanese soaps and Tai Chi Chuan exercise videos.

Just how many Chinese video shops are there in Southern California? It’s hard to figure.

Helen Soo, manager of San Francisco-based Hong Kong Video Programs Inc., a distributor of Hong Kong-produced TV shows and movies, said her company supplies 20 licensed distributors in Los Angeles who handle Cantonese-language movies and serials. International Audio Visual Communication Inc., distributor for Taiwan’s three commercial television stations, supplies Mandarin-language videos, mostly TV serials, to 25 licensed shops in the Los Angeles area.

However, Soo said, there are also an indeterminate number of video shops, many of them Vietnamese-operated, which exist by pirating videos.

S. C. Dacy, an independent film producer and avid Chinese movie fan, has a simple way of evaluating Chinese videos--he lumps them into two piles: the “lousy” majority of TV soaps and the superior, action-packed, kung-fu feature films produced in Hong Kong.

“From the perspective of world cinema, they (Hong Kong movie producers) are per capita the best action movie-makers on the planet,” he said about a genre of detective-martial arts thrillers where the operative concept is dangerously realistic stunts.

“In ‘A Better Tomorrow II,’ they have Chou Yun Fat--a combination Chinese Eddie Murphy and Tom Cruise--walk out a house as they blow it up three feet behind him,” Dacy said. “Their stars are stunt men. If the Chinese want to see a bunch of overpaid stars fake it, they can see American films.”

After their near extinction during the early ‘70s, Hong Kong-made features made a meteoric comeback in the ‘80s and are once again dominant with movies such as “A Better Tomorrow” being dubbed into Mandarin, Cantonese and other Asian languages.

But when it comes to sheer heart-rending delight, Ramona Bee, a mortgage banker from Arcadia, said nothing matches the Mandarin-language soaps produced in Taiwan. In fact, the 40-year-old Taiwan native is so addicted that she will sit through 20 hour-and-half-long episodes in a five-day span each time the latest soap comes to town.

Nor can Hollywood soaps such as “Dynasty” replace her Taiwan-made favorites. “The American soaps are all about sex or drugs and power struggles,” Bee said. By contrast, she said, Taiwanese soaps are more sentimental and preoccupied with Chinese family values and situations. They remind Bee of home and childhood because they’re based on pulp novels she read while growing up as a girl in Taiwan.

“It’s a Misty Future” is the quintessential Chinese soap, she said. It features a Cinderella-like young wife who must stand up to a duplicitous mother-in-law.

“The girl is from a poor family and she marries into a rich family. But the mother-in-law can’t stand the girl. She has one face when the son is around and another when he’s gone. So finally, the girl leaves her daughter behind and her husband goes blind.

“Then she comes back 10 years later as a private tutor. But (her blind husband) can tell from the voice that it’s her, but she denies it. Finally, it has a happy ending. They are so melodramatic. I cry and everything.”

Comedic ghost movies are another Hong Kong staple. But in contrast to kung-fu fare, films such as “Rouge”--a 1987 feature about a stage-struck prostitute who comes back to haunt two jaded Hong Kong journalists--are deeply rooted in China’s ancient Taoist belief in an ancestral spirit world. This fascination in the afterlife can have some hilarious twists. For example, in one recent movie, Dacy said, the protagonist prevents a ghost from reincarnating by hanging woman’s undergarments over the specter’s head.

Some stores, such as Paul Chang’s Video Land in Monterey Park, offer pornographic videos produced in the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong that appeal to non-Asian customers.

“I think it’s curiosity,” Chang said of his non-Asian customers. “They think the Asian woman is different. Everybody is curious of the other person’s back yard. It’s human nature.”