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A family meal in Hao Wu’s documentary All in My Family. Photo: Handout

China’s resistance to gay relationships and surrogate births, seen through a filmmaker’s own family

  • The documentarian Hao Wu tells a very personal story in All in My Family
  • ‘I wanted to show the challenges for gay people of Chinese descent, what kind of generational barriers they have to negotiate,’ he says

Chinese documentarian Hao Wu’s latest film, All in My Family, focuses on Chinese family tradition, social expectations, gay relationships and children born using surrogacy through an extremely personal lens.

The 40-minute film – Wu’s fourth and set for release on streaming service Netflix this Friday – was shot over a series of Lunar New Year holidays on periodic trips back to Chengdu from New York, where he settled 20 years ago.

Filmmaker Hao Wu has directed a very personal documentary, All in My Family. Photo: PRPP

As the film develops, we watch him anguish and strategise over when and how to tell his grandfather that he’s gay, married to his Chinese-American husband Eric and has two children, a boy and a girl born through surrogacy.

“I wanted to show the challenges for gay people of Chinese descent, what kind of cultural and generational barriers and differences they have to negotiate in order to build a family of their own,” Wu said.

This is the first time Wu has turned the camera on himself and the view is close and intimate. He uses a handheld camera, editing and special effects are limited, and many of the scenes are raw.

This stands in sharp contrast to his 2018 critically acclaimed People’s Republic of Desire, a slick, dystopian, special-effects-laden documentary about social media in China.

Despite its focus on lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) identity and related family issues, this endearing film captures many of the issues, trade-offs and emotions faced by families everywhere.

Wu’s narration is alternately honest, pained, ironic and reflective as he fills us in on which family members are allies, his mixed feelings about traditions surrounding the Lunar New Year and his long struggle with his demanding and cleaning-preoccupied mother.

Wu said he saw the film as an opportunity to move the conversation beyond The Wedding Banquet, Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s 1993 feature about a ritual marriage between a gay landlord and a female tenant, by tackling seldom-discussed gay surrogacy and its challenge to Chinese tradition.

A starring, if unseen, character is the extremely rapid social change that Chinese society has weathered – arguably among the most accelerated in human history – as we watch Wu’s parents and grandparents struggle to understand their Westernised adult son, his choices and values.

Being gay, in a same-sex marriage and having kids through surrogacy even a decade ago was unimaginable to many older Chinese, who are now confronted with globally minded Generation Xers and millennials.

Wu’s quest for approval and acceptance from his grandfather, who pressures him to produce an heir, highlights China’s deep patriarchal roots. “You must bring back a wife for my birthday, not a girlfriend,” his grandfather tells his only grandson part way through the film.

At one point Wu tells us that what he hated most about the new-year family gatherings growing up were such “traditional Chinese values” as saving face, respecting elders, parental control and the lies and pretences used to avoid sensitive issues.

Some of the strongest footage in All in My Family is of his headstrong, extremely direct mother reflecting on her son’s homosexuality. “I never imagined my son would change into that,” she admits at one point, tears in her eyes. “I couldn’t accept it. Very painful.” This only redoubles Wu’s determination to live the way he wants.

Hao Wu’s mother and father in All in My Family. Photo: Handout

Family members grapple with whether to tell 92-year-old grandpa that Wu is gay – and how to explain these grandchildren who suddenly appear without a woman in the picture.

Wu enlists other relatives’ advice on crafting evasive answers to him and neighbours: say their mother is dead, or an illegal immigrant, or too busy in America to come. His mother scoffs at the suggestion they tell the truth. “No way, absolutely not in China,” she says.

The narrator concludes that there’s no single right answer when navigating the continuum between family harmony and being true to yourself.

“When you are young, the truth is more important than anything else,” Wu says. Only later do you realise that people’s feelings are equally important, he adds, “as long as I don’t have to live in a lie”.

The point is sound and a good one to end on, though the rather sudden way it lands can feel a bit at odds with the rest of the film’s gentler pacing.

While All in My Family remains studiously subjective, it draws fuel from the broader social context, including China’s legal, moral and social environment surrounding LGBT issues as Beijing further tightens its grip on gender and various related social-rights groups.

A poster image for Hao Wu's documentary, All in My Family. Photo: Handout

Wu concedes that his film is likely to draw criticism from gay activists who believe the entire LGBT community should come out to everyone in order to broaden awareness. “That’s definitely going to happen,” Wu said. “I understand where those people are coming from. But come on, we are a big community. We shouldn’t have everyone think in one particular way.”

Social acceptance of homosexuality has been slow in China despite the nation’s long history. Written references to homosexuality date back to the Shang dynasty (circa 1600-1050 BC) some 3,000 years ago, with same-sex relationships considered relatively normal, until around 1840 when China increased contact with the then-prudish West, according to historian Bret Hinsch with Taiwan’s Fo Guang University, although other scholars dispute this.

Disapproval started to soften in the 1980s, homosexuality was decriminalised in 1997 and it stopped being classified as a mental disorder in 2001, according to Equaldex, a website for data on global LGBT rights. And a Taiwanese draft law in February to make same-sex marriage legal following a 2017 Taiwan constitutional court ruling has fuelled a quiet debate in mainland China.

As the film illustrates, however, traditional opposition runs deep.

Christene Anthony, a caseworker at the Centre for Surrogate Parenting, an agency based in Encino, California, says that Hong Kong and Taiwan are far more accepting of homosexuality and same-sex surrogacy than much of China given their greater exposure and different social norms.

“It just takes a whole lot more to feel comfortable with this on the mainland,” she added.

That said, China’s megacities are often far ahead of its rural areas. Adam, a married father with two infants born through surrogacy, said his parents quickly embraced his same-sex marriage and decision to have children, in part because they’re from Shanghai.

“It’s less about what you know than where you live,” he said. “There’s much more peer pressure in the village.”

Adam, who declined to use his Chinese name since he hasn’t come out at work, said All in My Family had little chance of being distributed officially in China given the government’s de facto policy against gay-themed films. But he expects it to be widely viewed through unofficial channels, bolstering support for LGBT issues in China.

“From the government perspective, I don’t expect anything to change,” he said. “But in terms of knowledge gained by ordinary people, this will be powerful.”

Overseas surrogacy agencies report a sharp rise in LGBT clients from China. Men Having Babies, a US-based advocacy and surrogacy-support group, recently chose Taipei over the mainland for its first Asia conference given in part Beijing’s restrictions on meetings and internet postings, says Ron Poole-Dayan, the organisation’s executive director.

The lack of accurate, unbiased information on foreign surrogacy in China had contributed to abuses among surrogacy agencies, including dodgy financial dealings, client-poaching and a view that surrogate mothers were little more than “wombs for rent”, he said.

“We think the ability of couples to communicate with surrogates, even if on WeChat, is essential for surrogacy to be ethical and sustainable,” Poole-Dayan said. “Sometimes it can be very transactional.”

Wu said he hoped the film would spark a debate, particularly among the Chinese-American and Asian diaspora’s gay communities.

“Especially coming to be a father myself, I understand how much love and energy and time my parents have invested in me,” he said. “At the end of the day, families are strong, as long as they can accept their differences.”

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