Based on a novel, Waylaid, by Ed Lin, The
Motel is written and directed by Michael Kang. It tells a
rather slow-moving but interesting coming-of-age story set in a
sleazy motel, but it’s also a coming-to-America story of immigrant
aspirations and a family drama. It is well worth a look. I was
particularly impressed by the performances of Jeffrey Chyau as
13-year-old Ernest Chin and Jade Wu as his single mother, Ahma, and
the difficult relationship between them. This is made more
difficult by their economic circumstances and the absence of
Ernest’s father, who must have been quick to abandon Chinese family
values in favor of the pursuit of happiness, American-style. Now,
in the motel they own and operate, his family are forced to scrape
a living by catering to other sexual transients at the motel — an
irony that is perhaps not altogether lost upon young Ernest.
“You’re a mean, ugly old lady,” he says to his mother at one point
in the continuing tug-of-war between them, “and you make everybody
go away.”
The idea of putting Ernest’s sexual awakening from childish
innocence against the backdrop of the motel is a fruitful one. His
little sister Katie (Alexis Chang) asks her mother, “How come
people stay at our house?”
“Because they can’t go home.”
“How come they only stay for an hour?”
“They come to take a nap.”
“How come they are so loud when they take a nap?”
Ahma wants something better than the motel for Ernest and
expects him to work hard in school. But he isn’t interested in much
except for writing, and writing seems to her to implicate him too
far in American culture, the dark underside of which she both
profits from and despises. When Ernest wins honorable mention in a
story-writing contest, his mother refuses to let him take part in
the awards ceremony. Honorable mention is worse than losing, she
says, because then everybody knows you lost.
Ernest feels stigmatized because he has to work in the family
business by cleaning motel rooms and manning the front desk when
necessary, but these jobs also put him in touch with new and
exciting realities lurking just beyond his ken in the adult world
of which he lives on the very edge. Finding a porn magazine called
Oriental Women left in one of the rooms, he shares it with
his friend, the slightly older Christine (Samantha Futerman), but
to both of them the magazine is little more than a curiosity.
“That’s disgusting,” says Christine looking at the pictures. “Let’s
check it out.”
Sam (Sung Kang), a young Korean, arrives at the motel for a
brief encounter with a sexy girlfriend but stays on as a
longer-term resident. Sam smokes and drinks and has a fast car and
a cell phone as well as a girlfriend. He represents to fatherless
Ernest the glamorous world of the adult male as it seems to a
13-year-old. Sam is also short of money, and Ernest steals from the
family’s funds in order to support his lie to his mother that Sam
has paid for his room. Meanwhile, in an off-hand sort of way Sam
has begun to take Ernest under his wing and teach him the sort of
cynical and unsavory life-lessons that we might expect from such a
man. “The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life sucks,” says
Sam, combining their common Asian heritage with an unmistakably
American-style popular brutalism. “There comes a time in every
man’s life when he has to make a decision. If he has any
cojones, he will think of himself first.”
This Ernest parrots back to his mother, except that in place of
cojones he says canolis, thus extending the
multicultural range still further.
Sam teaches Ernest how to drive his car and, deciding that it’s
time for Ernest to get laid, suggests that he take Christine out in
it. Ernest tells her he wants to take her to the awards ceremony,
but he pulls over along a deserted road to make a predictably
disastrous sexual advance. “I just want to prove I’m a man,” he
says when she pushes him away.
“You aren’t.”
“Well, I’m trying.”
“Try with someone else.”
At one point Sam remembers his own happy life up until the age
of 12 and wishes he had died then. Gradually Ernest realizes that,
beneath Sam’s manic hedonism and apparent savoir faire there lurks
a pit of despair that makes his own dull and unhappy life at the
motel look like a paradise by comparison. For him and for the
movie, childhood is gone. What lies ahead is as uncertain as ever
— but far more scary. So, not a feel-good movie then. But neither
is it without a certain charm.
