Eat Drink Man Woman

My penchant for old movies has had me watched many a commercial-free Turner Classic Movie (TMC) features on television. And now, Comcast cable also offers its subscribers free full-length movies on the On Demand channel. Like TMC, many of these free On Demand flicks are from yesteryears. But as Peter Bogdanovich once said, there are no old movies, just movies I haven't seen. Ang Lee's "Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)" was a movie I had not seen until a few evenings ago.

This movie title "Eat Drink Man Woman" reads like a line from Neil Simon's comedy Murder by Death (1974). In this parody of the British cozy mysteries, the character Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) castigated Inspector Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers) for the mangling of the English tongue. Wang was scorned for speaking English without articles, pronouns, and prepositions. The tongue-in-cheek subtext of Twain's irritation with Wang, of course, was Capote himself, an accomplished writer in real life.

Many from non-English speaking countries are learning to speak (and write) the lingua franca trippingly or haltingly the language of Shakespeare. Modern English words such as "hi" and "bye" have already grafted comfortably into the everyday Taiwan-Chinese vocabulary, as evinced in Eat Drink Man Woman . Yet, it is the eloquence of this four-word vernacular which speaks volumes to the immense richness of the Chinese language.

The original movie title comprised of four traditional Chinese calligraphic characters: 飲食男女. The literal and sequential translation of which reads: Drink_Eat_Male_ Female. These elemental word-characters and their meanings are known to every grade schoolers where traditional Chinese calligraphic scripting are taught.

There are no grammatical equivalents for gerunds, transitive, intransitive verbs, or tenses in Chinese. Thus the word-character Drink(ing) or Eat(ing) can be either a noun or a verb, depending on the syntax and context where they are placed along other words in a sentence. When Drink and Eat are paired in tandem (not Eat before Drink as in the subtitle), it became a couplet with further amplification in meaning. With the sum greater than the parts, the two-word phrase transformed to connotate "sustenance" or "to maintain life".

Vis-à-vis the ubiquitous scripting of today's Chinese, as examplified in the screen version of the words, Drink and Eat, the latter two words of the movie title Male and Female were shown as very old calligraphic variants. The significance of this change in scripting was interesting, if intriguing to note. This hieroglphic-like couplet of the "male and female" characters could lend to mean the biological imperatives of mating is as old as time. It is as necessary as eating and drinking.

When these two couplets were further paired as in the movie title, we have the adage "Drink_Eat_Man_Woman". A terse, quintessential statement that says : The circle of life requires sustenance.

In this Taipei family drama, Ang Lee aptly juxtaposed the varying affects of food and love, as it should be, to impart a verisimilar and sumptuous lesson on life.