"Dim Sum' offers a tasty slice of life

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"Dim Sum" is a soft, gentle film depicting the gay-to-day activities of a San Francisco Chinese family and, in particular, the close relationship between mother and daughter.

Laureen Chew, an assistant professor at San Francisco State University, plays Geraldine, the daughter. Her mother, With this issue we introduce Steve Zippin's new column on health, medical, and environmental topics, which will appear regularly in Socialist Action.

Ds. 2 Mrs. Tam, is played by her real-life mother, Kim Chew.

Dim Sum is the name of a tasty Chinese luncheon treat and, literally translated, means "a little bit of heart."

Reviews for "Dim Sum" have been overwhelmingly favorable and rightly so. In the film, the Chews need only play slightly altered versions of themselves: a firmly unassimilated Chinese Hazardous to your health immigrant who still speaks virtually no English even after 40 years in the United States and her modern, vivacious, daughter.

Mrs. Tam has lived the quiet existence typical of many Chinese immigrants but especially Chinese women. Isolated by language and culture and alienated by American ways, they surround themselves with family and draw their entire identity from them.

Geraldine's decision to live at home with her widowed mother is based on her own needs and fears as well as her guilt feelings about abandoning her mother. While Mrs. Tam urges her daughter to move out and marry her boyfriend, she also needs her daughter's company and, in fact, finds no other reason for living. Geraldine insists she's just not ready for marriage.

Through these two women, "Dim Sum" brings us the simultaneous blending and fading of cultural traditions.

Director Wayne Wang acknowledges that there is a "bad side to Chinatown" and that recent films such as "Year of the Dragon, "Rambo,, and "Missing in Action" only serve to reinforce the image of Asians as sneaky and evil. He has expressed the hope that "Dim Sum" will be a sort of "antidote" to such films.

Indeed, "Dim Sum" is refreshing in that it shows Asian-Americans interacting with each other, sharing many of the same doubts and fears and joys that most people in this country know. And I think that for many Chinese-American viewers, "Dim Sum's" faces and voices bring back memories like no other film today can.

But as a response to the anti-Asian films it falls short because it does not adequately deal with the darker side of Asian-American life.

For many Asians, life in the United States is unfortunately not as smooth and harmonious as is shown in "Dim Sum."

The violent attacks on innocent families, the brutal murder several years ago of Vincent Chin in Detroit are but a few of the growing number of racist actions taken against Asians in this country.

A film like "Missing in Action" serves only to justify these attacks in the minds of many people.

Showing Asians as warm, family-oriented people only partially addresses this issue. At some point a film will have to be made that combines the wonderful qualities of "Dim Sum" with some sharper rebuttals to the regime that encourages and perpetuates the production of racist propaganda.

Nevertheless, "Dim Sum" is a movie not to be missed. The characters are genuine and sincere, and the film possesses such warm, touching qualities that "Dim Sum" is truly "a little bit of heart."

pushed to doubt their own abilities. Only the established experts are qualified to think and act.

We all make thousands of complex decisions every day during the course of our work and lives, but we are told that