How comedian Stephen Chow’s God of Cookery helped ‘whitewashed’ Hongkonger rediscover her Chinese roots
- ‘It was the humour that really pulled me in’, says Elaine Ip, co-founder of The Week music festival
- The 1996 film introduced Ip to what it meant to be a Hongkonger
The God of Cookery (1996), starring Stephen Chow Sing-chi, was also written and directed by the Hong Kong comedian. Chow plays a corrupt megalomaniac chef who undergoes a journey of self-discovery after being exposed as a fraud. As ever with the director’s work, it is full of surrealism, slapstick, non sequiturs, in-jokes and references to Hong Kong culture. Event organiser Elaine Ip, co-founder of annual Hong Kong live music festival The Week, explains how the film changed her life.
My family moved from Hong Kong to Shanghai when I was two months old and then to Canada when I was two. We moved back to Hong Kong when I was eight. The God of Cookery came out within a year of my coming back.
I had no idea who Stephen Chow was before I saw it – it was my dad who liked him. But I’d always liked comedy – I’m a big fan of stand-up – and it was the humour that pulled me in.
I could speak some Cantonese, but at a terrible level. I went to an English-medium school and most of my friends were expat kids. I was made to take Cantonese lessons and was probably at kindergarten level. I stopped taking the lessons because I hated them.
I don’t know if I’d have learned Cantonese in the same way if I hadn’t become a fan of Chow’s films. I have to give him credit for teaching me some of the more casual Cantonese terms, although most people would probably say he was a bad influence.
The God of Cookery introduced me to what it meant to be a Hongkonger. I was so whitewashed – all my thoughts were shaped by my time in Canada – but the film was one of the few things that drew me back to being Chinese. It’s hard for a third-culture kid to find where they fit in, but Chow’s movies helped me relate to being from Hong Kong.
Chinese culture places a lot of importance on saving face, so it’s a big step to make fun of yourself like Chow does. He didn’t care about making himself look stupid. Everyone thinks he’s a great comedian, but I don’t think he gets enough credit for his storytelling abilities because the content is just so funny.