Film

Both culturally specific and achingly universal, Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers contemplates the ravages of time and distance—physical, emotional and cultural—on a parent-child relationship. Mr. Shi (Henry O), a retired Chinese widower, comes to visit daughter Yilan (Yu) in the U.S. following her recent divorce, only to find that she has no time for him. Left to his own devices during the days, Shi rummages through his daughter’s things, seeking clues to her new self, and strikes up a friendship with a Farsi-speaking neighbor (Ghahremani) who turns out to have family issues of her own.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers plays up the contrast between the old man’s active curiosity and his daughter’s passionless life-on-autopilot, reflected in the spare, impersonal decor of her apartment (which Shi promptly spruces up with a Chinese door hanging). When the inevitable father-daughter showdown arrives, China’s Cultural Revolution emerges as a vanishing point for the characters’ emotional inhibitions, but Wang’s film doubles as a commentary on the emptiness of the West. Far from struggling with the classic immigrant-story dilemma of assimilation, Yilan, at least until her father’s reappearance, seems to have left China behind entirely; in a sense, the spiritual aridity of her life is a sign of how thoroughly Westernized she already is.