FEI FAT YI MAN/ THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT

China, 1985, 98 minutes, Colour.
Yung -Cho Ching, Fu -Sheng Wu.
Directed by Mabel Cheung, Wanting Zhang.

The Illegal Immigrant was popular in its time, in the middle of the 1980s, the time of Ronald Reagan as US president. As regards China, this was pre-Tiananmen Square. As regards Hong Kong, this was more than a decade before the British handover to China.

On the one hand, there are some serious tones to this story, a focus on the illegal Chinese immigrants in New York City, their hard work in the factories, the concealment of their identities, the difficulties in staying, finding accommodation, continuing in work. There is also a subplot about gangs and their pressures on the Chinese.

On the other hand, the tone of the film is rather comic, in the establishment of the central character, his arrival in the US, the payments made for his immigration, the difficulties in repaying the debt and the pressures of the gangster moneylenders. However, people come up with the bright idea of his getting married, getting a green card. The various approaches to the young woman, the touch of her being haughty, final agreement to go through with the ceremony, but the couple not living together.

Needless to say, the American officials are suspicious, come to visit, there are comic touches in cover-up, desperate communications so that the appearance of marriage is upheld.

With the solution to the financial situation, and the couple getting to know each other and moving towards marriage, the film comes to a happy ending.

Several years later, Peter Weir’s The Green Card, with Gerard Depardieu as the French migrant needing to marry to get his card and stay in the United States, world audiences became more familiar with this basic scenario.