Part cultural epic, part soap opera, from the Amy Tan best-seller on Chinese-American family life. There are a couple of sizable stumbling blocks in the movie. The first is the voluminous, overinstructive, bookish narration ("Only the most dutiful daughter would put her own flesh in a soup to save her mother") that tethers the project to its original source. It is not quite a free-standing movie. Second is the complex, spokelike narrative that fans out from the central hub of a bon-voyage party in present-day San Francisco, with no less than four separate storylines (and further divisions possible within these), flashbacks into vastly different time-periods, different actors occupying the same role in different periods, a rotating team of narrators, and so on. It is not quite a cohesive movie either. But these difficulties are greatly diminished by the passionateness of the players (Rosalind Chao, Lauren Tom, Tamlyn Tomita, Ming-Na Wen, Lisa Lu, France Nuyen, Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin: impossible to separate and prioritize a beautifully harmonious ensemble) and by the powerfulness of the material: mother-daughter stuff, for the most part, with generational differences explained, similarities discovered, wounds inflicted ("I wish I wasn't your daughter and I wish you weren't my mother") and wounds mended. The menfolk, in the accepted soap-opera tradition, are given shorter shrift, but are deftly, caricaturistically sketched: the penny-pinching Chinese-American yuppie ("Honey, isn't there a generic brand of catfood?"); the cross-culturally blundering Anglo fiancé ("You know, Linda, all this needs is a little soy sauce"); the blubbery adolescent husband, in an Old World arranged marriage, with a beetle-sized mole, sprouting a wiry hair, on his back; others. The largeness of scope, both in the size of the population and the extent of the time-span, is in the accepted soap-opera tradition, too. Directed by Wayne Wang. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd