Be There or Be Square

Liu Yuan has been in Los Angeles for years with no steady work, no family, living out of a van, and apparently content with it. Then he meets Li Qing, who came to America with a large dream and an actual plan. Over the years the two of them keep meeting and keep parting; every time, one of them is getting up as the other sits down. It is one of Feng Xiaogang's New Year comedies and among the films that established the form in China. Ge You and Xu Fan became the emblem of it. Emigration is treated not as tragedy but as a matter of everyday incompetence and patience. It is a joke told about what the Chinese generation who went to America at the end of the nineties hoped for and what they found.