confronting diasporic (un)memory / awash in benevolence
by Gabriel Yuan
This review is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative V, a collaborative mentorship incubator between the 27th Reel Asian Film Festival and TACLA.
a memory i carry with me: ten years ago, in front of my grandfather’s grave. early spring in the shandong province of china. gazing into the slab of stone that marked his remains with a sense of detachment and urgency. my grandmother had asked me to bow, but i couldn’t move. i knew that if i did i would be mortified. in the bible, lot’s wife turns into a pillar of salt for looking back. i felt as she did, in the moment; not transformed, but swallowed whole by disobedience.
memory / construction
BENEVOLENCE opens in darkness and resonance. There is only sound, at first — three beats of a Chinese drum, slow and heavy with intention. Following closely are three strikes of a hanging bell, its fullness ringing for a second, suspended.
Kevin Matthew Wong’s documentary premiered at the 2023 Reel Asian Film Festival as part of the Unsung Voices shorts program. It serves as both dissemination and archive of the Tam Kung Temple, the oldest Chinese temple in Canada. Founded by Hakka Chinese immigrants in the 1930s, it stands in Victoria’s Chinatown almost a century past. The documentary follows a group of women who aim to preserve the establishment and broadcast its rich history.
The documentary does not follow a narrative but rather presents a series of vignettes. Interior shots of the Tam Kung Temple and interviews weave together a story about preservation, drawing toward a conclusion inviting the viewers to engage in the temple’s preservation.
BENEVOLENCE lingers upon space and memory, meandering through corridors that drift with the sweet tang of incense. Wong navigates the temple gently and with care — like a hesitant visitor. His camera commits each corridor to memory, lingering to take in the domed skylight or to pan over the banners that adorn the walls. Interspersed throughout the documentary are interviews of three women who serve as board members. Nora, Gayle, and Jackie each play a vital role in the Tam Kung Temple’s leadership and community. For them, the temple holds years of personal and family history.
In the first of many shots of the empty temple, Jackie narrates her memories over a series of interior shots. The late afternoon light only catches one wall, rendering the remainder of the room in warm shadows, as she talks about her spatial memories: the stairwell, incense smoke, and the temple’s sense of mysticality. At the same moment, the LED candles at the altar switch on with a loud click, a mantra starts playing from a speaker, and Tam Kung’s face is illuminated from the heavy curtains of the altar.
Wong’s cinematography carefully depicts the temple’s intimate holiness, rendering red and gold tones in an array of compositions — drenched in shadows, dully aglow, coruscatingly wreathed upon the altar. In the theatre, I was quietly enraptured. I had forgotten that places of worship could be filled with tenderness.
The first Christian church my family attended upon arriving in Canada was a repurposed school auditorium where the Chinese services were held. It had beige carpets and a long hallway where my friends and I gave ghost tours and scared ourselves. The building was a church in the most utilitarian sense, constructed into being every Sunday and torn down later that evening.
Growing up immersed in a deeply impersonal religion whetted my appetite for places of worship that relish in their adornment. I found myself drawn to Hakka Chinese religion, by its act of drawing upon memory and tradition not to reprimand, but to love and remember. To venerate ancestors and native deities rather than a god whose love is conditional, to be earned through romanticized suffering.
My religious and cultural grief are deeply intertwined. It is here, I think, where my intentions with the film grew muddled. Later in the film, Nora speaks about growing up in the suburbs just outside of Victoria’s Chinatown. As the camera pans over, she says that Chinese culture, to her, was quite foreign except when she visited the temple. Nora’s reminiscence echoed with me. I wish I had—a thread of connection, a neat cross-stitch over the void of my ancestry.
Chinese culture was not inherently foreign to me but grew dissonant, not for lack of trying, but from too many years in between and only childish evocations to fill in the gaps. I seem to have a better memory of my childhood than most people do. I remember events, even full conversations from when I was no older than three or four. Most of them comprise a mundane existence, tied to the first apartment I lived in.
tossing stones with my grandfather into the algae-covered, swampy pond behind our building, mimicking aloud their solid, wet plonks as they sank — 咚, 咚, 咚 (dong, like the sound produced by striking a piece of jade).
staring at the bamboo forest behind the playground, through which led a tiny path. i remember the darkness in there being warm and hazy, and the incessant mosquito bites.
i remember both the conversations i was not meant to overhear and the act of trying to forget them, years later.
My memories do not occupy tangible, existing spaces. That is what drew me to the Tam Kung Temple. It is a church that is also a memory. The temple’s significance is twofold, fulfilling both Chinatown’s heritage as well as religious tradition for Hakka immigrants. To this end, I thought I could honour and contend with both my diasporic and religious memories by visiting the temple.
I hold onto these childhood memories because I have not visited China in almost ten years. If I were to go back, I would be both a visitor and a foreigner. I have no idea what kind of people my maternal grandparents were. My ancestry and Chinese identity are almost mythological to me in their nearness and inscrutability.
These are not new feelings to the diasporic experience. I know what I feel is not new, revelatory, or even very introspective. I see it in my critiques of diasporic narratives that should hit home, from my disappointment in THE FAREWELL or my indifference to SAVING FACE. It feels unfulfilling to wallow in displacement yet never reach an answer. But BENEVOLENCE unearthed simultaneously a new urge and a possibility in me — to hold onto memories not out of hunger, but tranquillity. I wanted my remembrance to resemble a peaceful tradition, not a desperate search. I wanted to conclude my discontent.
guest / stranger
This past winter, while visiting my family in Vancouver, I did as BENEVOLENCE asked. I went to the temple out of curiosity, convenience, and a hunger for connection to my memories.
Early in the morning, I drove half an hour to the ferry dock and boarded the ferry to Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island. It was a long ride, and I headed outside to the open deck. It was December and the wind jostled violently. I watched the freezing waters churn below as we headed west and the landscape of islands passing by.
From there, I took an hour-long bus ride to downtown Victoria, where the Tam Kung Temple is housed. The entrance was a small and unassuming door with no markings or signage. I opened it and stepped into a narrow corridor that stretched into a steep flight of stairs leading upwards.
The temple occupies a small space, no bigger than a living room, but temporally it stretches years upon years. Banners on the wall list the dates of entire families who had visited. Newspaper clippings were scattered along the walls, from columns commemorating the temple’s anniversary and describing its history.
There were two other people in the temple, an older and a younger man. When the older man approached me, I realized we had a language barrier — he spoke Cantonese and Hakka while I spoke Mandarin. After some fumbling, I told him in very simple Mandarin that I wanted to look around. He told us to go ahead, but they were closing soon. Afterwards, he disappeared into the kitchen, the younger man left, and I was alone. It felt strange, with all the curiosity of wandering a museum alone, the holiness of a church, and the intimate peculiarity of being left alone inside a stranger’s home.
to confront diasporic grief / to stumble
What I was seeking was not a temple but a room. A small one, just off the main living room that contained all the answers to my ancestry. The choices of a small group of people that comprised the map of my geographical and personal assemblage. I wanted to collect and contain my desires into a house, a temple, a church — any vessel would do.
in the weeks where i am too busy to call her, i think about my grandmother at random. when i’m in the middle of cooking, when i’m half asleep. but i don’t dare linger for too long.
i’m afraid of facing the time we have left. i’m afraid of making up for the time i’ve been gone. i’m afraid, often, that my parents will one day decide to never speak to me again.
BENEVOLENCE distilled in me a sense of longing. I wanted a place for my diasporic grief to reside and to be washed anew. I was touched by the idea that a god could be someone personal — a fragment, or remnant, from a piece of cultural and personal history remolded.
Together, Nora and Gayle recount Tam Kung’s origin. He is a Hakka Chinese deity, a seafaring god who watches over fishermen. Immigrants who crossed the ocean to Canada sought him in particular for protection in their new land and dedicated the temple to his name.
Wong’s focus on Hakka religion is deeply personal, drawing from his background as a Hakka Chinese artist and his strong call to represent these stories. He mentioned in the post-screening Q&A that he visited the temple as a stranger, but by the end of the day, they had lent him the keys and permitted him to film there after hours.
Towards the end of the documentary, Wong poses a question to the caretakers: “What would it mean to you if the temple disappeared?” Gayle answers that it would be not only a personal, ancestral loss but one to Victoria’s Chinese community. The music swells as the shot cuts to a pair of hands feeding incense paper to a firebox, following the paper as it is swallowed by flame.
Every part of this scene is tied to remembrance. The camera slows down and briefly dwells by the firebox as the flames burn. The prolonged shot is heavy with a sense of loss and reflection. As flame eats away at paper, cultural tradition can just as easily be consumed. But simultaneously, burning paper is a form of ancestor veneration — a refutation of lost memories.
The shot of the fire transitions to the temple’s domed ceiling, overlapping for a second. Again, it is a commemoration. Though tarnished, the skylight doesn’t feel any less holy. Rather, it is a moment of longstanding, weathered devotion. This scene moved me, heavily, because I could feel Wong’s love for the temple; the equal measure of awe and respect for its vividness and history.
Stewardship of the temple feels like collaborative, collective work. The 140-year-old temple needs restoration. Its roof and windows are leaking, floors are worn with shoddy construction. The structural part of the roof needs fixing, there is no building foundation, and pieces of the parapet are falling off. One of the caretakers makes an emotional plea to viewers, “We want you to come, discover us, find out about us, and see what we can do. And help us protect and preserve this temple for the many generations yet to come.” At Reel Asian, her message is directly for Asian viewers, many of them diasporic. The mission to gather visitors hinges on a commonality, one of an Asian diaspora seeking to soothe their dissonance and lack of connection with culture through religion.
I am grateful to have discovered the temple through Reel Asian and seen it in person. It is a beautiful, reverent space rich with Chinese Canadian history. But I had gone hoping to reconnect with a certain part of my identity that lacked ancestral connection, and I do not think the temple offered any answers for me.
I feel I visited a museum rather than a place of worship. The documentary does not serve as an adequate intermediary for visiting a religious space, especially for those unfamiliar with Chinese folk religion.
What should the visitor’s intentions be? Is the temple equipped to accept visitors en masse? Not everyone at the temple may hold the capacity to be a tour guide. The documentary wants to invite viewers into its space, but there is neither a framework nor intentionality. It is also unlikely that Reel Asian viewers would make it to a temple on the other side of the coast in a non-central location off the mainland.
After the screening, Wong stood outside with a stack of the temple’s business cards. He handed one to each viewer exiting the theatre. But what good is visiting the temple as an outsider?
inheritance / benevolence
I was raised Christian. My own religion was not inherited but given to me, by American missionaries only one generation past — almost no time at all, almost reversible. Listening to the women speak in the documentary, I wished I had something worthy of inheritance.
I am not so different from the women at the Tam Kung Temple. My family’s story is typical in the Chinese-Canadian diaspora canon — we moved to Vancouver from Shanghai when I was a child, and through the years I have lost sense of where and to whom I belong.
During my trip to my family’s home, my grandmother was also visiting us from China. It was my first time seeing her in nearly seven years. I was intent on asking her about our family history, a topic largely unknown to me. I was older now, and I felt a sense of urgency.
I asked her over lunch one day, and my grandmother answered: she talked about her life as a young adult during the Cultural Revolution, how she met my grandfather and all the grief she had endured. It means a lot that she shared these memories with me. I have never seen an adult in my family share their trauma and grief before, much less in a raw, candid manner. I learned more about my family in one afternoon from my grandmother than over a lifetime of stilted conversations with my parents. She talked for hours — there, again, I felt a sense of tranquillity. I felt myself brush up against a sense of fulfillment. To have something however small to preserve is a privilege. My grandmother told me that my father knew all these stories too. He had never asked, only eavesdropped over the years; she only found out when he was an adult. I wonder about his silence, sometimes, and why he chose to pass it on to me.
To preserve something — a memory, a culture, a tradition, is not a solitary task. What is so enrapturing about Wong’s depiction of the Tam Kung Temple is the act of preservation, and how the documentary calls its viewers into collaboration. Preserving Hakka Chinese history is a collective political act, but I wished the documentary had facilitated a better dialogue.
BENEVOLENCE conceptualizes a different mode of diasporic identity, one that refutes western hegemony by preserving traditional folk religion. But the documentary does not depict the Tam Kung Temple through any sort of narrative or theoretical framework — what does the temple stand for? Tranquillity? Benevolence? These are traits one would assign to a god or an acolyte, not beliefs.
The word “benevolence” connotes a kind, selfless disposition. Here, the word is attributed to the temple caretakers and their intent — they are steadfast in their stewardship and dedication, driven and enmeshed by a benevolent cause. But throughout the screening, I thought of benevolence as a godly attribute, an unfamiliar tender sense of holiness.
Benevolence presented an alternate path to my cultural identity I had been pondering — both to reconnect with Chinese culture through religion, and to reconnect with religion as an autonomous decision rather than a forced assimilation. I think that is too heavy a cause to impose onto this documentary. Its call to action is rooted in cultural intent, to preserve and pass on the leadership of the temple, rather than religious exploration. It is not an adequate intermediary between the viewer and the temple. I hold both cultural and religious grief — they are impossible to fully untangle; but in a call to action, these emotions must be separate rather than being expected to bolster one another. BENEVOLENCE was ultimately not an answer to my religious contention, but it nurtured my search for cultural connection. It is the fear of losing my own history that binds together the entirety of my cultural grief. Hearing about my family’s rich history in Northern China from my grandmother helped me make sense of myself and where I exist now. Generational strife slots into place. It helps to know what I am missing.
on the tam kung temple’s website is a brief history, a snippet of a memory: a hakka chinese man swept to canada by the gold rush had brought a small statue of a local deity along as he travelled across the ocean. before he left in search of gold he placed the statue in a small wooden niche, by the mouth of a ravine, so that his fellow countrymen could pray to the god as well.
to confront diasporic grief is to hold onto a fragment and make anew. memory, tradition, self — a temple. i wonder about the man who had brought a piece of his mythology overseas and made an altar for it in a new land. did he, too, fear forgetting?
Gabriel Yuan is a writer with a craving for mythology, body horror, and Catholic imagery (they are not Catholic). They are finishing up a degree in English and Urban Planning at the University of Toronto, where they also curate a student magazine, the UC Gargoyle, as the editor-in-chief.
