Stream It Or Skip It: ‘All In My Family’ On Netflix, A Documentary About A Gay Chinese Man And His Traditional Family

On first glance, All In My Family seems like it would be a rough watch. A Chinese family railing against their gay son’s lifestyle and choice to have kids via surrogates. But the U.S.-based filmmaker Hao Wu doesn’t want to show a family in crisis; he just wants to show what being gay in a regular Chinese family is like. And the portrait is more loving than you might think. Read on for more….

ALL IN MY FAMILY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Filmmaker Hao Wu has been living in the U.S. for over twenty years, but he grew up in Chengdu, a city in southwestern China whose population is 14 million. We open his documentary short All In My Family in the home of Cortine, the surrogate who is having the baby of Hao and his husband Eric, but then we switch to Chengdu, where his family is gathered to celebrate his grandfather’s 90th birthday party.

Hao’s family, he says, isn’t much different than most families in Chengdu, but that’s exactly the reason why Hao left. Because he’s gay, and Chinese society doesn’t exactly embrace the LGBTQ community, he felt he needed to be someplace that was more accepting of who he was, even if he had to leave his family. Hao is out to his parents, but both of them use words like “choice” and “lifestyle” that profess that they still aren’t 100% on board.

His mother is especially hard on him, saying that she brought him and his sister up to be good people and provide her grandchildren. Hao being gay has ruined that vision for her. His grandfather, though, has no idea that Hao is gay; he feels that before he turns 100, Hao should return to Chengdu with a wife and child.

A couple of years go by and we find out Hao and Eric are planning on having a family; two kids by two different surrogates, so at the very least the child can be purely Chinese. His father, his sister and his “Big Aunt” and “Little Aunt” are overjoyed at the news, but Hao’s mother is resistant, because there is no mother. What will her father and the rest of the family think? When Hao and Eric finally fly to Shanghai to visit with the family, who have moved in with his sister, his parents say to call Eric a “friend” in front of his grandfather, and Eric stays away from the babies’ first visit to avoid confusing.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We can’t think of one that’s remotely like this.

Performance Worth Watching: Hao’s mother is a huge worrier, and amazingly angry and bitter. She’s happy that her kids have things better than she did, but is bitter that Hao is a filmmaker and just can’t wrap her mind around the fact that her son is married to a man and is starting a family. She also freely screams at Hao’s more easygoing dad to the point where he jumps into action whenever she talks.

Memorable Dialogue: Grandpa asks Hao when he brings the kids to Shanghai, “Where’s your wife?” Hao says “America.” That’s basically the response he has to anyone who doesn’t know he’s gay that asks about his wife.

Our Take: People tend to forget that, as conservative as we can be here in the U.S., there are cultures that are even more conservative, and reforms in rights, protections and especially behaviors are slow to come. In 40 minutes, Hao Wu covers about three years of his life, from his grandfather’s birthday through the first visit with his kids, and he paints the picture of what he’s up against as a gay man from China as more of a case of culture and tradition than anything else.

One of the things he makes sure to show is that his family loves him and his kids, and they’re happy that he’s with a good person like Eric. But their difficulty with Hao’s orientation doesn’t come from a place of bigotry or homophobia. It’s just not something that’s out in the open in China, even in the 2010s, and the idea that a family’s only son isn’t going to find a wife and create children the good old fashioned way doesn’t compute. In fact, Hao’s family is more of a compelling watch for how big a set of yelly worriers they are than anything else.

Our Call: STREAM IT. All In My Family is a fine look at how modern, western sensibilities butt up against ingrained biases in cultures that have been around for millennia.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream All In My Family on Netflix