Pushing Hands

Mr. Chu has spent his life teaching tai chi chuan in Beijing, and after his wife's death he leaves China to live with his son Alex and Alex's family in a New York suburb. The arrangement is uneasy on both sides. Alex's American wife Martha, a writer struggling with her second novel, does not speak Chinese, and Mr. Chu speaks no English, so the two share no language at all. Alex is left to interpret between them while trying to hold his household together, caught between his father's traditions and his own American life. Mr. Chu finds some comfort in his grandson and in the company of Mrs. Chen, a widow from Taiwan, but the distance between him and his son's world does not easily close.

Pushing Hands is Ang Lee's first feature as director, and James Schamus, who shares screenplay credit with Lee, would go on to collaborate with him repeatedly. Sihung Lung plays Mr. Chu, with Wang Bozhao as Alex, Deb Snyder as Martha, Wang Lai as Mrs. Chen, Fanny De Luz as Linda and Haan Lee as Jeremy. The film came before Lee's second feature, The Wedding Banquet, released in 1993.

The film is a comedy-drama co-produced by companies in the United States and Taiwan. It holds a rating of 7.2 out of 10 on IMDb from around 5,300 votes, and 7.3 out of 10 on TMDB from a much smaller number of votes.