When Jenny Lu graduated from London’s Chelsea College of Art in 2009, she left with the same bright-eyed optimism typical of many high-achieving graduates galvanised to go forth and make something of themselves. Instead, she faced a string of rejections and bad news, both professionally and personally. Her friend Anna, a young woman from a small Chinese village, suddenly killed herself. Later Jenny discovered that Anna had been working at an illegal massage parlour in the outskirts of London, a fact that Anna had been careful to hide from her friends while alive. Shaken by Anna’s death, and the fact that we can know so little about those closest to us, Jenny sought to pay homage to Anna through The Receptionist, a story of ‘hidden Britain’ that looks at the lives of five women who work at an illegal massage parlour on the edge of London.
The Receptionist opens to London in the throes of the 2008 financial crash. Tina (Teresa Daley) is a literature graduate facing the thankless grind of job hunting in an economy that sees very little value in the dignity of bare human life. Her mother is dead and her father, thousands of miles away in Taiwan, has stopped sending her money. Her boyfriend Frank (Josh Whitehouse), a bland and uninteresting architect’s assistant, has just been made redundant, and the couple needs to pay the rent for their shared studio apartment. Help comes in the form of a referral from a waitress at a Chinatown restaurant, bringing Tina to a small two-storey house near Heathrow. There she meets Lily (Sophie Gopsill) a sharp-tongued madam who runs the parlour, which is staffed by the haughty Sasa (Shiang-chyi Chen) and bubbly Mei (Amanda Fan). Tina’s job is to cook, clean, and answer client calls; “they do massages, body to body. Half an hour is sixty pounds”.
The Receptionist is not shy about the dangers and misery that can accompany underground sex work. Sasa, Mei, and later, newcomer Anna (Shuang Teng) are routinely subject to violence by men who treat their bodies as expendable playthings. It’s impossible to avoid the element of race here. With every shot of a man who throws around and forcibly fucks their bodies – and every expression of their blanket indignation when one of these women dares reject their advances – one is reminded of the enduring stereotype of Asian women as hypersexual, meek, beautiful, and cheap, as memorisalised in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong, and many of the roles taken on by early Hollywood actress Anna May Wong during her career. In Lily’s house, you can also pick your preferred iteration of the stereotype, be it the effervescent wide-eyed anime girl (Mei) or the dark, threatening Dragon Lady (Sasa).
Culture and race are also paramount in informing the internal conflicts of these women, who lie about their professions to their loved ones, and – especially for white-collar university graduate Tina – feel personal shame and sometimes moral disgust about their lives. What might come across as narrow-minded prurience to the western feminist viewer (sex-positive feminism after all, has taught us all to forego our moral misgivings with fucking) is more generously understood when factoring in the sexual conservatism, and yes, outright sexism, of Chinese attitudes to acceptable womanhood. Seen from above, the actions of the women in Lily’s massage parlour may be a showcase of anti-feminist Bad Faith; but engage with the women in their own terms, and you can see in greater relief the cultural conditions that have brought about their feelings. It’s an important distinction. The Receptionist is not interested in producing any statement of truth about the morality of sex work; it merely wants to represent the truth about these individual women’s lives.
The truth, in the cases of Tina, Sasa, Mei, Anna and even Lily, is almost uniformly miserable, hard-boiled and ugly. Brief moments of bonding between the group – including a dance party set to MGMT’s ‘Kids’ while Lily is away – tend to be interrupted with the unending imperative to make money, and the shared sense that they are but outsiders in an unfriendly and uncaring Britain, no matter what their settled status visas may say. Sasa is a single mum, dumped by her English boyfriend; Mei floats in and out in the city, half-heartedly attending English lessons; Anna has never even set foot in central London. Even Tina, as the resident white-collar ‘outsider’ to the parlour, sits precariously on the periphery of ‘London life’, denied entry to the world of legal employment and betrayed by her hysterical, one-dimensionally puritanical white English boyfriend Frank. As the film progresses, Tina loses her hardened, holier-than-thou exterior towards the women, and builds friendships with them over stir-fried chicken and book recommendations. Tina and Sasa’s friendship in particular is one of the strongest parts of the film, as the two women learn to understand the origins of each other’s prickliness, and support each other through their mutual humiliations, hardships, and ultimate escape from Lily’s parlour.
“You will never be seen as the same as them” was the warning offered by my own first-generation immigrant mother; “and will have to work twice as hard to get the same as where they are”. The immigrant psyche is marked by this painful dissonance, split between the knowledge that you have been too far ‘compromised’ by the West to fully feel at home in your ‘motherland’, while also keenly remaining aware of your ‘otherness’ to the successfully assimilated people around you. As the white neighbours of Lily’s house glare at Sasa and Tina with contempt, imploring them to get a job!, the irony is that they do have employment; it’s just not the form that’s palatable to the gatekeepers of polite society. While The Receptionist, as Simran Hans has noted in the Observer, falls into the trap of telling rather than showing, its greatest sleight of hand is its quiet depiction of the cultural gatekeeping that keeps immigrants out of overwhelming white, polite, middle-class society to which they desperately seek entrance; a society that would nevertheless purport to your face that they welcome foreigners! Even the ostensibly liberal minded bookshop owners and architects, in Tina’s world, will disappoint you.
In reviews of The Receptionist, critics have picked up on the operatic grittiness of the film, with some taking issue that Lu’s film failed to rise about garden-variety tropes of melodrama that befall similar films exploring hefty topics. It’s not entirely right: subtle moments, such as Lily’s disappointed “Oh” when Tina reveals to her that she has studied literature at university, or when the parlour’s clientele is revealed to be composed in part of painfully awkward, white male nerds, are likely to elicit all too familiar laughter from the Asian female viewer – especially those who have faced the difficulties of trying to legitimate their artistic interests to their deeply pragmatic immigrant parents, or dating in the West while attracted to men.
And yet it is true that Jenny Lu is ultimately more interested in depicting the hardship of the women in The Receptionist, and therefore opens her film to the criticism that it falls into garden-variety tragedy porn. This angle of critique gave me pause. There are, and will always be, good and bad ways of depicting stories; more and less effective ways to depict tragedy, and the lived experiences of the world’s victims. But I’m not quite sure what the complaint about something being too predictably and one-dimensionally sad means, especially when it comes to expertly-researched, true-to-life stories about the lived experience of communities too long ignored on the big screen; as Jenny Lu did here. Sometimes clichés need to be featured on the big screen because they are true; and it is really through the disclosure of this truth, that more nuanced and hopeful interpretations can begin to emerge. Who is the critic, after all, to dismiss someone’s narrative on the basis of it being unsuitably dialectical to be fitted into Art? I’m still figuring it out.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
