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Chinese film uses a kitchen to crush Hollywood’s war myth_我的网站

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    Promotional material for Once Upon a Time in the Middle East Photo: Courtesy of DoubanIn the days after Once Upon a Time in the Middle East opened across China, a striking chorus of overseas voices began to surface online. Moviegoers from South Africa, Iran, Thailand and elsewhere hailed the film as a rare departure from Hollywood's war stories, praising its decision to place US forces in the role of invader rather than "liberator." One widely shared post called it the movie that finally showed "the real America."
The excitement is understandable. Director Wen Muye has made something quietly radical: a war film that refuses spectacle. 
There is a wedding scene in Once Upon a Time in the Middle East that stays with you long after the credits. In the middle of a war zone, people still find a way to dance, embrace, and cry as if tomorrow will never come. The joy is desperate and beautiful at the same time. Watching it, you feel the ache of a simple truth: These people should have been allowed every tomorrow. That single sequence captures what director Wen Muye has achieved. He has made a film that only a Chinese filmmaker could have made - because of a sensibility that refuses to treat war as spectacle or moral theater.
The commercial response in China has been equally striking. During the past weekend the film took in 373 million yuan ($55.35 million) at the box office, over 4 times the amount earned by Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in the same market. Audiences walked out of the theater talking about war, food, and the value of ordinary life. The numbers confirm what the film itself demonstrates: a story told from the kitchen can still command a massive audience.
The story follows Xu Fu, an ordinary Chinese chef who travels to a Middle Eastern city (clearly modeled on Iraq around 2003) to work off family debt. With restaurant manager Ma Junsheng, he opens the Dragon Restaurant and serves Chinese food. Even after the invasion begins, the kitchen does not close. The kitchen becomes a fragile island where meals continue to be cooked while the war begins outside. Xu Fu is not a hero in a Hollywood sense. He does not pick up a gun or deliver speeches about freedom. He just keeps cooking.
What makes the film remarkable is how cleanly it rejects the familiar Western war narrative. Hollywood has spent decades following US soldiers into foreign cities, showing their courage, their trauma, and their brotherhood. Films like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down place the US experience at the center and often reduce the local population to a background threat or grateful recipients of rescue. Once Upon a Time in the Middle East turns the camera the other way around. It asks a blunt question spoken to an American officer: "Without you, where would the terrorists come from?" The line is not delivered as propaganda. It is offered as a practical observation about cause and effect. Violence creates more violence. Children who lose everything do not become extremists by nature; they do because the options for a normal life have been deprived.
The film makes this point through a recurring image: the knife. In Xu Fu's hands, a knife is a tool for chopping, flipping, and seasoning. It produces the bowl of "Xu Fu stew" that orphans finish and ask for more. In other hands, the same blade becomes a weapon. "The knife is not good or evil," the film suggests. "People are." The same logic applies to the children. Young Saif learns to cook under Xu Fu's guidance, kneading dough, controlling the flame, earning respect through a plate of food. Other kids the same age are packed into cars with bombs instead of books. 
Here the Chinese director's approach proves smarter than the Hollywood model. Hollywood war films usually rely on scale, speed, and moral clarity: big battles, clear villains, and a central hero who grows through combat. The camera stays close to the soldiers, the soundtrack swells, and the audience is guided toward admiration or catharsis. Director Wen Muye does the opposite. He stays small, slow, and unresolved. By placing the story inside a kitchen rather than on the front line, he forces the viewer to confront the human cost without the distraction of heroic spectacle. Instead of telling us who is right, he shows us what is lost. This restraint is more demanding and ultimately more persuasive. It trusts the audience to connect the dots rather than feeding them a pre-packaged moral. Where Hollywood often ends with a sense of hard-won victory or noble sacrifice, this film leaves you with the quieter, harder realization that the real damage continues long after the shooting stops: in the minds of children and in the broken routines of daily life. That choice of focus is not just different; it is more honest and more intelligent.
This perspective feels especially Chinese in its emphasis on ordinary survival. Chinese culture has long treated food as the foundation of life: "Heaven is big, earth is big, but eating is bigger." The dishes in the film, from northeastern iron-pot stews mixed with local grilled fish to carefully prepared fried rice made from whatever ingredients remain, are not exotic decoration. They are the practical language of endurance. One of the most moving moments comes when Xu Fu cooks a simple stew for a group of orphans during their escape. What began as "leftovers not fit for the table" becomes a permanent item on the menu. Anything made with care can feed people. That idea carries more weight than any battlefield speech.
The film's approach to food and daily ritual reminds me of director Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman. Lee used elaborate family dinners to reveal emotional truths that characters could not speak aloud. Wen transplants that same quiet method into a war zone. The kitchen becomes the moral center of the story. Steam, chopping boards, and shared tables matter more than explosions. In both films, cooking is never just cooking. It is a way of insisting that human connection still exists even when larger forces try to erase it.
A quiet but powerful metaphor runs through the story: the potato. A potato is harmless until it sprouts and becomes poisonous. The children radicalized by war are not born poisonous. They become so when the soil around them turns toxic. The film returns several times to the simple instruction "don't waste food." In peacetime the phrase sounds ordinary. In a war zone it becomes a statement about the waste of human lives. War does not only kill people; it spoils what could have been good.
By the final scenes, the Dragon Restaurant has become more than a business. It is a small example that another way of existing is possible. Children are learning to cook instead of learning to kill. The film does not claim this solves geopolitics. It simply shows that the most basic human desire, to eat well and live another day, remains the clearest common language across cultures.
The author is a reporter with the Global Times. [email protected]
。    A recent in-flight medical emergency highlighted how traditional Chinese medicine techniques can complement emergency care in unexpected settings.    Four faculty members from the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine responded to a medical emergency aboard an overnight Air China flight from Paris to Beijing, using a combination of conventional assessments and TCM therapies to help an 11-year-old passenger whose condition later stabilized.    At about 3 am Beijing time on July 20, cabin crew issued an urgent call for medical assistance after the Chinese girl, who was returning from a performance in France, developed chest pain, alarming her family.    Four BUCM faculty members immediately came forward: Wang Ting, the university's vice-president; An Chao, deputy director of the International Cooperation Department; Chen Younan, associate dean of the School of Acupuncture-Moxibustion Tuina; and Zheng Fengjie, dean of the School of Traditional Chinese Medicine.    After checking the girl's blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate, they identified persistent pain in the chest area as her primary symptom.    The team administered oxygen and placed a TCM pill under the girl's tongue to promote blood circulation and relieve pain.    They also applied acupressure and massage techniques, focusing on several acupoints including Neiguan, located on the inner forearm about two to three finger widths above the wrist crease, between the tendons of the palmaris longus and flexor carpi radialis muscles.    According to TCM theory, stimulating the Neiguan acupoint is believed to help regulate heart function, calm the mind and relieve chest discomfort.    Working in the cramped cabin, the four physicians took turns kneeling beside the girl while monitoring her condition. Her chest pain gradually subsided. After the aircraft landed in Beijing, the crew arranged for ground medical personnel to continue her treatment. Later reports revealed that her condition had stabilized.    Wang said the emergency response demonstrated that TCM can play a role in certain acute situations when used alongside standard medical assessments.    "The treatment combined sublingual administration of a traditional Chinese medicine pill with acupressure techniques," he said. "Together, they helped relieve the child's symptoms by promoting blood circulation and easing the chest pain."    He added that many people associate TCM mainly with chronic disease management and health maintenance, while overlooking its potential applications in emergency situations.    "Herbal medicine, acupuncture and tuina are not limited to long-term care," Wang said. "We hope more people, both in China and abroad, will gain a better understanding of the role traditional Chinese medicine can play in emergency care."    The July incident was not the first time faculty members and students from BUCM provided medical assistance aboard flights.    On June 28, 2024, doctoral student Cao Feng used acupuncture to help revive a woman who had lost consciousness aboard a flight from Beijing to Lanzhou in Gansu province.    And on Oct 9, 2024, student Gao Yingjun administered acupressure to assist a Russian passenger suspected of having a stroke on a flight from the Maldives to Shanghai.    More recently, on Jan 1 this year, doctoral student Yang Yao used acupuncture on the Neiguan acupoint to help treat a passenger experiencing a hypertensive emergency aboard a China Eastern Airlines flight.    For the university, these incidents illustrate how medical professionals trained in TCM can contribute when emergencies arise unexpectedly, even thousands of meters above the ground.                    。

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