Film Review: The Jade Pendant 唐人街1871 (2017) - USA / Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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There is a circular green jade pendant that Peony wears against her skin, a gift from her grandmother meant to bring luck and protection. In The Jade Pendant, that small piece of stone becomes the quiet center of a larger, more turbulent story — one about Chinese immigrants trying to build something like a life in 1870s California while the ground beneath them is already shifting toward violence. Director Po-Chih Leong’s film is imperfect, sometimes awkwardly staged, and not always subtle, but it has a genuine interest in its characters and in a piece of American history that most Westerns simply ignore. That is enough to make it worth watching.
Peony (Clara Lee), fleeing an arranged marriage in Guangdong, arrives in America under a contract she does not fully understand. She and her friend are sold into service as “flower girls” under a Hong Kong triad boss (Tzi Ma) who is expanding his reach into the West. Peony resists. She has martial training, a stubborn streak, and the pendant. She meets Tom Wong (Godfrey Gao), an American-born Chinese cook whose father worked on the railroad. Their romance is the film’s emotional engine — a relationship built on shared displacement, small acts of care, and the simple fact that both of them would rather invent a future than accept the one being offered. The story eventually collides with the real 1871 Los Angeles Chinese Massacre, in which a mob lynched roughly nineteen Chinese men and boys in Chinatown. The film does not treat this as background color. It treats it as the place where private hopes meet public hatred.
Gao, who died two years after the film’s release, brings a quiet, watchful quality to Tom. He is not a stoic hero; he is a man who has already learned how to make himself smaller in order to move through a hostile world, and who is slowly deciding he no longer wants to. Lee plays Peony with determination that never quite tips into the invincible-action-hero cliché the script sometimes invites. The supporting cast is uneven, but Tzi Ma is effective as the calculating Yu Hing, and Tsai Chin gives Madame Pong a mix of calculation and residual warmth. Leong, a Hong Kong director working in a largely American setting, keeps the camera relatively straightforward. The landscapes of Utah stand in for California, and there are moments when the production looks modest — clean in a way that undercuts period grit, dialogue that occasionally states what the images already show. The film is better at intimacy than at spectacle.
What The Jade Pendant does well is refuse to treat its Chinese characters as exotic backdrop for a white frontier story. The tensions among Chinese tongs, Irish police, and resentful townspeople are sketched rather than fully explored, and the romance sometimes leans on familiar beats. Yet the central idea remains clear: these people were not simply waiting for history to happen to them. They were cooking, arguing, falling in love, and trying to keep their children safe while a larger violence gathered. The jade pendant is not magic. It is a reminder that someone, somewhere, hoped the wearer would survive. The film earns its modest power by treating that hope as something real, even when the surrounding world is determined to prove it false.
It is not a great film. It is a sincere one, made with limited means and an interest in a story that rarely reaches the screen. For that reason, and for the steady performances of its two leads, it stays with you after the credits. (Neo, 2026)