How Do We Celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival? : Reading Ann Hui’s The Way We Are (Tin Shui Wai: Day and Night) as a Narrative of Care

This article examines Ann Hui’s The Way We Are through the lens of care, arguing that the film moves beyond a microscopic depiction of everyday life to raise broader questions about the world and to imagine alternative forms of relationality. Such a narrative contour becomes visible when practices of care—often rendered invisible or treated as mere background—are foregrounded and closely examined. From this perspective, the seemingly calm and uneventful daily life of Kwai-je(Mrs. Cheung)’s working-class family in Tin Shui Wai, a peripheral district of Hong Kong, emerges as a site where value judgments and modes of world-understanding collide, allowing new forms of recognition and imagination to surface. Kwai-je and Ga-on(Cheung Ka-on) respond affirmatively to a world that devalues care, creating relational temporalities in which care occupies a central place and gradually assembling alternative forms of family and kinship. In particular, the process through which Kwai-je forms a relationship with Ah-po(Granny Leung Foon) and comes to share the Mid-Autumn Festival with her illustrates how care operates to rearrange forms of life. This moment can be read as a rewriting of care itself, revealing how care shifts relational hierarchies and centers, and reconfigures the structure of everyday life. In doing so, the film relocates care from the private and familial realm into the social, redefining the boundaries between them.