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The Home Song Stories (2007), written and directed by Tony Ayres, is a punishing mirror of my own childhood memories. This film, autobiographical of what Ayres experienced during his formative years and a portraiture of his enigmatic and volatile mother, is a devastating account of familial dysfunction. Its narrative is an interspersion of melancholia and heartwarming moments, a story of what Vladimir Nabokov would describe as “subliminal coordinates.” The Home Song Stories depicts desperation and despair, innocence and naivety, grace and redemption in the tormented soul of Ayres’ mother and her suicide attempts, in the rapid crossfires of Cantonese, Mandarin and broken English in the kitchen and bedroom as arguments break out, in the encyclopedia-reading young Ayres himself who believed that “I will then know everything.” So much of this film reminds me of my own past, a cinematic apparition of the pain, the chaos and the emptiness which have shaped me today — my mother’s affections for me, her emotional vulnerability and insecurity and subsequent neurosis, my own passion for reading and learning, my estrangement from men in general.

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