Review: 'Come Home Love’ (愛回家)

Stereotype of annoying mother of boyfriend/ mother-in-law

‘Come Home Love’(愛回家) is a drama by TVB. Wan Suk Han (acted by Ma Hoi Lun) is mother of Leung Yin Fun (acted by Ng Ka Lok), and Ma Yau (acted by Kwok Siu Wan) is Leung Yin Fun’s girlfriend. In the story, Wan Suk Han works in the same restaurant with Ma Yau. Before Wan know Ma’s relationship with her son, Wan and Ma had arguments on restaurant issues. Since then, Wan’s annoying characters were revealed especially in front of Ma.

First, she forces her son to choose between Ma and her. In the drama, Wan used to ask Leung who he will save if Ma and she fall into the sea. On the other hand, she always compares between Ma and her. For example, Wan was jealous and complained to her son as he bought a handbag to Ma. These behaviours show her jealousy and dislike to Ma.

Second, she always suspects Ma is not a good person and will harm Leung and her. For example, when Ma tried to show sincerity to Wan by making her coffee, Wan immediately popped up in mind that Ma was trying to poison her. Also, she believes Ma is faking so she always tells Leung not to trust Ma.

Third, she treats Ma as a competitor, which she always wants to show she is more capable to run the restaurant at all costs. In one of the episodes, Wan went to Taiwan deliberately for buying a coffee machine as she simply believed that coffee machine could help her to gain trust from employer and beat Ma.

The behaviours mentioned above reflect a negative relationship between mother-in-law distrusts and daughter-in-law. A mother-in-law can try all possible ways to break the relationship between the couple, at the same time to make her son fall into dilemma though.

Relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is an important issue in each family as it may relate to everyone. Therefore, this is an interesting theme for broadcasting company to produce drama. The typical way to show this distrust relationship is to create an irrational, highhanded, and annoying mother-in-law who only believes the daughter-in-law fakes and lies to her son. However, this representation of ‘mother-in-law’s ’jealousy and annoyance is stereotyping them.  

In reality, not all mother-in-law are like Wan, but as ‘annoying mother-in-law’ can make the drama more sensational and gain more public attention. TVB is willing to exaggerating the irrational behaviours and keep stereotyping. For example in 2008, Wars of In-Laws (我的野蠻奶奶) has more emphasis and stereotypes about mother-in-law, but it still gained very high popularity in Hong Kong which reflect audiences had sympathy and find the ideas in the drama interesting. Therefore, stereotyping will still be an element in TV drama in future.

 

Leung Wing Lum, Amy (10517445/ 21047996)