How others will see it. Some will sympathize with Jade's plight. She wants to keep her family, yet choose her own friends and career. These goals are in conflict, since her parents will never accept anything that deviates from their plans for her, that is, a stable Chinese-American family of her own, in the most exclusive zip code in town.
How I felt about it. But she's not alone. It turns out other SGCA's are in a similar situation. Andrew's CFGCAs don't know he's gay, and are still trying to set him up with a nice SGCA. Another friend, Lisa, is in open rebellion against her parents, and Jade's brother, Winston, has already been "banished" by her family for an unmentioned breach of SGCA expectations. Even Uncle Bing, a middle-aged man visiting from Hong Kong, has a taboo relationship he must keep under wraps to remain in family favor.
Does it have to be friends or family? Fun or financial triumph? A socialist might suggest that the SGCA's are assimilating into American culture, an inevitable process despite the resistance of the CFGCAs and their own culture of perpetual advancement. This advancement, on the face of it, is an assimilation of a different kind, economic instead of cultural.
The parents aren't rejecting the material success of the American dream. But they want to retain key Chinese-Hong Kong traditions: education, a professional career, marriage within a select caste, followed by children, brought up within a close-knit extended family. This is more shallow than it seems. Marriage is for position and not love. The achievements of children, particularly when they match SGCA expectations, are relished by parents so they can boast about them to their CFGCA peers. Sometimes the bragging involves lies, or at least withheld truths, so as not to lose face.
Filmmaking, by nature, is liberal. Films tend to tell stories about sympathetic characters who struggle against unfair situations. The repression of individuality is a typical theme, and in the case of CFGCAs against SGCAs, the younger freedom-seekers will be portrayed as right. Even when the choices appear sinful or selfish instead of reasonable. We especially worry about Lisa, who might end up pregnant, sick, and broke. The CFGCAs aren't always wrong. They know more about the consequences of misguided choices than their SGCAs believe.