"Jesus, meet Grandma": Multifaith Households

By Mary Ann Beavis, St. Thomas More College

Julia Kwan’s Eve and the Firehorse is a movie about many things: family life, sibling relationships, death, the anxieties and fears of childhood, the challenges of adapting to a new culture, racism. But above all, the film is pervaded with religious and spiritual themes, which it handles with charm, humour and imagination.

Eve Eng is the heroine of the story—a Chinese-Canadian nine-year-old growing up in Vancouver in the 1970s. Eve’s parents are first-generation immigrants, and Eve belongs to a loving extended family with feet in both Chinese and Canadian cultures. Eve’s grandmother tends a household shrine featuring Buddhist and Taoist deities; her parents, aunts and uncles follow traditions designed to ensure the luck of the family. Eve and her sister take her mother and aunt to a showing of The Ten Commandments, dubbed into Chinese (“Moses has a kind face,” her mother observes) while Eve’s aunt observes that some Chinese families think it’s best to raise a child Christian—Christian children are better behaved. Eve lives in an enchanted world of singing goldfish, ghostly encounters, goddesses who come alive at night and “dance with wild abandon,” and even a vision of Buddha dancing with Jesus.

The movie treats knotty issues of multifaith relations with a light and gentle touch. The death of Eve’s grandmother sends the members of the family in different spiritual directions. Her mother, recovering from a miscarriage, seeks solace in Buddhist meditation and temple worship. Eve’s older sister, Karena, is impressed by a book from two “God’s Witnesses” who come to the door because it offers a vision of a world of harmony among people of all races and cultures (and she has a crush on a Sikh boy). She and Eve start attending a Catholic Sunday school with the approval of her mother (“two gods are better than one—more protection!”). Karena becomes convinced that the only true religion is Catholicism, but Eve (named, she is told by a Christian friend, after the woman who brought sin into the world) is not fully convinced. She continues to ask questions and see visions—the household goddess stops dancing and takes up plumbing; Jesus and the Buddha stop talking. But she agrees to join with her sister in a new club, “The Girls of Perpetual Sorrow,” whose aim is to advance the work of the Lord by doing good deeds in the world.

As a professor of religious studies who regularly uses film in class, and who has led church faith and film groups, I can recommend Eve and the Firehorse as an entertaining and family-friendly movie that will spark many questions for discussion: Why does Eve’s family accept Jesus as part of their family shrine, while Sister Agnes teaches that Christ is the only true God? Do all religions teach the same thing, and does it matter? Would Jesus and the Buddha be friends, or does Jesus really think he’s the only god in heaven? Are Eve’s visions “real,” or are they “just her imagination”? Can a person belong to more than one religion at once? Should we try to convert others to our own faith? I am also delighted by the clearly Canadian context of the story—while the film will appeal to viewers of many cultures, it will resonate especially with viewers north of the 49th parallel.