The de/construction of family relationships in the postmodern city has been a central concern of both Canadian director Atom Egoyan and Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang. One question that all of their feature films persistently ask is: how do the characters (re-)establish themselves and reconstruct their family when their traditional family (founded on marriage or kinship) is either an empty shell or completely broken and lost?1 Far from fixing the problems in these traditional families, both directors either show them as irretrievably lost, or expose--especially in Next of Kin, Family Viewing, Rebel of the Neon God and The River --their exploitative or oppressive power relations, from which the characters need to break away. Whether losing or leaving their family, the characters in Egoyan's and Tsai's films are fixated by the loss and/or left drifting alone in the postmodern city of Toronto and Taipei respectively. More importantly, while the characters' domestic space ("home" in Toronto's suburban houses or Taipei's apartment buildings) gets emptied and de-qualified, the "non-places" (e.g. hotel, telephone center, sauna) they frequent do not offer them any stable sense of identity or relations.

Many critics, therefore, think that most of Egoyan's films (at least those since Speaking Parts) and all of Tsai's offer pessimistic, if not morbid, views of the postmodern city with an overwhelming sense of personal loss and alienation. Geoff Pevere, for instance, sees Egoyan's films as being "among the most extreme studies of individual and social disaffection" in which the characters, in the pursuit of "something spectral," get increasingly desperate and obsessive ("Middle of Nowhere" 15, 18). Peter Harcourt finds in the ending of both Exotica and The Adjuster "a serial dimension where the actions of loss and of grief will repeat themselves over and over again" (1995: 71).2 Tsai's films are a lot more controversial, being criticized both for his depiction of Taipei, his treatments of homosexual (or incestuous) desire, and his overall pessimism.3 While he himself claims that his main character, Hsiao-kang, is "filled with hope," growing and learning to love from one film to the next (Look 186), most of his critics think otherwise. Jiau, for instance, sees Tsai's characters' attempts to reach out get more and more feeble from Rebel to Vive l'amour, and in The River the characters are reduced to satisfying their biological needs and "los[ing] any hope for love/affection" (1997: 36). With a few exceptions, 4 most critics see Vive l'amour "nihilistic" (Jiang 147) and its characters "postmodern flaneur . . . with no feelings about real experience" nor "sympathy or even abilities to dream" (Chen 6; Wang 78). While some critics find in the ending of The Hole a sign of hope, Chang (1998) finds in the film auto-eroticism but not communication, Ivy Chang, communication only in "fantasy space"(82), and Wood, a vision of the end of the world with no hope for salvation.

Granted the overall bleakness of the two directors' urban scenes and their characters' sense of isolation, I do not think that their films, nor their characters, exemplify the depthlessness and disaffection Frederic Jameson sees as dominant in postmodern society. I think that each of their films still offer different degrees of hope through the characters' attempts at human connections. Indeed, in the postmodern "non-places" (such as hotels, strip clubs, nursing homes, saunas, overpasses, elevators and train/subway stations) the characters do not have a stable familial structure to fall back on and some are even subject to other forms of oppression/exploitation. Yet these spaces with their multiple floating signifiers also offer them possibilities of choice and re-definition of self and "family." What both Egoyan's and Tsai's films show in these fluid and frequently claustrophobic "non-places," I argue, are human contact and re-defined "family" relationships on the one hand, and, on the other, "aesthetic reflexivity" (Lash and Urry, see next section) on either filmic or personal level. Through reaching out for human connections, the characters can at least resist complete annihilation of self-identity by the flows of signs and/or their own desires. 5The films' and their directors' aesthetic reflexivity, in turn, express the directors' sense of identity and their attempts at building a community in the filmic world of flows.

In this paper, therefore, I will examine the deconstructions of family in the films by Egoyan and Tsai and their reconstructions in some postmodern "non-places." Though addressing similar problems of the disintegration of traditional family structure in the postmodern urban space, Egoyan and Tsai can be diametrically opposed to each other in terms of their cultural contexts, urban settings and filmic styles. Placed in the hierarchical network of the global space of flows, however, their films can be engaged in a meaningful dialogue on difficult constructions of families respectively in the First-World and Third-World urban space. With the help of theorists on globalization such as Manuel Castells, Scott Lash and John Urry, therefore, I will analyze the different kinds of "flows" in Egoyan's and Tsai's films (e.g. video in Egoyan and water in Tsai), as well as their similar logic of "home vs. non-places," and set them in the context of the global context of flows. More specifically, I will use as my theoretic basis Lash and Urry's theory of aesthetic reflexivity, which they see as a way out of the "abstraction, meaninglessness, challenges to tradition and history" caused by the rapid flows and circulation of subjects and objects (3). I will then do a closer analysis of four films: Family Viewing (1987; hereafter cited as Family) and Exotica (1994) by Egoyan, and Rebel of the Neon God (1992)《青少年哪吒》hereafter cited as Rebel) and The Hole (1998) by Tsai. Family and Rebel will be analyzed in terms of the challenges they pose to family structure and family rituals. In both films, we also see the characters active in re-inventing their identity or family. Re-inventions of new identities and/or family will then be the focus as I move on to analyze the other two films set in postmodern "non-places": Exotica and Hole. The characters' self and family re-constructions might be difficult, unconventional and incomplete; however, they are ways to avoid being emptied or flattened by the rapid and destabilizing flows of commodities, information, desire and even virus.