The film In Love We Trust portrays the potential challenges that may come with China’s One Child Policy. 

The film starts with a tour woman giving a tour of an apartment to prospective customers. There, she received a call that her daughter was seriously ill. As such, she immediately brought her daughter to a hospital where she learned that her daughter was suffering from a serious, rare cancer affecting her bones. The only way to stop the issue was to have a transplant; However, the only likely candidate to qualify for such transplant was a sibling, which the daughter didn't have. This was the start of the family issues that arose between two families.

The woman’s daughter was born from a different father than her current one, and in order to save her, she needed the new child to be from the ex-husband, not the new husband. Naturally, the new husband wasn't particularly happy about this, and neither was the wife of the ex-husband. However, both families eventually permitted for a child to be born from the ex-husband through indirect means. However, this is a particularly sticky issue for the husband, because this means that the new husband can’t have any of his own children due to the one-child policy.

When the indirect methods for having the child didn't work, the ex-husband and the wife has agreed to have sex in secrecy from their families. However, the husband learned of their act because the wife’s phone somehow accidentally called the new husband without the wife knowing; In which he overheard the conversation between the two.

While this has caused a tension between the new husband and the wife, he has ultimately accepted the wife’s act under the condition that no-one knows of this incident, and that the child and everything else in relation to the child is marked under his name.

I think that while a situation like the one that happened in the film is extremely unlikely, I think it still underscores the tensions that may be caused due to the One-Child policy; If a family has an offspring of theirs have a disease that can be cured primarily through the means of the child’s immediate family members, what is that family to do?

The movie Lan Yu discusses about the hardships LGBT people face in China (although the movie itself revolved around a gay couple. One thing I realized is that whenever a movie is set on supporting the LGBT community, they generally will revolve around a gay couple; Rarely have I seen movies going on about Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transexuals).

The movie begins in a bar, where a business guy was helping out another business guy to find him a boyfriend. Ultimately, the business guy suggested the other business guy to go out with Lan Yu. Lan Yu himself is also a gay person. One thing I was particularly surprised with was when the gay business man ended up marrying a woman. That, I wasn’t surprised about; It was necessary for him to do so in order to remove suspicions that he was a gay person. However, after he divorced with the woman, he not only was depressed, but also he said that he thought he was a man who could make a woman happy. This made me wondering, even though the film directors portrayed the business guy as a gay man, could he also have been interested in woman?

Originally, it was the business man who was tugging the strings in the relationship. This could be seen in numerous occasions in the film. The first instance was when Lan Yu caught the business man cheating. Even though, Lan Yu was upset about this, he has forgiven the business man after he went to save Lan Yu from the “incident.” Another instance was when the business man gave him a house, and promised they would be together, but then ended up marrying the woman. I think it was when the business man married the woman when the relationship between the two began to change. It was instead Lan Yu who began to have control over the relationship.  

Later, when the business man was in deep trouble with the officials, Lan Yu saved the business man by paying the officials $3 million in an attempt to bribe the officials from enprisoning the business man.

In addition to attempting to show the difficulties gay men encounter in China, I think it was also to show that they not only have to capability to be in a lasting, (somewhat) loyal relationship, but also have to capacity to be in a happy relationship just like a straight couple could have.