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This chapter analyzes The Ice Storm (1997). In The Ice Storm, Lee challenges the viewer with a new level of deconstruction and fragmentation of the family. This choice is an interesting one for the director, who had already negated and subverted the traditional Confucian patriarchal Chinese family structure in The Wedding Banquet. In that film, the homosexuality and individualism of the protagonist challenged and transgressed traditional Chinese cultural norms. Now, in the The Ice Storm, Lee had come to a new challenge of representing on film the deconstruction of the American family in the 1970s. The pivotal roles in the film all belong to teenagers. Both the beginning and ending of The Ice Storm focus on comic book imagery. The Ice Storm is an adaptation of Rick Moody's 1994 novel.

This chapter discusses the impact of an ice storm on the United States and Canada. In the United States alone, the storm damaged about 18 million acres of rural and urban forests in Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont. In New York, the power outage lasted twenty-three days; more than 1,000 transmission towers were damaged; and power companies replaced over 8,000 poles, 1,800 transformers, and 500 miles of wire. In Canada, the outage lasted thirty-three days; more than 1,300 steel towers were damaged; power companies replaced over 35,000 poles and 5,000 transformers. The Canadian response involved the largest peacetime mobilization of military troops in the nation's history. The impact on the region's dairy herds was massive. In New York, 1,400 out of 1,800 dairy farms in the storm region suffered losses.

This chapter discusses the breakdown and rebuilding of the electric grid in Potsdam in January 1998. It discusses how, unlike the focused, piercing devastation of a tornado, hurricane, flood, or earthquake, the breakdown of the grid took a week to evolve as it slowly, incrementally compressed the power grid past the breaking point. The heaviest accumulations covered the Seaway valley from its source at the eastern edge of Lake Ontario across a wide path north and south of the river all the way past Montreal. When the rain finally stopped falling, those lands were under more than four inches of ice. The chapter discusses various problems that people of the affected area had to face, and also discusses how power was restored in the region and the grid was brought back to normal.

This chapter discusses accidents and disasters, and relates a fire accident that happened on January 30, 1996. It also discusses an ice storm in Potsdam. The chapter reveals that during the ice storm, ice was building across eastern Ontario and southern Quebec, including parts of the city of Ottawa and most of the Montreal metropolitan region; it was forming in isolated patches of Vermont and New Hampshire, and spreading across a large swath of Maine and into the Canadian Maritimes. The job of maintaining the grids crisscrossing the great northeastern forests, challenging in normal times, was getting more difficult. The chapter reveals how the process was started to energize the emergency public service grid and to make emergency plans to face the ice storm.