For Adult Cross-Cultural Kid and actor Lucy Liu, being the child of immigrants meant that one language was spoken at home while another was spoken outside the home.
It was “the way that you receive something at home, which is fluid, which is poetic, which is common language, the mother tongue,” she says during a recent television interview promoting her new film “Rosemead.”
“But then when you go outside, and as a child, watching my parents receive, I guess, racism … being condemned based on what they look like before they even open their mouths,” she continues. “And then when they did, it was fragmented conversation, and I think that that broke my heart watching it as a child, but it also taught me the wrong things, which is to keep silent, to hold in my expression or my emotions, and I had to really unlearn those things, and I’m still unlearning them.”
Based on a harrowing true story, “Rosemead” wrestles with themes of identity, mental health and the immigrant experience in the United States, capturing the dissonance between cultural expectation and personal crisis. Liu delivers a fierce performance as Irene, a terminally ill Chinese immigrant trying to protect her teenage son, played by Lawrence Shou, who suffers from schizophrenia.
That broke my heart watching it as a child, but it also taught me the wrong things, which is to keep silent, to hold in my expression or my emotions.
“I wanted Irene to also have that feeling of, I guess, to connect with the audience, that her struggle inside the house was very different from outside the house,” she says. “And that fragmentation of dialogue, and the way that she uses the words, is powerful, but it’s also, there’s a lot that is not being fed and said.”
SAVING FACE
The Chinese language has the term “diu lian,” meaning to “lose face.”
“Which means ‘don’t shame us.’ So all of the things that happen within your own home stay in your own home,” Liu says.
Liu, who also served as a producer on the film and has been working on it for seven years, hopes viewers will see the movie “and understand that these stories are important.”
This story isn’t one just about the Asian American and Pacific Islander commmunity, she says.
“It’s a story that resonates universally, because it is about love, it’s about family,” Liu continues. “And it’s about the stigma of culture and what we carry, and how we continue to pass that on. And so, I really felt strongly that this movie, this little indie movie, should be there and exist for people to access.”
Check out the trailer below.
