Orphaned, which explored the environmental and financial cost of Alberta’s “orphaned” wells. “I’m a second-generation Chinese-Canadian; my mom immigrated to Canada in the 70s,” she says. “I’m really inspired by second-gen stories.
At the time I was writing Lucky Star I was watching a lot of the Sopranos. I loved Jewish-American cinema. I love Italian-American cinema.
A lot of those stories are second-gen where the culture is still very much a part of your life, but there has been a loss of culture as well. So you know these things but you are still holding onto something that your parents told you about. There’s a certain dynamism that I like where it’s not exactly an immigrant story anymore.
The kids have been born, they are established. What is their life like? That was what I wanted to show with this story. Personally, I really wanted to see a Chinese family on screen where it wasn’t the immigrant North American story, where it’s like ‘it’s so hard for us losing our culture’ and it feels like ‘Oh the motherland, we had so much and lost so much and I wish I was back there,’ this yearning for the motherland.
I wanted to show something where we are established here; we are Canadian and this is what we are dealing with now as this diaspora.”.