When Irene picks up her teenage Joe from school, they engage in a warm, almost cheerful exchange. The conversation, which comes early in the new film Rosemead, carefully avoids potential minefields: Joe’s increasingly erratic behavior and Irene’s cancer battle.
That silence on sensitive issues is a familiar one for Lucy Liu. Playing Irene, Liu paints a wrenchingly compassionate portrait of an immigrant mother struggling to navigate multiple challenges in the wake of her husband’s death.
“In a lot of immigrant families, we don’t necessarily unpack our feelings in real time,” said Liu, who was raised by Chinese American parents and who learned to speak English when she was five. “There’s a sense of protection by being quiet and that silence can feel loving, but it’s also very heavy.”
It’s far more introspective compared to some of her other roles: Liu has charted a trailblazing path for Asian American representation in Hollywood from Charlie’s Angels to the swashbuckling Kill Bill saga. Despite all those successes, Rosemead is her first dramatic leading role. The film has a limited theatrical release in New York starting Dec. 5.
Director Eric Lin wrote this moody drama, centered around a small set of characters, with Marilyn Fu based on a real life story. The title is the name of a neighborhood in California’s San Gabriel Valley, home to a vibrant Chinese American community.
Liu brushed up on her Mandarin to better portray Irene’s mannerisms and accent, although the character that her film role was inspired by was a Cantonese speaker.
Central to the film is mounting anxiety on the part of both Irene — about Joe’s schizophrenia, making sure he takes his meds and lacking confidence that his therapist (James Chen) can save him — and Joe (Lawrence Shou), worried that his mother’s health is worsening.
Liu, who also produced the film, hopes Rosemead will prompt more discussion about mental health and lift taboos on the issue. She told NPR’s A Martínez in an interview for Morning Edition about “the struggle of not talking about feelings or even identifying our feelings” in her family as a child.
Irene and Joe feel increasingly isolated in a predominantly Asian community that shuns airing dirty laundry, despite some support from friends. Irene isn’t sure how to integrate the help that is available to her. “It’s a very big cultural shift to ask her to do, especially when she’s doing it on her own and trying to run a business and then, you know, at the same time grieve,” Liu said.
Their isolation ultimately leads to a calamitous end.
“People seem to highlight excellence, not so much anything else, and that’s what people brag about,” Liu said. “So I think that there has to be a lot more discussion about just everything. There should be more visibility about just living and surviving, and not so much just excelling only.”
Liu, a single mother to a 10-year-old son, acknowledges that parenting can be “really terrifying.”
Children, she said, “have to fall and they have to feel a sense of agency, even from a very young place. So that’s when you give them choice.”
She continued: “Hopefully, they make good choices at some point on their own, but they have to learn by kind of falling down.”
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Lindsay Totty. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.
Transcript:
A MARTÍNEZ, BYLINE: From “Charlie’s Angels” to the “Kill Bill” saga, Lucy Liu has charted a trail-blazing path for Asian American representation in Hollywood. And yet she has not played the lead role until now, with a new film, “Rosemead,” in which a completely different side of the actress emerges. Here she plays Irene, a Chinese American widow fighting cancer and helping her son as he struggles with schizophrenia. It’s based on a true story, and Liu also produced the film. And I asked Liu about the taboos around mental health in immigrant families – families like hers and mine.
LUCY LIU: I think in a lot of immigrant families, we don’t necessarily unpack our feelings in real time. And I think in this movie, there’s a lot of silence. And that can be incredibly compassionate because it also recognizes that our parents kind of had their own unfinished lives before we even entered the picture. And I guess understanding that and having compassion for that changes how we see them and then how we see ourselves. But that doesn’t take away the struggle of not talking about feelings or even identifying our feelings.
MARTÍNEZ: In this film, Irene’s son is Joe, who’s 17 years old, and he is showing signs of schizophrenia. He’s going through a really, really rough time. Let’s hear a scene from “Rosemead” between Irene and her son’s therapist.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “ROSEMEAD”)
JAMES CHEN: (As Dr. Hau) Mrs. Chao (ph), we need to work together to treat his schizophrenia.
LIU: (As Irene) Dr. Hau, just because you have a Chinese face is not meaning you’re understanding us.
MARTÍNEZ: I’ve heard that exact interaction many times, in that it’s like, you don’t understand us because you’re not from where we’re at, even though we share a lot of the…
LIU: Right.
MARTÍNEZ: …Same things.
LIU: I think in that particular scene, there’s a judgment from Irene that he doesn’t speak the language that she speaks or come from the struggle that she comes from. And so he doesn’t really know what it’s like. And I think the receiving of help is something that she wants, but she doesn’t know exactly how to incorporate that and integrate that into their lives. It’s a very big cultural shift to ask her to do, especially when she’s doing it on her own and trying to run a business, and then, at the same time, grieve. There’s something complicated and layered about that scene that’s very heartbreaking.
MARTÍNEZ: In addition to her husband dying suddenly with cancer, she was in remission. She’s…
LIU: Yes.
MARTÍNEZ: And now has cancer again. So, I mean, there’s a lot going on in her heart, in her mind and also maybe chemically in her body.
LIU: Yes. And I think that the root of it is that she has fragility physically, but she’s emotionally very strong. And I think that dichotomy is what’s almost keeping her alive, you know, to protect and be there for her son. And it’s fascinating that she starts to shrink more and more as the movie progresses. And I think that loneliness creates this feeling of not having a choice and being cornered into the choice and the decision that she makes in the end.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. And one of the biggest evolutions, Lucy, I think, for younger generations today is this openness and acceptance around discussing mental health. I want to play this scene. This is Joe’s friends, who saw him have a very disturbing incident at school after a school shooter drill, and they just wanted to check on him.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “ROSEMEAD”)
LAWRENCE SHOU: (As Joe) Sometimes all the – like, all the [expletive], like, gets to me, you know?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Actually, yeah.
SHOU: (As Joe) Really?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Yeah. Except I go to Pizza Hut and eat a whole supreme pizza alone.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I go to the pet store, and I play with the snakes.
SHOU: (As Joe) Why?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) ‘Cause it’s, like, really gross, and then it just gets me out of my head.
MARTÍNEZ: When I was a teenager, I couldn’t imagine, Lucy, even considering asking for help for something like this because I’d feel like I was weak or it was some kind of, like, mistake or misstep on my part. But today kids talk to each other about this all the time, and I think that can’t be anything but helpful.
LIU: A thousand percent. I mean, I don’t think we used the phrase mental health growing up at all.
MARTÍNEZ: Oh, no way. Absolutely not.
LIU: I mean, our family definitely did not have that language, so I think that we expressed pain through behavior. You know, mood, distance, probably overworking and then trying to keep everyone stable. And I think it’s such a beautiful scene because it’s, like, an outreach for these kids. And I wish that there could have been more of that for Joe, you know? And I think Irene doesn’t see that. I think she tries to reach out to him, but she just doesn’t have the emotional vocabulary to help that process.
MARTÍNEZ: So eventually, Irene gets to a point where she can see that Joe is spiraling, and then she confides something very, very dark that she noticed about him to his therapist. Let’s listen to that.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “ROSEMEAD”)
LIU: (As Irene) He have an interest on guns. Maybe he going to hurt some people.
CHEN: (As Dr. Hau) I understand your worry, but most people with schizophrenia don’t engage in violence. In fact, it’s quite rare. We’ve no reason to believe that Joe is any different.
MARTÍNEZ: Lucy, you’re a single parent. You have a son who’s around 10 years old. It’s such a tightrope to be a parent.
LIU: You know what? Having a child is really terrifying.
(LAUGHTER)
LIU: There’s so much nuance to life, and I think the one thing that I have learned is that apologizing to your child is really healthy.
MARTÍNEZ: Really?
LIU: And it can reset things, and it can show that life is not perfect. You’re not perfect. And it also allows them to realize that you can make mistakes, you know? And that you should make mistakes. Like, that’s how you learn. And I know that my parents never apologized to me once.
MARTÍNEZ: You know, it’s funny. I did apologize to my daughter once, a long time ago. She wanted…
LIU: Just once?
MARTÍNEZ: …To take an all-day…
LIU: (Laughter).
MARTÍNEZ: Well, because – so she wanted to take this all-day trip to the beach with a group of people. There were some boys in there, too. I didn’t feel good about it, right? So I said no. She was so mad at me. And then I said, you know what? I’m sorry that I love you so much and that I want to make sure you’re safe. That was my big apology to her.
LIU: That’s the only time you apologized?
(LAUGHTER)
LIU: Oh, my gosh.
MARTÍNEZ: It didn’t work because she kind of just was quiet.
LIU: You know, the thing about kids is that they want a sense of control. They also have to fall and they have to feel a sense of agency, even from a very young place. So that’s when you give them choice. And hopefully, they make good choices at some point on their own, but they have to learn by kind of falling down.
MARTÍNEZ: That is Lucy Liu. She produced and stars in the new film “Rosemead.” Lucy, thanks.
LIU: So great speaking to you, A.
(SOUNDBITE OF GOLD PANDA’S “SWIMMER”)
