Tag: Nina Paw Hee-ching

Hero (世间有她, Li Shaohong, Joan Chen, Sylvia Chang, 2022)

January 25, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

The latest addition to the growing sub-genre of Chinese pandemic movies, tripartite anthology film Hero (世间有她, Shìjiān Yǒu Tā, AKA Her Story) is the first to root itself in the lives of contemporary women just as they are disrupted by the arrival of COVID-19. As might be expected, the themes are largely those of love and endurance which draw additional poignancy from a Lunar New Year setting that prioritises family reunion but may also be in their way reactionary in reinforcing patriarchal social codes while implying that it might be the women who need to give a little and reassess their notion of what’s really important.

Directed by Li Shaohong, the opening sequence pits 30-something mother Yue (Zhou Xun) against her domineering mother-in-law, Ju (Xu Di), whose love and care for her son and grandson borders on the destructively possessive. Yue is the first to contract the mysterious new form of pneumonia then taking hold in Wuhan, prompting Ju to immediately try and kick her out of her own flat while insisting her son, Kai, and grandson, Dongdong, come back with her to another city further north. When lockdown is declared in Wuhan, the grandmother is trapped with the family but her acrimonious relationship with Yue adds to an already stressful situation. After Ju comes down with COVID too, Kai and Dongdong take refuge in the empty flat of a friend leaving the two women alone but mainly phoning Kai to complain about each other.

A phone call from Yue’s parents eventually forces Ju into a reconsideration of her corrupted filiality as she remembers that Yue is also someone’s daughter and a mother herself. She accepts that Yue’s criticism of her as overly invested in her son’s life is fair and mostly born of her loneliness rather than an attack on her otherwise conservative values that imply she exists only in service of the men of the family, while realising that by failing to take proper care of herself she accidentally increases the burden on those around her and should instead agree to care and be cared for as a part of a harmonious community.

This question of interdependence also raises its head in the third chapter directed by Sylvia Chang set in Hong Kong and filmed in Cantonese. Chang’s segment is not really much about the pandemic save for the additional strain it places on the relationship between press photographer Chelsea (Sammi Cheng Sau-man) and her husband Daren (Stephen Fung Tak-lun) with whom she is in the process of separating. When their son develops a fever, they end up in a blazing row discussing the reasons their marriage is falling apart which relate mostly to differing views of contemporary gender roles with Daren apparently reluctant to do his fair share at home while lowkey resentful that Chelsea has not only continued to work but is professionally ambitious especially as, it’s implied, his salary is not really enough to support a family of four on its own. The family also have a Filipina helper who in a rather poignant moment is heard singing happy birthday to her own child back in the Philippines whom she cannot see because she’s earning money taking care of Chelsea’s. Like Yue, Chelsea is also prompted to consider what’s most important, but the implication seems to be that she’s the one in the wrong and should learn to prioritise her family while her husband is more or less vindicated rather than encouraged to change.

Only the middle section, directed by Joan Chen, attempts to deal with the gaping losses of the pandemic era as a young woman, Xiaolu (Huang Miyi), tries to gather the courage to tell her parents, who are still hoping she’s going to hook up with a now successful childhood friend, that she’s going to marry her uni boyfriend, Zhaohua (Jackson Yee), who’s stayed behind in Wuhan to look after their cat while she returns to Beijing for Lunar New Year. Xiaolu keeps in regular contact by phone but soon discovers that Zhaohua has become ill with a mysterious illness. She immediately decides to return to Wuhan but he warns her not to because it isn’t safe and shortly thereafter the city is locked down while she and her family are placed under quarantine in Beijing. Shot in a washed out black and white only the various FaceTime conversations between the young couple are in colour hinting at the greyness that now surrounds Xiaolu’s existence and the distance between herself and the happy life in Wuhan which has now been taken away from her.

The film’s Chinese title more literally means “the world has her” or maybe more simply implies that she is in the world, more of an everywoman contending with the extraordinary than the “hero” of the title though the survival of the three women is in its own way also of course “heroic”. This concept of heroism may however be somewhat problematic in its emphasis on patriarchal social codes which insist that their first and only duty is to the family even if the message of holding your friends and relatives closer in the wake of disaster is universally understandable. Nevertheless, it does perhaps pay tribute to the women’s perseverance and determination to seek kindness and love even in the most difficult of times.

Hero streams for free in the US and Canada until Feb. 5 as part of Asian Pop-Up Cinema’s Lunar New Year celebration.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Reclaim (一家之主, CJ Wang, 2022)

September 3, 2022by Hayley Scanlon

An ordinary middle-aged woman begins to wonder what it’s all been for when dealing with her insensitive, authoritarian husband, distant children, and the sacrifices she continually made to make others happy in CJ Wang’s touching family drama, Reclaim (一家之主, yījiāzhīzhǔ). The Chinese title, master of the house, is in its way ironic in the various ways in which Lan-xin (Nina Paw Hee-ching) is expected to shoulder all of the domestic responsibility with none of the control, though she is indeed attempting to reclaim something of herself as a woman and an individual as distinct from being someone’s, wife, mother, friend, or teacher.

Lan-xin wanted to study art in Paris, but she got married young and started family and ever since then has led a conventional life doing what she thought to be right thing. Now, however, with her husband David (Kou Hsi-Shun) recently retired and both her children grown up she’s wondering a little what it’s all been for especially as David is a chauvinistic throwback who belittles her work as an art teacher while harping on about ways to make money patiently waiting for his collection of antique teapots to rise in value. Now that her mother’s dementia has intensified and she keeps escaping from her nursing home, Lan-xin wants to bring her to live with them but David is both dismissive and disinterested talking about it in the same way one would to a child who wants to get a dog asking if they really have the space and making it clear that looking after her will be Lan-xin’s responsibility.

While David holds on to a substantial cheque with the intention of investing it in a series of harebrained schemes from luxury tombs to VR cafes, Lan-xin’s desire is essentially to try and repair her fracturing family by buying a larger apartment where they could all live together. David complains that no one tells him anything, but that’s largely because he’s continually dismissive of their dreams and aspirations blowing a hole in his daughter’s new project designing eco-friendly homes that prioritise individual comfort by telling her that she should just extend the living area into the balcony to trick people into thinking they’re getting more for their money. Jia-ning (Ko Chia-yen) in particular is feeling lost in her life unsure of what role it is she’s supposed to be playing while clearly disillusioned with the nature of the relationship between her parents in which her mother is expected to sacrifice her desires in service of her father’s. It’s clear that neither of the children want the kind of futures their parents envisaged for them, their professor son also preparing to return from the US to live a simple life in the Taiwanese countryside.

Both of the children, however, take their mother for granted and often treat her poorly. The son orders her to book his plane tickets for him and abruptly hangs up after asking her to clean his room and make his favourite food, while Jia-ning also snaps at her expecting her to handle domestic tasks and locate missing items. Lan-xin forms a quasi-maternal relationship with a former student who has returned from America (Mason Lee) and now works in finance but is faced with the implosion of all her hopes firstly in her daughter’s more immediate needs to claim independence in her working life while avoiding the same compromises she was forced to make, and then by the illusionary nature of her home owning dream buying one home for fragmenting family rather than enduring her dissatisfying living arrangements while investing in separate homes for each of her children.

There may be a degree of personal myth making in her meditating on the lost opportunity of a Parisian education as implied in an imaginary conversation with her mother, though as her miniature-making hobby implies perhaps she played the role she wanted to play but lost sight of herself somewhere along the way. A voyage into her own memory reunites her with her essential self and allows her to reclaim her name no longer willing to be subservient to her husband’s desires but prioritising her own. As in her dream, all her sacrifices will eventually be repaid while Jia-ning too comes to a better understanding of her mother and grandmother along with her own place in a changing society. Lan-xin is finally a master of herself no longer afraid to take up space in her own home and in full control of her own aspirations and desires.

Reclaim screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. It is also available to stream in many territories via Netflix.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)

Beyond the Dream (幻愛, Kiwi Chow Kwun-Wai, 2019)

October 8, 2020by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Two troubled souls battle illusionary love in Kiwi Chow Kwun-Wai’s existential romance, Beyond the Dream (幻愛). What is love when divorced from fantasy, and once you know do you have the courage face it? That’s a question asked by each of the mirrored protagonists who’ve convinced themselves they are unworthy of love while struggling to extricate themselves from past trauma and present insecurity as they find the sands of reality constantly shifting beneath their feet.

Chow opens with a street scene, the evening crowds gently parting to find a woman in distress, Ling (Wong Lam), who eventually begins to take off all her clothes. While passersby stare and film her public breakdown, a man, Lok (Terrance Lau Chun-Him), who recognises her from a support group for sufferers of schizophrenia, comes to her rescue as does a mysterious woman who wraps her cardigan around her giving her both modesty and warmth. Helping Ling into an ambulance, Lok ends up with the mystery woman’s cardigan somehow captivated by her, touched by the way she came to Ling’s rescue when everyone else was intent on ridicule. Sometime later he is surprised to realise that the woman lives on the floor above him on his estate. Returning her cardigan he discovers her name is Yanyan (Cecilia Choi Si-Wan) and she lives with her violent drunk of a father (Ng Kam-Chuen). The pair become a couple and Lok starts to wonder if he should tell her about his struggles with mental health only for his symptoms to begin resurfacing. Much to his horror he realises that his relationship with Yanyan is nothing but a vivid fantasy, a figment of his illness which exists only his mind.

Yet even fantasy is built on a grain of truth as Lok later discovers when “Yanyan” turns up at one of his support group sessions only she’s a post-grad psychology student by the name of Yip Nam who is looking for volunteers to participate in her research into erotomania in those diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nam hopes to find out if lack of love is a causal factor in the condition through the stories of those who become consumed by romantic delusion. Unfortunately, her project is rejected by her supervisor, Dr. Fung (Nina Paw Hee-Ching), on the grounds that she has no viable subjects. Lok would seem to be the ideal patient, were it not for the awkward fact of which Nam is still unaware that she herself is the subject of his fixation, the “real” woman who came to Ling’s rescue all those months ago.

“Relationships are always your problem” Nam is warned, herself carrying the burden of a traumatic past which, according to her mentor Fung, has also convinced her that she doesn’t deserve love, mirroring Lok’s fantasy of Yanyan and her imprisonment at the hands of the abusive father who eventually keeps them apart. In her role as his therapist, she counsels him to “find your true love in reality”, interpreting his recurring dream as a metaphor for his desire to lose himself in the comforting fantasy of his illusionary love for Yanyan rather than take the risks concurrent with seeking happiness in the “real” world. But she herself is also seeking wilful oblivion in other kinds of illusionary romantic distraction pursued perhaps as a form of self harm or at least a means of blaming herself for something for which she has no need to apologise.

For Lok, meanwhile, romance is still more uncertain, his sense of reality permanently impaired as he finds himself pulled between his idealised love for Yanyan and the problematic relationship with Nam while convinced that no one could ever love him because of his mental illness. “No matter who you really are, you’ll all leave me in the end” he sadly affirms, later advising Nam that “it’s time we wake up from our dreams” ironically advocating for a return to “reality” while simultaneously running from it. Continually divided in Chow’s elegant composition, forever gazing through mirrors and seeing only the reflection of unfulfilled desire, the lovers struggle to overcome their psychological barriers to move beyond the dream of love into something more concrete if perhaps no less illusionary, chasing self-acceptance in the eyes of another as they surrender to romantic destiny as its own kind of “reality”.

Beyond the Dream screens at Chicago’s Davis Drive-in on Oct. 10 as the closing night of the 11th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

My Prince Edward (金都, Norris Wong Yee Lam, 2019)

March 6, 2020by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

“Why do you all think that marriage means happily ever after?” A conflicted young woman asks the man attempting to railroad her into a life of conventional respectability. “It doesn’t mean that” he explains, “But there’s no happiness if you don’t get married”. In 21st century Hong Kong can it still really be that a woman’s success or failure is measured by her age at marriage? The debut film from Norris Wong Yee Lam, My Prince Edward finds its heroine asking if there isn’t more to life than marrying a man you don’t love because it’s what everyone seems to expect.

31-year-old Fong (Stephy Tang Lai-yan) has been in a committed relationship with wedding photographer Edward (Chu Pak Hong) for the last seven years, but she’s been keeping a secret from him. 10 years previously, she and her friend Yee (Eman Lam Yee-man) underwent sham marriages to Mainlanders in return for cash so they could rent a flat with a third friend, Mabel. Fong believed that the agency would deal with her “husband” on their own, arranging his Hong Kong residency permit and thereafter a divorce but although Yee’s “marriage” went off without a hitch, Fong’s hit a snag in that the agent was arrested so her husband never got his ID card and she never got her divorce. The reason she’s worried now is that she overheard Edward tell his assistant to photoshop his client’s marriage certificate to redact any mention that he’s been married before to avoid potential embarrassment at the ceremony.

The fact is, Edward is a strangely conservative, patriarchal sort of man and she knows he might not be very understanding even if she sits him down and explains that she’s technically still married to someone else. Everything might have carried on as normal if Edward had not taken it upon himself to make an ostentatious public proposal that Fong could hardly have refused even if she’d wanted to. The public proposal is perhaps another manifestation of Edward’s manipulative tendencies, but is also mostly undertaken to please his conservative and equally possessive mother (Nina Paw Hee-ching) with whom he still shares a joint bank account at the age of 31. Too afraid to face the potential consequences of the pair finding out, Fong attempts to track down her “husband”, Yang Shuwei (Jin Kaijie), to convince him to co-sign the divorce papers so they can come through before her mother-in-law’s preferred wedding date in a few months’ time.

The grand irony is that Fong only did the sham marriage because she felt trapped by her conservative parents who objected to a teenage romance. She moved out to find freedom, but now feels trapped within the claustrophobic district of Prince Edward and most particularly the Golden Plaza shopping centre which houses her apartment and the bridal shop where she works which is next-door to Edward’s photography studio. She wanted to move into a swanky new flat, but Edward’s mother is dead set on buying the place where they currently live so Edward won’t have to move, an arrangement which suits him fine. Edward, meanwhile, is prone to jealous rages and Fong can hardly leave the apartment without getting 30 messages asking where she is and when she’ll be back.

It turns out that “freedom” was what Shuwei was looking for too. He wanted a Hong Kong ID card as a stepping stone to going to America, hoping to make worldwide travel easier than with a PRC passport. Ironically, he can’t understand why Fong puts up with Edward’s prehistoric attitude and encourages her to reconsider marrying a man who’s already borderline abusive. Fong doesn’t quite want to admit it to herself but she feels the same, only she doesn’t have the courage to resist. She’s been successfully keeping Edward at arm’s length all these years, but now that the subject of marriage has been raised she’ll have to make a firm a decision.

Working in the bridal shop she sees enough stressed out, unhappy couples going through the motions to realise that it’s not all sunshine and flowers, while it sounds like her family life was not exactly a bed of roses growing up. What she can’t seem to do, however, is to give herself permission not to marry. Unexpectedly getting his wings clipped, Shuwei asks her what it is she wanted to do and where she wanted to go, questions that no one else has really asked and Fong doesn’t know the answers to. If she stays with Edward, she might never find out. Like the flipped over turtle she tried to rescue from a pet shop, Fong runs the risk of swapping one tank for another, ending up trapped inside the Golden Plaza for the rest of her life being bossed around by her mother-in-law and walking on egg shells around the fragile Edward which seems like a heavy price to pay simply to be accounted respectable. “You don’t know what freedom is” Shuwei scolds her, confused that she chooses to stay when she has the choice to be anywhere she wants. The real Prince Edward gave up his throne for love, choosing one kind of freedom at least or perhaps just swapping one tank for another. Fong doesn’t know where she wants to go, but is beginning to realise that she has a choice and choosing herself is no bad thing.

My Prince Edward screens on March 8/12 as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

The Attorney (一级指控, Wong Kwok-fai, 2019)

October 5, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

What price justice? Wong Kwok-fai’s legal thriller The Attorney (一级指控) puts an unequal society on trial but discovers that to beat shadiness you might need to get a little shady and a healthy bit of deviousness may serve you well if it’s offered in service of a noble ideal. Then again, it’s a slippery slope towards the abyss if even the proponents of law aren’t above a little judicial finagling to ensure that “justice” gets done in a society which continues to defer to those with the biggest pockets rather than protecting those of meagre means.

We meet our two attorney heroes in the middle of their respective cases. Jaded hot shot Lei You Hui (Alex Fong Chung-sun) is defending a journalist who broke an important story about corruption in the competition for places at prestigious schools from a defamation charge, while the idealist rookie Kelvin (Carlos Chan) is defending a frail old woman held up on a charge of operating without a proper business licence. Lei wins his case, and Kelvin loses. Lei mocks Kelvin’s lack of success, and Kelvin has only contempt for Lei’s cavalier attitude towards the upholding of justice.

The action begins when a 25-year-old man, Lee, is found lying in a pool of blood next to the dead body of a young woman, Ka-yee, who is later discovered to be the daughter of a billionaire businessman, Kwok (Liu Kai-chi). The case seems open and shut. Lee claims he passed out and found the body when he woke up but the circumstantial evidence against him is overwhelming. His grandmother, Chu (Nina Paw Hee-ching), of course believes that he is innocent and enlists the best lawyers she can get access to, leading her to a solicitor who introduces her to Kelvin who is determined to see that the young man gets a fair trial. Lei, meanwhile, has a personal interest in the case in that his late wife was killed in a shopping mall collapse 10 years previously which also took the lives of Lee’s parents. Lei prosecuted a class action law suit, but lost. The shopping mall was constructed by Kwok’s company, which gives him an additional reason to want to help aside from trying to make things up to Lee and Chu whom he feels he failed all those years ago.

Wong wastes no time in demonstrating that “justice” is a nebulous concept when society is necessarily set up to benefit the rich. Ka-yee’s body was discovered in a building belonging to a property magnate, Tsai Chi-wai (Patrick Tam), who is currently running for political office on a platform of equality for all. Chi-wai is, however, a member of the super rich elite who believes he can do as he pleases because he is protected by his wealth and privilege. Lee, by contrast, is a poor boy delinquent who ordinarily wouldn’t have access to a fancy lawyer to clear his name and most likely would have been torn apart by the elite prosecutor those with vested interests have ensured is attached to the case even though it’s a simple enough affair.

Yet, as Lei discovers, the roots of corruption lie in the understandable desire to protect one’s children even when they’ve made terrible mistakes. Meeting with Chi-wai’s smarmy father, he discovers a man who talks up his youthful high ideals of union activities and working for the workers but later emphasises his hard won cynicism in insisting that no one with a brain seriously believes in things like truth and justice, only self interest. Tsai wants to protect his son at all costs, if only to protect himself by getting his boy into high office. Meanwhile, Kwok is left with questions about his own responsibility for his daughter’s death. If having literally billions in the bank can’t keep your little girl alive, then what use are they?

Then again, having billions in the bank is pretty useful leverage for getting your own way even if you eventually have a change of heart about enabling societal corruption. Chi-wai snarls that you need to be smart to survive, but according to Kelvin saving lives is more important than winning. Lei, who had given up his lofty ideals after being unable to get “justice” for his wife’s death begins to regain his faith in the law thanks to Kelvin’s influence and the accidental coincidence of getting a kind of revenge on Kwok by showing him the error of his ways in illuminating the truth behind his daughter’s death. To do that, however, he’ll have to bend the law a little which leaves him a compromised figure if for the best of reasons as he wilfully demonstrates the flaws in a legal system which is in itself inherently corrupt in its avowal that everyone is equal before the law while ignoring the fact that not everyone has access to the same level of “justice”. Wong’s conclusion may be a little rosy as even the most jaded of legal minds finds himself minded to rebel against the system, but there’s no denying his purpose as Lei decides to protect his daughter by protecting his society from the forces which threaten to blacken her future.

The Attorney screens in Chicago on Oct. 10 as the closing night gala of the ninth season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema. Actor Kenneth Tsang Kong, scriptwriter Frances To, and xxecutive producer Cherrie Lau will be in attendance for an introduction and Q&A.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sen Sen (生生, An Bon, 2018)

March 20, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

“The rules are dead but we are not” jovial granny Lili (Nina Paw Hee-ching) insists as she shows some young whippersnappers how pool should be played. An Bon’s Sen Sen (生生, Shēng Shēng) offers more than a few life lessons along its merry way as it wanders through the grieving process from both ends – an elderly woman deciding to live her best life in her last days, and a young boy trying to come to terms with the death of his older brother, but for all of its melancholia affirms that life should be lived without regrets or rancour and with as much understanding as it’s possible to have while remaining firmly rooted in the present.

An begins with an ending – Lili’s middle-aged daughter sadly dealing with her late mother’s effects, before winding back a few months to young Sen Sen (Wu Zhi-xuan) who has inherited his older brother’s smartphone. A lonely child, Sen Sen spends his evenings in fast food restaurants to avoid to going home to an empty house while his mother works nights in a convenience store. Not quite understanding how smartphones work, he is struck by the enormity of his friend’s explanation that if he wants to go on using it he will need to delete some of his brother’s files to make more space. While scrolling he gets a notification that “Live 100 Days” is currently streaming and discovers that his brother had been an avid fan of Lili’s popular web channel via which she livestreams her everyday life as she deals with her terminal cancer diagnosis.

Sen Sen and Lili are of course dealing with a similar problem but from very different positions. Lili has fully accepted her terminal prognosis and decided against chemotherapy, preferring to live out her final days as fully as possible rather than spend them in hospital suffering with the effects of the treatment. Her daughter, Yi-an, however, does not approve of her mother’s choice and keeps nagging her to keep up with her doctor’s appointments which has only placed further strain on their positive yet perhaps distant relationship. Like Sen Sen, Lili is often alone at home, her husband having passed away some years ago and Yi-an now living in the capital, which is perhaps why she gets so much out of sharing her everyday life with strangers online.

Sen Sen, meanwhile, struggles to accept his brother’s death and his mother’s way of coping with her grief. He fears that he will eventually forget him and that his mother seems indifferent to his memory. Perhaps in an effort to ease the feeling of absence, the pair will be moving to a new, smaller apartment and Sen Sen has dutifully sorted out his brother’s things but his mother has all but ignored them. Like Sen Sen, his mother doesn’t like being in the apartment surrounded by a sense of incompleteness and so she throws herself into work to avoid thinking about her loss, leaving Sen Sen feeling neglected and unloved as if she’d forgotten about him too while consumed by her own grief.

Making friends with Lili, Sen Sen begins to understand a little about his mother’s grieving process just as Lili channels some of the things she’d like to say to Yi-an into the videos she gets Sen Sen to film for her. As Lili later puts it, everybody needs to learn to let go – of past resentments, of life, and of loss that can’t be avoided. Sen Sen becomes a surrogate grandson for Lili who admits that no one really knows what happens in life and she doesn’t quite know what advice to leave behind for her daughter, while she becomes a substitute maternal figure him as she gently tries to explain that his mother isn’t rejecting him or his brother but only attempting to deal with loss in her own way.

A gentle tale of learning to enjoy life while it lasts while recognising what it is that’s really important, Sen Sen is a strangely uplifting look at life in the shadow of death seen both by those approaching the end and by the ones who are left behind. Filled with warmth and humour, An’s whimsical screenplay is as cheerful as it’s possible to be just like its openhearted heroine keen to pass on the joy of being alive even as she prepares to say goodbye.

Sen Sen screens as part of the eighth season of Chicago’s Asian Pop-up Cinema on 27th March, 7pm at AMC River East 21 where director An Bon and Nina Paw Hee-ching will be present for an introduction and Q&A.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Show Me Your Love (大手牽小手, Ryon Lee, 2016)

March 19, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Is it ever really too late to make up for lost time? Malaysian-born director Ryon Lee explores dislocations familial and geographical between a conflicted son and the guilt ridden mother who left him behind. Show Me Your Love (大手牽小手) shifts from frenetic, ambitious Hong Kong to sleepy, laidback Malaysia and from the ‘80s to the present day as two generations reprocess the idea of family in the wake of their own fears and disappointments both afraid and eager to put the past behind them while there is still time to make amends.

In the Hong Kong of 2016, Nin (Raymond Wong Ho-yin) is a successful teacher with a high-flying estate agent wife Sau-lan (Ivana Wong) who’s trying to convince him to give up his teaching job and movie to Guangzhou to invest in property. Home life is somewhat strained with Sau-lan working overtime and Nin worrying about a move he doesn’t really want to make, all of which means it’s the worst possible time to get an unexpected long-distance phone call informing him that the aunt that helped to bring him up when he lived in Malaysia has passed away. Travelling alone to the funeral, Nin is encouraged to reconnect with his estranged mother Sze-nga (Nina Paw Hee-ching) who has apparently started to behave strangely much to the consternation of Nin’s cousin who had been looking after her but is due to move to Australia to be close to her own children. Sze-nga angrily insists that she doesn’t want to return to Hong Kong with Nin and so he has little choice other than to place her in an old persons home at least until he can sort things out.

Nin’s melancholy voice over relates to us the various reasons he chose not to stay in contact with his mother. After abruptly moving them from Hong Kong to Malaysia when he was a boy, Sze-nga was continually evasive about her personal life and frequently told him minor lies which left him with longstanding trust issues and a lingering fear that she would soon abandon him. Sze-nga eventually did just that, depositing him with her sister while she went abroad again to work only to resurface 10 years later when her son was almost a man, taking him back and accidentally ripping him away from the surrogate family he’d formed with his aunt.

Truth be told, Nin never quite felt as if he belonged in his aunt’s family either despite her best efforts. A nosy a relative made sure he was pulled out of the family wedding photos in case someone thought he’d been officially adopted, somehow signalling his liminal status like a stray cat given temporary refuge. Perhaps for that reason he never managed to keep in contact with his aunt, either, forgetting to send her a New Year card as he’d promised he would. Broken promises become something of a theme from Sze-nga’s constant attempts to smooth things over with a comforting lie to the guilt and resentment that stands between mother and son.

Failure to communicate honestly continues to cause problems for the pair as well as for Nin individually whose longstanding fear of confrontation has led him to avoid telling his wife he’d rather not move to Guangzhou or to explain what’s going on in Malaysia. Eventually joined by his wife and daughter, Nin begins to repair his familial wounds by coming to understand a little about his “difficult” mother in that she always wanted the best for him but had a funny way of (not) showing it. Before it’s too late, he decides to make up for lost time by making good on some of those long forgotten promises as seen on a cute homework assignment he made as a 10 year old in which he was tasked with figuring out his mother’s hopes and dreams.

Despite the fierce sentimentality, Lee makes space for some typically Hong Kong verbal humour to lighten the mood while Nin’s melancholy childhood reminisces take on a rosy, whimsical tone even as he relates his own heartbreak in feeling abandoned and rejected by his often absent mother. Show Me Your Love is a warm and funny tale of putting the past to rest before it’s too late, making the most of the time you have left with the people that you love before it runs out with too much left unsaid.

Show Me Your Love screens as part of the eighth season of Chicago’s Asian Pop-up Cinema on 26th March, 2019 at AMC River East 21, 7pm where actress Nina Paw Hee-ching will be present for an introduction and Q&A.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Canadian-Hong-Kong actress and Cantopop star Ivana Wong also sings the same titled main titles theme