When Joan Chen moved to California from Shanghai, she had just won Best Actress at the Hundred Flowers Awards (at the time considered to be the Chinese equivalent to the Oscars) for her role in 1979's Little Flower. Beloved in her birth country, she sought to make a new home overseas and started at square one in Hollywood.
"In my 20s, there weren't any interesting Asian roles," Chen tells Exclaim! over Zoom in support of her latest film, Dìdi (弟弟).
A problem not exactly new in Hollywood, Chen recalls how Anna Mae Wong, one of the first Asian-American stars, struggled to truly prove herself: "Anna Mae Wong was working at a time when Hollywood was fantasizing about the Orient. She proved that she had star quality, but she didn't ever get the chance to portray complex, real, humanized characters."
After Chen made the move to America, she found success starring in the Academy Award-winning The Last Emperor, David Lynch's Twin Peaks and the seminal queer drama Saving Face. However, for as much progress had been made since Anna Mae Wong's run during the early days of cinema, even an actress as talented and proven as Chen still found herself on the sidelines of an industry not quite ready to open its doors to different faces and stories.
"Parts dried up for me. For so many years, I wasn't working at all — no interesting parts. I went back to China to work," she explains.
The Hollywood of today, while still in need of improvement, has experienced a drastic social and cultural shift in the last decade or so, and thankfully Chen is here to reap the rewards of a movement she helped propel forward 40 years earlier.
Dìdi (弟弟) made its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story written and directed by Sean Wang and starring Izaac Wang as Chris, a bratty 13-year-old deep in the throes of teenage angst, and Chen as his mother, Chungsing. The film, Wang's feature directorial debut, won the coveted Audience Award at Sundance and was quickly acquired by Focus Features soon after.
Chen's heart-wrenching turn as Chungsing is nothing short of brilliant and will have audiences conjure up deep-seeded guilt over their behaviour towards their own parents as kids. On Chen's performance, Wang recalls cutting out scenes of dialogue, because, "Joan's look communicates everything. Her face and her eyes did everything. She gave the character grandeur, that star quality, but she's also an immigrant mom. There's a warmth and groundedness that meets in the middle."
Much of the pain in Dìdi (弟弟) derives from Chris's frustrations — common for people of his age — compounded by the alienation the young boy experiences as a Taiwanese-American living in a predominantly white neighbourhood. It's a common experience for many children of immigrant families growing up in the West, and it can feel all-consuming at such a tender age. For Chen's part, her maternal response to Chris is what completes the film: a mother desperately wanting her children to live a happy and comfortable life, and being villainized by her kids in this pursuit.
Chen's performance becomes all the more interesting when considering her real-life coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution that saw famine and persecution destroy lives and families — including Chen's own, when her maternal grandfather died by suicide after being wrongly accused of being a foreign spy and counter-revolutionist. As a teen, Chen was subject to Mao Zedong's program to "send down" privileged urban youth to Chinese rural communities, which saw millions of kids taken from their families. (Chen avoided being "sent down" due to her burgeoning acting career.)
It's safe to say, Chen's coming-of-age story differs vastly from that of us hyphenate kids who have moaned so profusely, a disparity that Chen admits to struggling with when raising her own children.
"When my kids were younger, I did make the mistake of dismissing their frustrations and pains. It's like, 'What hardship? You have everything you need' — a roof above their head, they're fed and loved," recalls Chen. "[But] you cannot be comparing it with a very different era and a very different country and cultural environment. I know that these growing pains in the teens like Chris in the film [are] valid and true."
The journey Chen took to understanding her children's pain reveals itself in Chungsing throughout the course of the film, creating a layered performance that will hopefully bring Chen the recognition from Hollywood she so richly deserves. But regardless of whether the accolades come to fruition or not, at minimum, Dìdi (弟弟) has shone a spotlight on Chen, allowing others to finally appreciate her contributions to Asian-American cinema.
Films like Minari and Everything Everywhere All at Once were touted as milestones for our community, and while we celebrate their achievements, it's important to take the time and give flowers to those filmmakers and performers who were working when films like Dìdi (弟弟) weren't possible — the Joan Chens, Lucy Lius, Tamlyn Tomitas and Gedde Watanabes.
"I'm so happy I'm still here today and things have become so much better," Chen says. "It's a different time. Today we can be real and actually present our true selves, just like any other human being."