Nearly four years ago, filmmaker Anne Hu spoke with Grace Hwang Lynch for TaiwaneseAmerican.org as she was crowdfunding to make Lunchbox, a dramatic, three-part coming-of-age short drama about regret, healing, and honoring the people we love. In the film, when a Taiwanese American woman (Shirley), prepares lunches from her childhood, she struggles to forgive herself for pushing away her immigrant mother.
Hu had written Lunchbox in 2017, when a Facebook video appeared on her feed, capturing the experiences of Asian Americans who had been bullied for their homemade lunches. “My mother passed away when I was 20,” she told Lynch then. “As I watched the Asian Americans in the video express their love and gratitude for their parents, I desperately wished I could tell my mother how much I love her and how thankful I am for her. But I’ll never be able to do that. Overwhelmed with emotion, all I could do was sit down and write Lunchbox.”
Now Anne, (who directed, wrote, edited, and played the lead role of Adult and Teen Shirley)has shown her completed short film at festivals around the world, garnered many accolades, and is bringing Lunchbox to your home with its online release on Omeleto and TaiwanPlus.
In this new conversation with Cindy Lee, Anne shares more about the process of making this “love letter to her mother” and how it has deepened her ties to her communities.
A lot has happened since your last chat with TaiwaneseAmerican.org! Can you tell us more about the making of Lunchbox?
First, I should say thank you so much to HoChie and TaiwaneseAmerican.org. They’ve been super supportive of our journey. The first time I spoke with TaiwaneseAmerican.org was during the fundraising portion, and being able to spread the word about our story and our journey really helped us raise the money to get this film made.
I’m really proud of what we accomplished together—we basically put feature film energy into this short film. A feature film is a standard 90-minute to two-hour film. Our short film is 16 minutes. A lot of indie short films have maybe two actors and one location because that’s more manageable to create with limited resources. That’s how my previous shorts were. With Lunchbox, the story called for more, and I’m grateful we had the support to pull it off. We had five locations, 13 actors, and we shot for five and a half days. We had a team of over 70 people.
That’s a lot for a short film. Despite how large our production was, we were still operating on indie means. We didn’t have the funding of a major studio. This was definitely a community effort from every single community that was involved. The Taiwanese American community, the Asian American community, the Cleveland community, the film community, everybody had to come together, and I feel like everybody did because they were just so passionate about this story, and that’s really cool. I’m eternally grateful.
It sounds like it was very intentional to bring this back to Cleveland.
You know, I could have shot this film in New York. At the time, I was based in New York. In fact, when I was shopping the project around trying to recruit producers, a few asked, “Why don’t you shoot it here? It’d be so much cheaper.” But honestly, I wanted that authenticity, that specificity of Cleveland.
I think there are subtle differences in the way people move and talk. When you watch the film, you can feel that specificity. All the kids in that film were cast in Cleveland and across Ohio, and it’d be different if it was all New York kids or all city kids. Revisiting this era and this location, I think it’s all in there and you can feel it subconsciously.
What was it like to revisit your hometown and your childhood through making this film?
What is it like to revisit these areas? You know, I have a soft spot for Cleveland. It’s where I’m from. It’s part of who I am. I have some wonderful memories there. And of course, some memories that were sad and painful. And so, playing Adult and Teen Shirley, revisiting the story was both wonderful and uncomfortable. But at the same time, I wanted to go there.
Uncomfortable– how so?
It’s uncomfortable because it’s honest and personal. This is a very personal and heartfelt story, and I think viewers can feel that when they watch the film. I think its authenticity and specificity are why people have been able to respond the way they have to it. One of the first scenes you see is the young child version of the main character running down the stairs to greet her mother.
Her mother had just made her this delicious lunch of zongzi. And it’s the happiest moment you’ll ever see the two of them. There are people who, when they watch this film, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, my mom had that hairstyle,” or “Oh my gosh, I have that rice cooker.” Revisiting all these things—this is what makes the film what it is. This is what makes this film a love letter.
Can you tell us more about the audience response to Lunchbox?
I feel very fortunate that we’ve had a really amazing festival run. To date, we’ve screened in 53 film festivals around the world and won 20 awards, which is incredible. I have my team to thank for this. This film would not be possible without everybody who’s worked on it and all the communities, supporters, and donors that came together.
I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people across different races who will come up to me, and they’ll just start crying and telling me about their relationships with their parents or their experience growing up Asian American. I always feel very grateful when I have experiences like this. It’s a reminder of why I do what I do. I make movies to connect. To connect with others. And for people to connect with each other.
Lunchbox screens for a packed house at the historic Cleveland Playhouse Theater at the Cleveland International Film Festival, winning Audience Choice for Best Ohio Short.Has this changed or deepened your connection with the Taiwanese American community?
The act of filmmaking for me is inherently me continuing to evolve as a person, and that includes my identity as a Taiwanese American.
One of the things I feel so grateful for was reconnecting to my Taiwanese American roots in Cleveland, in particular. The two Taiwanese American actresses that played the younger versions of me are both from the Chinese school that I went to, the Chinese Academy of Cleveland.
First-time actor Elizabeth Gao plays Preteen Shirley in Lunchbox. Photo Credit: Quinton JacksonIt wasn’t on purpose. We put a casting call throughout all of Cleveland for Chinese American or Taiwanese American actors. We were open to [professional] actors, but we were also very open to non-actors. And it just so happened that both those girls were from my Chinese School. They had never acted before. I think they did a phenomenal job.
Working with them was such a full-circle moment. I grew up as this film describes. I [felt] so much shame. You know, it was the 90s. There just wasn’t as much representation. There wasn’t a lot of talk about taking pride in who we are, at least not in my circles at the time. So, it was really amazing to go back to that school to give back to this community that I’m so proud of now. To give that experience of being able to see yourself on-screen, something that I didn’t have then. We also had a producing team that was led mostly by women, many of them Asian American women. To give this experience of seeing and being represented in front of and behind the camera to other Taiwanese American girls was just incredible.
And, the community there at the Chinese school was really generous. So many items in that opening scene—the rice cooker, the sauces, all the Asian cooking supplies came from that community. They supported us with everything we needed.
The principal of that Chinese school, KC Liao, was also so integral to helping us. He’s actually the father of one of the girls that was cast. Again, none of this was planned to work out this way. But he actually helped out so much, he ended up being one of our associate producers.
Reconnecting to that school that I grew up in and the Taiwanese American community are truly one of the highlights of working on this film.
Since you mention the cooking supplies, let’s talk about one of the focal points of your film, the food.
Zongzi, the first dish in the film—I love that dish. There’s zongzi, or versions of it, in a lot of Asian countries, but the way we wrap it in Taiwan is very distinctly Taiwanese. And so, it was important to get somebody who understood that and could teach me how to do that.
We hired a Taiwanese food stylist named Anna Lee. She’s a very well-established food stylist in the industry, and I wasn’t even sure if we could get her, because we could not pay her normal TV show rate at all. But, she loved that we were telling this Taiwanese American story, showing foods from her country, and she said, “I want to support this.”
She was so crucial to making sure we got that authenticity. Originally, we were going to do hand-pulled noodles for one of the dishes. She was the one to tell me, “Actually, that’s not very Taiwanese.” She tried making them, and she was like, “You have to be a noodle master to do this. This isn’t really realistic for the character. But, what you would find in a household, that a mother could do, is hand-cut noodles.” So, that’s actually something that we changed super last minute. The week of shooting, I had to rewrite that section of the script from hand-pulled noodles to hand-cut noodles. And, the chopping of the noodles was fantastic, and we wouldn’t have been able to find that solution without Anna.
Authenticity has been a recurring theme in this conversation. What are some of the other ways you made sure Lunchbox would be authentic to you?
One was the casting of the mother character. It’s not an easy role to fill, because there aren’t many actresses in that specific age group who are immigrants who can speak Mandarin.
That was really challenging to find, but in the nick of time we were able to find an amazing actress named Dawn Ying Yuen. She was brilliant.
It was really important to cast an immigrant in that role because I feel like there are subtle differences. We definitely auditioned a lot of Asian American actresses for that role, and they were all very talented. This [casting decision] has nothing to do with talent. But, there are just some things, you know, that lived experience of an immigrant. It’s in the body . The way they move, the way they dress, the way they do their hair. All these little details were needed in order to feel that tension between the main character, Shirley, and her mother. Those subtle differences are the things that tear them apart. It’s the things that the main character doesn’t appreciate when she’s younger and can only appreciate when she’s older.
Also, all of the sound you hear in the film is from us actually cooking on set. The sound of the Tatung steamer steaming and the lid rattling—I got an actual Tatung steamer and recorded that sound. That’s such a popular and common kitchen appliance. That’s one of those details people don’t know, they think it’s a steamer and that’s just the sound. No, we specifically wanted a Tatung steamer. A lot of the tension that builds over time in the film is built through the sound.
You’ve called Lunchbox a love letter to your mother. But the story you tell stretches beyond one individual, doesn’t it?
I hope she’s proud. I just really want to make her proud through making this.
You know, this film is also about grief and what it’s like to lose a parent or loved one. And I think grief is a difficult journey for everybody. Losing a parent at a young age is inherently very challenging for any child to go through. My mom passed away when I was 20 years old. When you are a person of color or a child of immigrants, losing a parent has another compounded pain or grief, because it can feel like you’re losing a connection to the culture.
The main character is trying to reconnect with her mother, and also to her culture that she pushed away when she was a child. So, cooking these foods her mom used to make her, it’s a love letter to her mother, to my mother.
We talked about reconnecting to my Taiwanese American community. It’s also through the food. Food is not everything of a culture, but it’s a love language, it’s an entry point. Anytime we go to Taiwan, we see our relatives, it’s always like, “Have you eaten? What have you eaten? What do you like to eat?”
Even when there’s a language barrier, you know, if you don’t speak the language, food is this universal language. And it can get people to be inspired, to understand the culture in a deeper, richer way.
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Lunchbox is available on YouTube’s Omeleto and on TaiwanPlus for a limited time. For the latest on where to watch Lunchbox and to learn more about the Lunchbox team, please visit www.linktr.ee/lunchboxthefilm To learn more about Anne including her upcoming work, you can follow her on Instagram @annehufilms or visit www.linktr.ee/annehufilms
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