KELLY YU
The director and writer connects with her family's story in her short film, Plum Town.
Photo by Graham Byers
I don't come from an arts background at all. It's the question my mom always asks: “Where did you get it from?” She traced it back to my fifth great uncle and is like, “Oh, he was a writer!” [laughs].
My dad is a geologist — he’s a professor and super academic — and my mom is an accountant. I sucked at math and science. I think English was the one subject I always got perfect scores in and everything else, I just didn't have the brain for it, which really perplexed my parents. So it was half knowing that I wasn't good at anything else and also dissecting what it means to be an only child.
Growing up, I think I was just always looking for something to do because I was bored and lonely by myself. I grew up playing the violin all my life and always felt like I was forced to, but I didn't realize how much I liked it until I stopped.
I loved writing novels and I was always writing my own books. But by books, I mean, I never made it past 10 pages because I would just move on to another story or idea to be obsessed with. And also fan fiction because I was really into Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.
In high school, I think I wanted to find ways to prove to my parents that art could be something I could realistically do with my life. I took a photography class in high school and really liked it. I saw photography and videography as an entrepreneurial way to do what I wanted, so I started taking photos for people and businesses and really liked that aspect of it.
When it was time for college, I was at this weird crossroad where I really liked business and I loved being entrepreneurial. I’ve always wanted to run my own company, and I also loved music, writing, and photography. I realized film was the amalgamation of everything I loved.
With writing and directing, I think it just means freedom. It means getting to tell the stories that I want and bring that to life and work with a bunch of cool people in every department.
I think of writing in terms of being able to control the narrative and directing is then being able to translate and bring that to life with the help of composers, cinematographers, and actors.
I realize that, as a young filmmaker, you learn by imitating. I remember being in my first year of film school and not knowing if I had a style. I would screen things in class and then my classmates would be like, “Oh, this is a Kelly Yu film.” I was so confused.
But now, the more I write, the more I realize that I gravitate towards the same things. In terms of themes and subject matter, it is always about family. And I think this is my trauma as an only child surfacing, but even if it's not explicitly about family, it is always the core.
I recently had to write a bio or resume and I was like, I need to find a way to encapsulate this theme or this topic of filmmaking that I'm drawn to, and I guess it’s the dramedy genre, but more specifically, it’s finding humanity within the absurd. I always find myself drawn to really absurd topics.
***
Plum Town is originally based on my grandfather's story. I went back to China for the first time in years after I graduated from high school. It had been a really long time. In my last memories of visiting him, I was significantly younger. I was that kid that hated visiting my grandpa's countryside house because he spoke in this dialect that I didn't really understand and he lives in the rural countryside. It's a bit rough out there, especially in the summer since there's no AC. All of my youngest or earliest memories were associated with never wanting to visit.
When I visited in 2019, I obviously was older and I had this desire to connect with him to learn more about my family. I remember my uncle was taking me on a walk one night, and I think I was trying to make conversation. So I was like, “How's the farm?”
My dad comes from generations of wheat farmers in the countryside. He's the youngest of five, and he's the only one who went to school and studied his way out of the countryside and moved to the city. But everyone on his side of the family are still farmers.
My uncle kind of looked at me and he was like, “Oh, we don't do that anymore.” Just casually. He was like, “Five years ago, this Korean smartphone corporation showed up and offered us a lot of money to buy out our land. And now we just work in the factory. This is just what everyone is doing.”
There's this national movement, the rural revitalization strategy, to raise the poverty line in the countryside in China. There's a lot of companies and land developers that are expanding factories to the countryside because the land is cheap. In return, the farmers get to work in the factory.
He was like, “It's great. It gave us the money to send your cousins to school and lifted our quality of life.” But to me, in that instant, it felt like such an erasure of my family history.
I went back to America and started college. I started my first year at USC film school and my mentors were like, “If you want to direct, then you should write the films that you wanna make because no one's gonna hand them to you.” And the story of my family just stayed with me. I started doing more research into it and I learned about how this is happening to farms all over the countryside. So I decided to try and write it as a feature film.
I thought no one would ever be interested in something like that because it felt like such a niche — a personal thing — especially in Hollywood because we’re so used to being told like, “Oh, this kind of film would never get made. It's not mainstream enough. No one will ever want to finance this.”
I think that writing it as a really young writer was actually a blessing in disguise because you don't have that pressure of, I'm writing this for an audience or I'm writing this for money. I'm just writing this for myself. Just to collect my thoughts on paper.
In the fall of 2020, I wanted to direct something and I actually started writing a separate short film. Then, I met my now really good friend and collaborator, Thomas Kim. We were having coffee and he was just like, “Are you dumb? Why don’t you just do the short film version of Plum Town?”
I remember thinking, Oh, I can't. I'd have to shoot it in China. Where am I gonna do that in Los Angeles? Thomas challenged my way of think-ing about it and said, “It doesn't have to be the literal version of the feature. It can just be thematically linked. It can just be something that gets the theme across and the tone of the larger piece.”
From then on it was just, How do we shoot this? Where do we go? We are in Los Angeles. How do we find a place that resembles the Chinese countryside? We ended up getting really lucky because my producer, Jean Liu, just bought a duplex in Silver Lake and was doing a complete renovation and the second unit was completely untouched.
It was perfect. It was the bones of the house that we were looking for, so our production designer went in and completely transformed the entire space. We didn't have to pay to use it and we got to have it for as long as we needed, which was just super lucky.
***
I'm from New Orleans and a lot of artists never play in New Orleans. There’s the AMC theaters and there's a very local indie theater called The Broad. I remember [Lulu Wang’s The Farewell] was playing at The Broad, which I was so surprised about. I went to opening night and there was a line in front of me with people from any ethnicity, any race, and they were all buying tickets to The Farewell.
I literally shed a tear in line because I never thought I would ever, in today's age, witness a Mandarin language film starring Awkwafina play at an obscure indie theater in New Orleans, Louisiana, with a line out the door.
Lulu Wang loves capturing the absurdity in Chinese culture, but also the “East meets West” lens. So I love Lulu Wang’s work and then Cathy Yan, who I think these days, people know more from her directing the DC film, Birds of Prey. But I knew her from her debut feature, Dead Pigs, which Plum Town is heavily inspired by.
Everyday on Instagram, I see they're casting for this Asian American TV show or this Asian American film. But then I wonder if there's a distinction between Asian American and “East meets West,” and if those lines are getting blurred in Hollywood or if Hollywood still wants to divide that.
A film like Dead Pigs, for example, wouldn't really be Asian American because it's set in China with Chinese characters. Cathy Yan just happens to be Asian American. But that film never got distribution in America until she directed a DC movie because it was too Chinese. Whereas a film like Minari can be financed and distributed by A24 and can become mainstream.
So that's just something I'm grappling with because I remember crowdfunding for Plum Town and calling it an Asian American film because, in a way, I felt like I had to in order to receive that acknowledgment and support from the Asian American community.
But then I kind of felt a little bit like a fraud because it's in Chinese, it's set in China, and the only thing making it Asian American is me. I wonder if there's an emerging space for both.
***
I think, especially for a young filmmaker, it's so easy to get your hopes up. I think being realistic and not trusting someone's promises until it happens is a really good way to not be disappointed. I remember the first time a producer offered me the opportunity to adapt a book into a pilot and your mind starts going a million different ways. Oh my gosh, have I made it? Am I a writer now? I'm gonna make money from writing. And then you get ghosted and — just keep everything in check.
One of them was being able to discern if people wanted to work with me because they actually wanted to versus other reasons.
It was the token minority, it was the young female, and it would always alternate. It was different every time. But the token minority is definitely a big thing. I always found myself introducing myself as an Asian American writer and director. And then I was like, What if I just introduced myself as a writer and director or a filmmaker? I still struggle with this.
I think part of it is being proud of your heritage. I am a Chinese American director. This is what I'm proud of. This is the space that I exist and work in. But also being able to identify just as me or as a filmmaker. For a year, I was super paranoid about any opportunity, any collaborators, anyone that wanted to take a chance on me. I just became super distrusting.
I think the lesson that I learned from that was, honestly, to surround yourself with good people. I used to not give my gut enough credit. If my gut told me something, I would second guess myself; I'm just overthinking this.
But I think, especially this past year, I’m really learning to trust my instincts more. If my gut tells me something is right or something is wrong, I try not to second guess it and overthink it and just follow my instinct instead.
***
Plum Town, at its core, is about how I feel as the child of immigrants. We often strive to become more than our parents. And by that, I mean, always wanting to leave home, always wanting to go to the big city and make it. I definitely have looked back at my hometown and my parents and thought, Oh, I just wanna get outta here and make it big.
It's the eventual realization, and even subsequent guilt, that we wouldn't be as successful without our parents. As far away as we move, we're nothing without them.
There is a scene in Plum Town where it all centers around that realization. Honestly, I just want people to have that realization to call their parents and to go back home more often. I think what I loved about The Farewell is the message was just to call your grandma, you know? So call your grandparents and call your parents, and just realize our parents have sacrificed so much for us. It's also a way of saying thank you to our parents.
As told to Michaela Zee
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. All images courtesy of Kelly Yu.
Image Credits
Director: Kelly Yu
Cinematographer: Philips Shum
