Vancouver actor shines in new movie
LIVING THE DREAM: Lim took up acting in 2010, at the age of 58
As a child Lillian Lim would sit in Chinatown theatre and dream of being an actor, but it wasn’t until more than five decades later she got to fulfil her fantasy.
In 2010, at the age of 58, Lim joined a Meetup group (online groups that bring people together to do what they love) called the Vancouver B-Movie Factory. The moviemaking group made YouTube shorts, and Lim was thrilled to bits.
Flash forward to 2018 and the 65-year-old now has a list of film credits under her belt, and is now on the big screen in a meaty supporting role in the Mina Shum written and directed feature film Meditation Park.
“I think that was my first love since childhood, because I grew up with Shirley Temple and the Chinese equivalent to Shirley Temple named Fung Bo-Bo,” said Vancouver’s Lim, remembering those early movie-going days.
“My mom would take me to the movies because my brothers couldn’t sit still.”
Lim’s dream of acting was put on hold for education, careers and kids. Her path included three years as a pharmacist before returning to UBC to become a dentist.
“I was considering medicine but my brother, who is an anesthetist, advised me to become a dentist because he said if one of my patients died I would take it personally. He said I should be a dentist because it is very hard to kill a patient,” said Lim, who has three adult daughters.
After working as a dentist for 27 years, Lim retired and turned her focus from teeth to tulle and topstitching and enrolled in the oneyear fashion design program at Blanche MacDonald in 2010.
“That was quite scary,” said Lim, about being in a room of 19-year-old fashionistas.
Lim did well in the class and her top marks landed her an internship with Chinese designer Lillian Zhang in Shanghai. However, she had to return to Canada a year later when her mother became very ill. It was then in 2013 that she finally decided she was going to give acting a try.
Her credits to date include parts in movies The Unseen, Darc and Birth of a Dragon. Her TV resume lists such titles as The Romeo Section, Legion, Fargo, Travelers and Altered Carbon.
But it’s her role in Meditation Park that has given Lim a lot more limelight.
Meditation Park is a wonderful film about a traditional Chinese woman who takes control of her world after a lifetime of serving her husband and family. Lim plays Anita, the leader of a trio of older Chinese women who stand on Vancouver’s Hastings-Sunrise area streets and sell backyard parking to the punters who go to Hastings Park and the PNE. It’s this gang of polyester clad car parkers that help culturally cloistered Maria (Pei-Pei Cheng) make the move into the outside world. At the end of the day it is a sweet, charming, coming-of-age story.
Anita and the other parking ladies (Sharmaine Yeoh and Alannah Ong) teach Maria the ropes: how to hold a sign, how to run from bylaw officers, and how to keep a new interloper (Donald McKellar) in check.
“My casting director Judy Lee brought her in for an audition, and I was immediately taken,” said Shum about Lim. “She had an urban but warm attitude, like she was a member of some angel girl gang mixed with an old-fashioned carny.”
Shum also appreciated how much Lim seemed to like the character, and the joy she took from playing the pushy parking maven. According Shum, last fall at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s opening night screening of Meditation Park Lim showed up in full character and tried to sell backyard parking to Mayor Gregor Robertson.
Seeing Lim was another reminder to Shum how far the Vancouver Asian acting community has come since she did her first feature the award-winning Double Happiness in 1994.
“I feel really buoyed to work in this city. The Asian acting community,
since I first started making movies, they are good. They are really good actors,” said Shum, adding that recently there are a lot more roles for Asian actors and the successes of actors like Sandra Oh, Constance Wu, and Randall Park have been inspiring and illuminating.
For Lim, making Meditation Park was like coming home as the film was shot on location over three weeks in the Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood, and Chinatown.
“It was a lot of fun. I grew up in Chinatown, and we went to the PNE every year and we saw all the old Chinese women with parking signs, and we actually parked in some of the backyards,” said Lim.
The familiarity of the neighbourhood was just part of the homey feeling Lim felt making this film. It turned out that Lim and her character Anita shared a sartorial sense that is, well, quite something.
“I relate to her a lot. I am her,” said
Lim. “It wasn’t hard for me to play her in the movie. When I went for a costume fitting 90 per cent of what they asked me to try on was already in my own closet. I shop a lot in Chinatown. I shop at Value Village. I go to these places that Anita probably bought her stuff from.”
Now with Meditation Park up safely on the big screen, Lim is eager for more work, although she would probably argue the term work. After all, she absolutely “loves,” acting.
“I think I like to be a lot of people that I am not in real life,” said Lim adding that she is not one for regrets or for slowing down.
“I think you know it is never too late to go after what you are passionate about,” added Lim. “I don’t think age should count as a barrier for what you want to do with your life.”