In ‘Expats,’ Wang treats Hong Kong as character
Director centers story on not only the lives of women but a changing city
I still remember ugly crying after watching Lulu Wang’s breakthrough feature, “The Farewell,” with my dad, an immigrant.
I saw myself in Billi, a Chinese American woman trying to make sense of her bicultural identity as she wrestles with a family secret — her grandmother, Nai Nai, is about to die, and everyone knows except her. “The Farewell” was an ambitious project; there are few U.S. films with an all-Asian cast where much of the dialogue is not in English. But Wang stuck with the integrity of her story and that bet paid off.
Wang’s work caught the attention of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Nicole Kidman; her production company, Blossom Films, optioned Janice Y. K. Lee’s New York Times bestseller, “The Expatriates,” and she was looking for someone to adapt it. They connected and Wang was eventually brought on board to write and direct on “Expats,” a six-part limited series on Amazon Prime Video.
When I meet with Wang in the restaurant of the London Hotel in Los Angeles, it’s just weeks out from the premiere of the series. Moving from the critical success of “The Farewell” to “Expats” has brought Wang a new weight of responsibility, but she carries it with a sense of duty.
“In ‘The Farewell,’ the fears that I had were, ‘Am I properly representing my family?’ ” Wang says. “This felt the same thing, but on a much larger scale because now my family was in the city of Hong Kong.”
Since 2020, Wang has
labored on “Expats,” which delves into the lives of three American women living abroad in Hong Kong and examines how their lives intersect within the city’s international community. The premise is centered on a missing child and the grief and shame that follows affluent mother Margaret (Kidman), her best friend Hilary (Sarayu Blue) and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a Korean American woman from Queens, New York, who is a recent college graduate.
Before signing on to the series, Wang met with Lee in New York City, where the author lives. And in an atypical move, Wang invited Lee to join the show’s writers room, which led to Lee writing “Home,” the final episode of the series.
Under Wang’s direction, and with the help of a diverse all-women writers room, the series takes license with Lee’s work,
breathing new life into minor characters whose backstories aren’t detailed or are ambiguous in “Expatriates.” For example, in the series, Margaret’s husband, Clarke (Brian Tee), is Asian; Hilary is South Asian; and one of Mercy’s romantic interests is a queer woman. It fleshes out a world that feels rooted in the reality of Hong Kong’s nuanced politics around race and gender.
Blue, who is Indian American, says it was “thrilling” to get to portray the complex character Hilary, who is on a path to self discovery later in life and is wrestling with ideas of motherhood.
For Wang, these changes came naturally as writers were considering characters they related to. Vera Miao, a queer Taiwanese actor and filmmaker, and Gursimran Sandhu, a Sikh Indian American writer-director, each wrote an episode of the series and
lent their perspectives to craft the queer and South Asian experiences reflected on screen, Wang says.
“I saw a real opportunity with Hillary’s (character) and I said, you know, let me find the writer who will help develop this, but I think it’s important to somehow address colorism in East Asia,” Wang says.
Each episode could stand alone as a short feature. But it’s the fifth episode, “Central,” that Wang brought with her to film festival circuits, earning buzz among critics and audiences. She centers the episode on Hong Kong natives and migrant Filipino houseworkers who sit at the periphery of the lives of wealthy American expats.
“I saw a real opportunity to both, of course, work with Nicole, who is such an incredible actor and an (executive producer), but also knowing that she told me that she would support my vision,” said Wang. “Because there’s no world in which somebody would give me the kind of resources to make a film about helpers in Hong Kong in a huge typhoon. We did some really big set pieces that required resources to center people who weren’t Nicole. It was incredible that Nicole gave me this platform to tell a story about expats, but then also to shed a spotlight elsewhere.”
Wang says she’s hopeful that the lives of Hong Kongers were depicted accurately and thoughtfully, and that the series expands the conversation around identity.
“When we talk about diversity, it’s not through an American lens. It’s through a much more global lens because even Asian American as a category in America is challenging in many ways because it is a huge continent,” she says. “I want people to question more and leave with curiosity rather than with labels ... (or) projecting or broadcasting.”
Wang doesn’t consider “Expats” to be political, but she also doesn’t shy away from showing Hong Kong’s thorny politics, including the Umbrella Movement, pro-democracy protests that began in 2014 over proposed election reforms that have divided Hong Kong citizens and mainland China.
“There was a lot of fear around these yellow umbrellas,” Wang said of the props they used in the series. At one point, she says that in post-production, they considered color correcting the umbrellas into a less threatening shade of orange. “Something small can take on so much meaning ... it rains all the time ... then they became a practical tool for defense when there was tear gas and all of that. And so then that’s how it transitioned from a utilitarian tool to a symbol of the revolution.”
The loss threatening to engulf Margaret’s life is juxtaposed with the indifference of a city that has much bigger concerns. The shift in Hong Kong’s government is signposted by a scene in the last episode where workers on bamboo scaffolding remove a neon sign, a mainstay of Hong Kong’s visual identity. There is a palpable sense of nostalgia for a city that is changing beyond recognition.
“I think in recent years, for me, I’ve really seen Hong Kong defined because so many people have left so you can’t say that it’s defined by those borders,” Wang says. “I really connected to the spirit of Hong Kong and wanted to make sure that I was able to translate that and I do think that that’s what initially intrigued me about the project was the resilience of Hong Kong as a parallel to the resilience of these women.”
The director effectively treats Hong Kong as another main character. The upheaval of protests and the mounting chaos of the women’s stories rise in unison with the typhoon that threatens to engulf the maritime port city.
Since the success of “The Farewell,” Wang has been working nonstop on “Expats.” She believes her job as a storyteller is to pay attention to stories that are most effective and powerful in addressing suffering. And that is where she wants to wield her influence.
“There is a lot of conflict, and as somebody who has always been raised as the mediator both within my own family as well as between cultures, that is something that I think about a lot,” says Wang. “Art has to be subversive particularly at this moment in time. You have to say something.”