The acclaimed new film exploring the myths about left-handed people

“For years leading up to making this, I kept telling Sean that I really wanted to tell stories about women. The environment I grew up in Taiwan had a lot of expectations and a lot of restrictions on girls. They had to be a certain way, they had to fit in. You can’t stand out. Especially when you’re young, you’re told not to be different, and that has a huge impact. ”

Casting a left-handed actor

In 2023, Taiwan is still Some of the lowest reported rates The left-handedness rate in the world is approximately 5%. Neighboring China had the lowest rate at 2.64%. In contrast, nearly 13% of the population in the Netherlands is reported to be left-handed, compared to a global average of 10.6%.

Tso said children in Taiwan are still taught to use their right hand instead of their left, especially by older generations. “Before we made this film in Taiwan, a lot of people said, ‘Your story is so old because the left-handed taboo doesn’t exist anymore,'” she says. “But I told them, ‘This is my story and I’m going to tell it.’ And when I cast Nina Ye, [the young actor who plays I-Jing] In 2022, Nina was 6 years old. Her mother told me on her first day that Nina was born left-handed, but had already been “corrected” by her grandmother, who didn’t like the idea. So when Nina was on set, she had to retrain herself to use her left hand to draw or throw a ball. We had to constantly check to see if she was using the right hands in the scene. ”

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The idea that the left is somehow “wrong” still persists in Chinese and Taiwanese culture. According to 2013 research on this topic According to Howard Kushner, professor emeritus of science and research at Emory University in the US, the character for “left” in Chinese can be translated as “strange,” “different,” “wrong,” “opposite,” or “against.” Many Asian (and African) cultures traditionally use their right hand to eat. use left hand when something gets dirty. Kushner points out that in Mandarin, the character “right” means “to eat with the right hand.”