Leslie Tai
Interviewed by Rachel Dang
Leslie Tai is a Chinese-American independent filmmaker who creates artful, multi-layered, illuminating, and disquieting documentaries about her family and the parts of Chinese culture that are not normally in the public eye. Leslie’s mission in creating her films is to change the mindset of people and disrupt their way of feeling. Tai's work chronicles the dreams, anxieties, and consumer desire of China’s rising middle class and the Chinese diaspora from a distinctly female perspective. Tai’s film How to Have an American Baby (shot in San Gabriel Valley, California, USA and Beijing, Shanghai, Jilin City, and Chengdu, China) shows the tensions and battles between Chinese and American Dreams as they play out in the psychological landscapes of women who are trapped in between two worlds. The film portrays four women and examines their experiences of how they achieve this dream through a complex maternity system in America. The Private Life of Fenfen (2013, USA) shows vlogging footage of Fenfen displayed on different TVs in different environments with people’s reactions to the footage. This footage shows Fenfen’s love life and how she experiences hardships caused by Chinese societal and cultural pressures.
This interview was conducted via Zoom on May 30, 2024, between myself and Leslie Tai.
R: I was amazed when watching all of your films. —the creativity behind Grave Goods and How to Have an American Baby. I learned so much from all the films.
L: Thank you.
R: You’re Welcome! Before we move on to the questions, could you introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your filmmaking background?
L: I came to documentary filmmaking from a design and media arts background. That was what I studied at UCLA. They had a video class that I took in conjunction with a class called The History of Documentary Film, offered in the film department. Those classes created the perfect situation for my love of documentaries to explode into my life. As soon as I watched my first documentary in that history class, I suddenly knew that was what I wanted to do.
During undergrad, I studied abroad in Italy, and I was kind of all alone, fully immersed. I learned the language, the culture, and made friends. The whole experience revealed this huge discrepancy in my life: I am Chinese-American, and yet I am now more fluent in a foreign language other than my own. After graduating from UCLA, I decided to go to China, and then I eventually got a Fulbright scholarship to make my first feature-length documentary film in China.
During that time, I fell into this whole underground documentary film world that was experiencing what we might now call a golden age. All signs pointed me to this filmmaker named Wu Wenguang, who was widely considered the founding father of Chinese independent documentary. I got involved in this underground documentary film world inside China and ended up staying there for six years.
That’s the most important way I would preface where I come from as an artist. I was born and raised in America, a second-generation Chinese-American, but I chose to go back to China during a very specific historical moment, when China was on the rise. So, I was coming of age during the Great Recession of 2008. And that was right around when I would have entered society and the job market, but instead, I spent all of those years in China. My recent films are about contemporary Chinese society and the effects of a rapidly changing society on the psychology of the individual, especially women caught somewhere in between China and the U.S.
R: It’s so crazy to me how you met this person who is very focused on documentary and that was your dream you wanted to pursue. Thank you for sharing that! For the first question, What is your definition of experimentalism and feminism? How does your work fit into these two terms and do you consider yourself a feminist?
L: I would define experimental film as something not concerned with things like linearity and narrative structure or plot and more about reflecting on the medium of film itself. Disrupting institutional cinema as it’s “supposed to be.” Focusing on the material and aesthetic qualities of that filmmaking medium in terms of the image, rhythm, pacing, challenging ideas about structure and modes of representation, and playing around with time and perception.
Feminism—I mean, I don’t use that word a lot. Wait, let me take that back. For How to Have an American Baby, I have said that that film is a feminist film and that including the long birthing scene was a feminist directorial move, mostly because it’s trying to center and almost correct this complete lack of representation of what giving birth is actually like. If you think about how many people watched their very first live childbirth through my film, it’s shocking. In all the other media you are consuming, I can name one documentary film that shows it at a decent length and we’re talking about the most foundational experience of women and their bodies. Every one of us was born, and that was one of the comments that has stayed with me. While watching that birth scene, this person suddenly realized that all 500 people in this theater had all been born at one point–so I guess that is how I would connect feminism to my filmmaking.
R: I remember watching the birthing scene and I felt like everything clicked with my relationship with my mother. It never truly hit me how much she cared for me and loved me the way a mother does with her baby, who has grown to be 21 years old. It hit me in one moment and I was like “Wow.”
L: Oh really? In that moment?
R: In that moment! It felt surreal learning about the mother and seeing her throughout your film before the baby finally comes out. While she was crying and holding her baby right after giving birth, it made me very emotional. Thank you for sharing that in your film.
Moving to the next question, In your film, How to Have an American Baby, I noticed many vulnerable moments such as the woman mourning the loss of her baby. How did you feel during these moments and in what lens did you want to portray these women?
L: I was so lucky to have made the film by myself and had the privilege of being alone with the camera and the person, although sometimes I had a production assistant. It was about the distance between my camera, myself, and the person. It didn’t always feel right to just film something full and frontal. A lot of people have asked about various parts of the film [where] it almost seems like I’m shooting secretly, but what is happening is my body and my position are simply responding to how I’m relating to the people—the privacy I would like to give them, or how I’m feeling about this distance in that specific time.
If you remember, I’m looking over her shoulder in that scene. I didn’t want to film her face in that moment. I wanted to be with her. She had gotten out of her maternity hotel for a day and had gone to see the lawyer that I had found for her. I was going to take her home, but on the way, we were going to grab dinner, and I wanted to show her a view of Los Angeles. I asked her if I could film her in the park afterward and she said yes. I don’t know, everything just happened so organically. She grabbed the photo album that the hospital gave her. I just set up the camera and decided to be behind her.
It’s funny because the film I had envisioned didn’t have her character in it. I reflected a lot over the course of the editing process and the different versions of the film, and I felt, ultimately, that this film is really about her. Her story is what the whole film is structured around. My idea for the film was more kaleidoscopic, as you can see more in the first third of the film, where it was just shifting perspectives. But, at a point, I knowingly dove into her world and her material, even though the circumstances of her filming were just wildly different from everything else I had already filmed. Everything else was beautiful and fly on the wall, where I was trying to be invisible. In a way, I didn’t care that the shape of her story and her character didn’t follow what I had in mind and didn’t follow any of the other stories or materials that I had. The idea was just to knowingly let the characters hijack the shape of the film, to come as they were. You find out at the very end something about who Lele is, her social status, and the status of her relationship. It’s supposed to be shocking. I wanted to show her as a complex character.
What I like to do in my filmmaking is to try to create that moment of “Oh my god, this person is not at all who I thought they were,” essentially re-creating these moments that I experience in my relationship with her in real life. The whole epilogue is quite long for an epilogue. It gets into the current state of everyone, but the point of the portrayal is that we see them in China and they are completely unrecognizable. I don't mean visually, but I mean their lives, the context, the tensions, and the dynamics of their lives. I needed it for the Western audience who was going to see an Asian woman in an American environment and was going to use her standards and cultural norms and think she could relate. I needed to take that audience to China and blow up that idea and say “No, you don’t know the slightest thing about her.” In China, we’re now in their world, in their society, on their terms.
For Lele, I chose to end the film on her “husband”’s assessment of her. It was interesting because, in a way, I was trying to show how her society objectifies her. And, also, I had been experiencing pretty much everything from her side of the story and grappling with the inconsistencies. To suddenly switch perspectives and hear how everything happened, through a man’s perspective, where he sees her as this fragile person who almost lost her mind, and who wanted to kill herself. All of these revelations shocked me because I found myself experiencing her differently, which only made me more aware that I was processing my understanding of her through his perspective. I’m not dropping this bomb of his perspective at the end because I want him to have the last word. It's more that in hearing from him, it becomes so obvious how that is how society sees her. Like we zoomed out, we are looking at her from a different angle, and now she’s a completely different person.
R: Seeing life and death so close together when you went to translate for the other mother in labor, whose baby didn’t make it, or when the woman lost her baby after giving birth, did that spark any new shifts or influence your film?
L: It became the whole core of the film, which is this moment and this interplay between two different fates intersecting and colliding in this moment. Because they all happened to have the same doctor, it all happened to be in the same moment. I didn’t know Lele at all. I just went to go film Jojo. It was incredibly intense to learn what had happened in the other room, and then return to a room where everything was still in process and be terrified that the same result could happen. At the time, I hadn't witnessed so many childbirths at that point, so it was super intense for me. If you are making a film about people traveling to a foreign country to give birth, it’s the worst possible case scenario–somebody dies. It immediately changed the trajectory of everything. In a sense, the film had to then revolve around this moment. That was a no-brainer. That was just what it was.
R: Motherhood is a difficult yet loving journey, as shown in your film. My mother showed me how motherly love can sometimes bleed over to hate. I noticed sometimes when she is exhausted from working all day, even looking at me could set her off. But, I knew she loved me unconditionally. How would you explain motherhood and the relationship mothers have with their children?
L: You know, the interesting thing is I started this film when I had just turned 31. It was almost like personal research, if you will. I think I just wanted to know what this whole birth-giving thing was. It was never on my radar and I had never wanted to do it. Motherhood is complicated because the desire to become a mother came to me a little later.
I was raised by a single mom, and I still to this day have a difficult relationship with her. It’s mostly a matter of communication and miscommunication that feels so impossible across cultural, generational, and linguistic divides. I’m sure a lot of children of first-generation immigrants experience the same thing. I was also in the middle of making the film. I just didn’t have it in my mind that I wanted to become a mother. It was more foisted upon me, when I realized that my time was almost up. I had to explore what it meant for me to become a mother, whether I wanted it or not. Then I realized I had already been exploring this idea.
Just so you know, I just recently became a mother. I have a 16 month old. The birth of my child compelled me to finish the film. I finished it, and it had its world premiere 4 weeks after I gave birth. So, I wasn't able to make it to the world premiere of my film, but I have the experience of birthing the film out to the world at the same time that I pushed a 9-pound baby out and became a mother. It’s been just a life-changing experience. All I know is that anyone who has made a film can become a parent, because I still feel like making a film is harder than becoming a mother. I’m not trying to say I didn’t experience a whole lot in order to become a mother either. I’m just saying how arduous, grueling, and horrible making a film can be.
R: That is really like a full-circle moment. The whole film, with your process of being pregnant too. Seeing Fenfen talk about marriage in your film, The Private Life of Fenfen, reminded me a lot of my mother constantly reminding me never to get married ever. Learning of my mother’s two divorces before I was born, and experiencing her divorce with my father, I felt like marriage ruined relationships instead of growing them. How do you feel about marriage? Also with what you said before, with your personal experience of learning new things and showing the build-up to the moment—I felt that a lot with Fenfen’s film. When the whole vibe completely switched in the middle of the film, I was not prepared for that and it was shocking!
L: You meant taking the audience through the changes that I experienced. Yeah, exactly! So there’s a moment [when] I’m watching her video footage, and it shifts and you’re like “OMG.” Yeah, the shift becomes the core of the narrative structure. In all the films I make, there’s always that shift in perception that everything else has to build towards.
My mom also divorced my father, and I was raised by a single mom. She eventually remarried, but I didn’t have a good relationship with him. I wouldn’t say I grew up with any kind of real experience of what a healthy positive union might look like. I did end up finding my husband at a young age. We’ve been together for over 15 years. We’re going to be celebrating our 10 year anniversary this year. He’s kind of great, so I’m really happy that I’m married to him, because he is a good man. I just don’t think that there are many of those, especially in the world of my films. There is no good man. That more reflects my understanding of the world, but I just live a different kind of life because I have this one lucky thing that happened.
R: For me, it’s really hard to pick and delete footage for my films while editing. I feel like if I delete one thing it won’t be the same as if I leave it in. What was the process of picking the specific videos out of 100 hours of footage for your film, The Private Life of Fenfen?
L: Well, her footage, she had 400 hours of footage. Most of the footage had nothing happening. Then there was a concentrated, maybe, 9 tapes where all the shit went down. I became aware of watching it almost like I was watching a soap opera. That’s when it gave me the idea of what if it was a soap opera? It was the only section of her footage that had this sort of built-in narrative. Her love loss was really heartbreaking, when she had to leave the guy that she liked, because they were both too poor to be with each other. He was also from the north. She was from the south, and she was hiding in the neighbor’s dark room to eat rice, because they eat noodles in the north. It was a very crazy–two opposite worlds. A love that was doomed from the beginning. I think that story is really about the way that Fenfen is so tied to her social world, and how much impact or pressure it exerts on her reality. In American society, you don’t have to do things that your family wants you to do. A lot of that film was trying to make people understand that it’s different in China; when there is this pressure, you have to do it. You have nowhere to run. That is sort of why the film, in another layer, becomes how society is gawking, judging, and adjudicating her. They represent the society that constrains her.
R: It’s also interesting how everyone that is viewing the film like this soap opera was totally on her side as well.
L: Another thing I didn’t expect was that everyone was like “What am I watching? Why am I watching this?” I realized they had no frame of reference for a video diary shot by a random person. It was either a soap opera or something else. That got me thinking: we had created this thing, and now I’m placing it in this environment where the people are viewing it, but they don’t know what they’re viewing. What their reactions are depends on what they understand what they’re viewing to be. The nature of the documentary itself, when it’s not being shown to the Western audience, but it’s being played on television in these places—what is it? Picking and choosing was really about, in the end, using her footage to tell a concise story. But there was also an arc in the way that people responded to her. So you mentioned that they seemed like they were all into her, but what I found is that many seemed like they mostly didn’t care. Even though them not caring could’ve been, “Oh my God, my experiment failed. This sucks.” It became more like, “Oh maybe the tragedy of the whole story is the indifference, that her story doesn’t matter and that it’s playing on the TV”—that nobody cares. You see, towards the end, the world of the TV gets drowned out by the din of the restaurant, and nobody is even watching.
R: How do you turn your ideas into real films? What is your thought process and physical process for creating your films?
L: I’ll start with How to Have an American Baby. I think it was just this huge ambition that I had. I had this friend who was staying inside of a maternity hotel. I was visiting her while she was still living there with her newborn. We were taking a walk on the hilltop, and we saw all these houses. She was telling me [that] behind all these closed doors are more maternity hotels. So there was a mental image in my head immediately of all these lives unfolding. I just thought: if only I could film behind all these closed doors. I don’t even want to follow the characters. I just wanted to capture these moments, these decisive moments, where something is happening. There was an aesthetic and structural vision that just popped into my head.
The Private Life of Fenfen is more conceptual and structural, which shows how I’m trying to reflect on the medium. In American Baby, I wasn’t trying to do that. I was just trying to show what it was like behind all these closed doors. It was more like a formal challenge or exercise. This film was about how to tell this in a kaleidoscopic way. The biggest challenge was accessing and figuring out how to present myself and relate to these people, and how to be inside of this world with my camera.
I come from an education where I learned how to write a fake film in preparation for the film. I would go do research, have the idea, and then write a hypothetical film. Then I would go out and make it. I think that’s still probably the strongest way to go. For American Baby, I knew what the vision was, but, because it was a documentary, I couldn’t get exactly what I had envisioned. But, the essence and the spirit of what I was trying to do remained intact. In a way, you do some research, you make a blueprint, and then you go. I had no control over anything I was filming. A lot was left to improvisational moments, and it was very physically hard, because I was one person moving around with a camera set up. It was incredibly physically taxing.
R: As a documentary filmmaker, do you think you have to be outgoing to be able to connect to people to get this type of footage?
L: Yeah! At a certain point, I noticed a change or an evolution in my ability. I was like “I’m a fucking good salesperson!” There was a moment when in my 20s, I was living in China. I was very cynical about the people in the world. So, I’m not that person who wants to be friends with everybody.
There was a point where I was trying to get access into this world, and also trying to convince them about what I was doing. I could only tell them the truth. They had to feel my passion and feel how much I wanted to make a work of art. I had to convince them what I was doing was important, which wasn’t so hard. But, also, why their involvement was important, which was kind of hard; and how my intentions were pure. [That] I just wanted to create a work of art, and I wasn’t going to sell them out; I wasn’t going to make a news exposé. I’m not a journalist, and I’m not going to make a commercial thing that sells. So, people could get behind that. And then it was just a matter of thinking about what I could give them in return. In Chinese culture and society, it’s all about reciprocity. I wouldn’t say everyone’s using each other, but they kind of are, in a pretty open way, and that’s not a bad thing. The ties between people are much stronger. Nobody’s free to not help each other—everyone has to, more or less. This goes back to what I was trying to express in Fenfen, getting into this world of personal debt. Giving and taking was a lot of work. It took up all of my emotional energy. But, I would say the reason why I can’t make this film or anything of this scale again is I just don’t have much more life force that I want to put into something like this. I gave every single person a lot of me. That’s the number one thing I have to give to them, I have to disclose myself to them, I have to invest in this relationship so much that it feels natural to them to invest reciprocally.
R: After picking my major, film and digital media, I’ve thought and stressed about whether I’m going to be broke and have to abandon my dream career as a filmmaker, or be part of a production crew. I have doubts that I won’t be able to make it in the industry, and I feel like the film industry isn’t as stable as other jobs, or an environment where you have to make your way up. My mother is also really worried about my career path choice, as she wants me to be a doctor or an accountant. I was wondering if the film industry is inviting for female Asian-American filmmakers. Being Asian American, how did this shape your career? Is filmmaking a stable and well-paying job or is it as scary as I think it is?
L: I think that all of your fears are entirely founded. The only way I could make this film for nine of my prime earning potential years was to live an extremely low-budget life and make a lot of personal choices that allowed me to have the time and flexibility to work on this. I think, if you choose the path of an artist, you have to be ready for it to be a full-on lifestyle decision. You are choosing to value certain things more than things. You value your time more than your property. It’s funny, because my friend, who ended up becoming a law professor, told me what her starting salary was. I was just complaining about it. She was like, “You could’ve done that. You made your choice. I decided I wanted this and I made this choice.” So, it is a choice.
But, if you want to make it in the industry, there are commercially-minded people who want to be a part of a team and work their way up in a very cut-throat industry. So, on the Hollywood side, maybe that’s possible, although nowadays I’m not so sure. But, to do this sort of independent thing, people cobble together a mix of freelancing and corporate projects or teaching. I don’t think you have to work in the field to make your own personal work. I almost think it’s better to do filmmaking if you have a solid other source of income.
As far as being Asian American, we’re kind of living in a moment of post-COVID, post-George Floyd, amidst the DEI movement. I was once told that female Asian-American documentary filmmakers are not underrepresented, they are the majority of the projects funded by public television. I was kind of shocked to hear that, but I do think that the industry, which is also going through a big upheaval at the moment, has more of a lens toward supporting minority filmmakers and female filmmakers almost exclusively, like “this is what we want to support at the moment.”
R: That made me think of how shows and movies portray artists. So, it is true in a way.
L: It is true. I also think that the kind of films that get funded have to do with what is deemed important by the liberal progressive side. It’s very much [about] how you can fit into the dominant, preferred narrative about people of color at times. That can also be frustrating. At the same time, I’ve received the benefit of the greater intentionality around supporting people like me and you.
It doesn’t mean they are prepared to support, nurture, or make me feel safe to express my voice and my point of view. Especially with American Baby, it was so different and threw people for a loop. They didn’t know politically where they should stand on my film. What would make them feel comfortable with the idea that there are Chinese people who were doing this? [Chinese birth tourism] seems like it's taking advantage, and not like the immigrants south of the border, because they're not risking their lives–they are privileged. My film brings up a lot of thorny issues that white Americans can’t grasp.
R: This is my last question. How would you describe your purpose with filmmaking in 5 words?
L: Don’t, know, how, to, feel. I think my filmmaking purpose is to leave people not knowing how to feel—to disrupt the way that they were feeling. Leave them speechless. Leave them without words to put together. I try to make films that reward multiple viewings. I like things that are complicated, detailed, and layered. All of my films operate on all these layers, and they’re all super dense. After taking it all in, it’s okay to not know how to feel.
R: I hope to make people leave speechless with my films too! That was all of my questions! I wanted to congratulate you on the birth of your child! I learned so much through this interview and you are a very talented, awesome, and really funny person. Thank you so much!
L: You asked such good questions, and I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you!