Story behind the film

For our children to ‘flourish’, is often the singular focus of most migrant families; in fact it is often the primary reason why many parents make great sacrifices to undertake the challenges of migrations such as my own parents. However, amongst the daily grind of pursuing academic and extra-curricular achievements to endow their children with the best skills and opportunities, the importance of their spiritual wellbeing and their sense of self is often forgotten.

My journey for this short film project started during the Marriage equality survey late 2017.  In most culturally-and-linguistically-diverse (CALD) communities the situation surrounding LGBTIQ+ issues was nowhere near even being able to talk about marriage equality. And when the survey was announced and debate started it really threw a bomb into our communities. The language around the campaign like love is love were simply meaningless to how many of our communities understand what marriage and family is. Whilst there was an air of positivity in wider society and galvanising together to achieve this thing, most of us LGBTQ+ people with CALD background like me just felt constantly anxious and isolated from mainstream society, the gay community and our cultural community.  

I do remember there were some efforts in the mainstream such as some newspaper articles featuring CALD LGBTQ+ voices as well as this initiative organised by the multicultural council of Australia, where various ethnic minority and religious leaders came together to pledge their official support. However they were not at the fore and there were not really much active Yes campaigning within the CALD community contexts such as in our native language media or spaces. While the Yes campaign concentrated on galvanising the mainstream, the No campaign targeted and exploited our communities spreading misinformation, just as it did again during the Voice Referendum in 2023.

When they announced the result I couldn't even celebrate. I felt us LGBTQ+ people in minority communities had been collateral damage in a war.  Everyone was celebrating but we knew that the situation for LGBTQ+ people in our minority communities got so much worse and will continue to regress due to the expected backlash.

In 2019 I came across the report from this research project by UWS which really focused in on how the marriage equality survey impacted CALD LGBTA+ people in our families and communities called ‘Home is where our story begins’.  It confirmed many of my experiences and feelings. So many of us felt we have to compartmentalise and separate our queer identity from our ethnic identities which intensified since the marriage equality survey. In 2023 I went to a world pride event, Hafla, at the riverside theatre in parramatta. It was an afternoon of music, poetry reading and storytelling organised by the queer middle eastern community. It was the most poignant and moving queer event I have ever been to. One speaker was this counsellor who 20 years ago paved the way in the practice of culturally appropriate therapy and social intervention after a series of suicides by queer youth at her Lebanese Maronite community. She described the progress that was made in her community 20 years ago to the point where she was able to engage their church and talk about mental health issues facing queer youth during their church services. And she lamented that the situation had regressed so much decades later. That very same weekend there was a Christian-Lives-Matter protest against World Pride in Newtown. And that movement was founded in Sydney during the Marriage Equality survey by many who were from the Lebanese Maronite community.

What turned things around for me and gave me hope and inspiration was a podcast called Shoes-Off recommended to me by my friend in 2020. It explores Asian Australian issues in depth produced by Jay Ooi who is himself a gay Asian man and dedicated episodes on the intersectional experience. In particular I was moved by the episode about after school tutoring. He interviewed this tutor, who saw his responsibility was not only to coach his students academically but to be a friend and really listen to them, see them, and build and affirm their sense of self. The other thing which also gave me hope was that I had been leading the LGBTQ+ employee network at my workplace which co-incidentally was founded around the time of the marriage equality survey. I had focused on raising awareness about intersectional experience of LGBTQ+ people with minority backgrounds and LGBTQ+ inclusion and safety in schools. That experience really showed to me the importance and power of everyday visibility. I worked in a field where there are many 1st generation Asian migrants. I realised for many of them this might have been the first time they have engaged with an openly gay Asian person in their daily lives rather than just seeing LGBTQ+ people and issues in mainstream media, which even I struggle to connect with. Around the same time I watched the critically acclaimed TV dramedy series, The Family Law, which portrayed had a positive coming-out experience for a Chinese migrant family in its last season. This really showed me how compelling diaspora storytelling has the potential to reach and change our communities.

I came to believe what was important in turning around the culture in our Asian Australian communities is to stop dwelling on the tension between mainstream culture and our cultural heritage, between our queer identity and ethnic identity; that only isolates us more. And we shouldn’t only tell stories mired in pain, tragedy and loss; that won't change how our communities view queerness. We need positive stories and examples that pave the way for how our communities can embrace our queer members finding inspiration from our own people and our own culture.

So in early 2021 I wrote a screenplay with the desire to tell a story that could inspire our Asian diaspora communities.  The story is set during the height of the marriage equality debate, about a gay Australian-born-Chinese adolescent boy struggling not with his homosexuality but with the meaning of love and family against the background of his parents’ constant bickering resembling nothing of the ideals he sees in the mainstream campaigns. The family is disconnected not because of any overt neglect, abuse or homophobia. There’s no oppressive tiger parenting which I think is much less common nowadays. But simply because the parents are unable to see their child for who he is; only what they think him to be. This is when a new piano teacher enters his life. A gay Chinese teacher. She sees him. She nurtures and affirms his musical passions and sensibility.  She inspires him to find his sense of self and his own meaning through his passion for music and by simply being a visible openly gay person from his own culture.

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She also inspires his parents to see and embrace their son for who he is. Because it is seeing queer people daily in our own communities sharing the same fundamental life experiences and challenges, albeit in slightly different ways, that has the power to make our communities see us queer people as 'our own' rather than lost to the mainstream. Another really pointed thing about my own coming out experience as well as many many others in my LGBTQ+ Asian community I have found is that many of our parents, in particular mothers, had shared with us their own experience of same sex attraction. However, instead of using that experience to understand and affirm us, they used it to dismiss our experience and identities as unimportant or 'just a phase' to be grown out of. Or if they had finally shared it to demonstrate their empathy, as a few of my friends experienced, it was done too late, after years of conflict and trauma. So I hope that this story could inspire parents who might be dealing with a queer child to just dig a little deeper and ask themselves what their fundamental hopes and dreams for their child are, and use their experiences to understand and support their child rather than invalidate who they are.

Since writing my screenplay I have seen other hopeful and positive queer intersectional stories on screen such as Happy New Year Ms Luna and Her own Music. I really wanted to be part of this wave of positive storytelling that can inspire change in our communities. My hope is that my film will be a cathartic story for the LGBTQ+ Asian community and inspire those who are able to, to live openly and visibly in their communities as it has the power to inspire others in our communities to embrace their queer loved ones.