The popular new film explores myths about left-handed people

“All the years leading up to making this, I kept telling Shawn that I really wanted to tell a story about women. The way I grew up in Taiwan, there are a lot of expectations, a lot of restrictions that we put on girls. You have to be a certain way, you have to fit in, you can’t stand out. Especially when you’re a young kid, you’re told not to be different, and that really affects you. This is more than just being left-handed, it’s a story about how you can’t be yourself.”

Choose a left-handed actor

In 2023, Taiwan still has some of the lowest rates of left-handedness in the world, at around 5%. Neighboring China was the lowest, at 2.64%. In contrast, approximately 13% of people in the Netherlands are reported to be left-handed, and the global average is 10.6%.

Children in Taiwan are still being taught how to use their right hand instead of their left, especially by people from older generations, Tsu says. “Before I made this film in Taiwan, a lot of people said to me, ‘Oh, your story is so old because the left-handed taboo doesn’t exist anymore,’” she says. “But I told them, ‘Okay, it’s my story and I’m going to tell it.’ And then when I cast Nina Yee [the young actor who plays I-Jing] In 2022, she was six years old, and her mother told me on the first day that Nina was naturally left-handed but had already been “corrected” by her grandmother, who didn’t like the idea of ​​it. So, when Nina was on set, we had to retrain her to use her left hand for things like drawing and throwing a ball. We always needed to check whether she was using the right hand in the scene or not.”

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The idea that the left is somehow “wrong” still exists in Chinese and Taiwanese culture. According to a 2013 study on the subject by Howard Kushner, professor of science and study emeritus at Emory University in the US, the Mandarin letter for “left” can be translated as “strange”, “different”, “incorrect”, “opposite”, or “opposite”. Many Asian (and African) cultures traditionally use the right hand to eat, and only use the left hand when something is dirty. Kushner points out that the Mandarin character for “right” means “eating with the right hand.”