Winnie M Li on writing ‘Complicit’
by Winnie M Li
Working as an ESEA professional in film and TV, you sometimes feel complicit in your own erasure.
I was a fledgling producer for six years in the UK film industry in the mid-2000s, and I can count on one hand the number of ESEA film professionals I encountered during that time. Across the six feature films and two shorts I helped produce, only one on-screen role was ever given to an ESEA actor: the bit part of ‘creepy old Chinese man who lives next door’. But that was the world in which I worked: the strangeness of toiling every day to bring stories to screen, knowing full well that those stories would never depict anyone who looked like me.
In hindsight, one might ask: why would I put up with that constant invisibility? The fact was, I didn’t feel I could do anything about it. I was a young Taiwanese-American woman who arrived in the UK with virtually no connections, eager to make my mark in the world of filmmaking. Like many in that industry, I started as an unpaid intern, who made photocopies and cups of tea, filed papers and updated my boss’ phonebook. The sense of hierarchy was so severe that nowhere in those six years did it seem suitable for me to ask my superiors: ‘Hey, can we make one of these characters East Asian?’
Or maybe, it didn’t occur to me to rock the boat, because that’s how I was raised. How much of this compliance came from my youth and naïveté? How much of it came from my upbringing, and how much of it came from working in an environment that was so overwhelmingly white?
Twenty years on from my first internship, I no longer work in film. But I often think about how enthusiastic and diligent I was back then, how eager I was to please in my desire to succeed. And when I wrote my novel Complicit, I re-visited what it was like as a young ESEA woman in the film industry, before I knew how to stand up for myself. How easily can youthful ambition be exploited, in the face of (white male) superiors who are morally wrong? And what if speaking up means endangering your job – and your future career?
I explore these questions in Complicit, as seen through the eyes of my protagonist Sarah Lai, who embarks upon a film career much to the disapproval of her immigrant parents. A native New Yorker, Sarah grows up in Flushing’s Chinatown, but her job takes her to the Cannes Film Festival and the movie sets and red carpets of Hollywood. And yet, through it all, she’s still trying to prove to her parents that she can ‘make it’. she can carve out her place in that world of rich, white people who get to make movies.
In writing Complicit, I wanted the book to be primarily about #MeToo and young female ambition in film – and but also, unmistakably, about being ESEA in that world. I was also conscious that the publishing industry might expect an author like me to write a multi-generational immigration story – but personally, I have no interest in writing something that can be easily sidelined as ‘East Asian material’. I want to write contemporary stories that can be seen and sold as mainstream. Our stories can be universal. Because if I can get readers of all ethnicities and genders to empathise with a young female ESEA protagonist in a predominantly white world, then I can consider that storytelling a success. So here’s to rocking the boat and making our stories more visible – on screen, in books, and behind the scenes, too.
Winnie M Li is an author and activist, who has worked in the creative industries over three continents. Taiwanese-American and raised in New Jersey, Winnie studied Folklore and Mythology at Harvard, and later Irish Literature as a George Mitchell Scholar. Since then, she has written for travel guidebooks, produced independent feature films, programmed for film festivals, and developed eco-tourism projects. After earning an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, she now writes across a range of media, including fiction, theatre, journalism, and memoir.