Producer/writer/director Mina Shum will participate in a Q & A after the 7:25 p.m. shows of Meditation Park at Fifth Avenue Cinemas on Friday and Saturday, March 9 and 10.
The heroine of Mina Shum’s Meditation Park is the great Cheng Pei-Pei, but we don’t learn her character’s name until 30 minutes into the film.
Before that, she is called “old woman” (a dubious endearment if ever there was one) by her husband Bing (Tzi Ma) and “mom” by daughter Ava (Sandra Oh). It’s not until after finding a pair of skimpy underwear in her husband’s suit pocket that our devoted wife and mother finds the courage to venture out of her Vancouver home and apply for a job: “I’m Maria,” she says proudly.
“Yeah, that was very deliberate,” says Shum, of the major turning point for the character. “She’s so proud when she says her name, it’s her stepping out and making an identity for herself. It’s an English name, probably not her real name – her husband probably decided it for her years ago – but she owned it.”
For the 40 years since they emigrated to Canada, Maria has been entirely dependent on her husband; she’s in her 60s when she finally finds the courage to step into the community and poke at her boundaries. She meets up with a feisty group of Chinese widows who sell their backyard parking spaces to fair and hockey patrons in their East Van neighbourhood. She learns to ride a bike. And she develops an unlikely friendship with Gabriel (Don McKellar), her parking-shark neighbour across the street.
Clearly, a journey of self-discovery can happen at any age. “I hope so,” says Shum. “Maybe I’m making the film for my more mature self: I’m constantly re-inspired, re-invigorated, obsessed with something, coming of age over and over again.”
This is Shum’s fifth feature film. Her first, Double Happiness, starred Oh as a young Chinese-Canadian woman rebelling against the cultural confines of her strict parents. Here Oh’s character finds herself firmly in the sandwich generation, working and caring for young children and trying to meet the emotional demands of aging parents. “That’s certainly an avatar from my life,” Shum, mother of an 11-year-old son, admits. “You’ve never enough: there’s not enough me to spread around. But we need to be gentler with ourselves in terms of what we think we can accomplish.”
Shum admits that she wasted a lot of time trying to be “everything to everyone” but finds that now she is more at peace with her imperfect self. “Sometimes my hair’s not combed, and sometimes I’m wearing nice clothes,” she laughs. “You can’t get around people making assessments of you.”
In the few decades since her first film, the definition of what a Chinese filmmaker looks like has also changed: “I’ve been working toward expanding that. I’m not limited to the notion of what a female, Chinese filmmaker is the way I was when I made Long Life (2002’s Long Life Happiness and Prosperity), back when someone called up my agent and assumed I didn’t even speak English...”
Shum wrote the script with her friend Oh in mind (not long after Oh’s 10 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy) and “she read it and loved it.” But Shum was hesitant to approach Don McKellar because of some of the similarities between Gabriel, his character, and circumstances in McKellar’s own life. “Don lost his wife about eight years ago, and I was worried we were delving into personal territory,” she says. Gabriel and Maria forge a friendship despite a language barrier; McKellar had a neighbour whose husband died around the same time as the actor’s wife passed away. “Don shared that his neighbour was Portuguese and didn’t speak English well and they didn’t have much to say, but they would have tea every day at 3 o’clock.”
She already knew Tzi Ma (Arrival) as “the visiting husband” who used to visit wife Christina Ma on the Long Life set. But the real coup was getting Cheng Pei-Pei to be in the film. “Before there were female role models, there was Cheng Pei-Pei,” says Shum. Cheng “was kicking butt” in the martial arts films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, films like 1966’s Come Drink With Me. By the time she appeared as Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Cheng had long since earned the sobriquet “the queen of swords”.
“Yep, I can’t go back now: I just have to work with legends from now on, that’s all,” Shum jokes.
Her actors’ recognizability presented challenges during the Chinatown shoots. “We’d be rehearsing and there would be a lot of ‘Cheng Pei-Pei, we love you!’ and that was lovely, because often it was women the age of her character,” says Shum. Other reactions were harder to predict, like when a female shopper in a fishmonger scene kept ruining the take because she wanted to buy fish. “She just really needed her grouper,” Shum laughs.
Meditation Park is shot not only in Shum’s home town, but in her neighbourhood. “I could walk home for lunch, sit and think about the afternoon … my home office became my trailer,” she says. When the scene called for a snow shovel, “we just ran back to my house.” It’s a vibrant little village, she says, one with block parties, Applepalooza in the park, holiday lights. “I think it’s a reaction to smart-phone addiction, this desire to gather,” she muses. “I know my neighbours, and that’s really great.”
When it comes to friendliness, Hollywood North gets a bad rap, she says. Shum did an experiment, “partly to get myself out of my shell,” walking from her house to Hastings Street, saying hello to each and every person she met. “I had people who didn’t speak English who giggled, people who thought I was crazy, but mostly people said hello.”
It’s OK if they don’t say hi back, it’s not personal, Shum insists. “We’re very afraid in some ways, it feeds capitalism very well to be afraid. But the only way we’ll survive is to be embrace each other… All my films, it’s simply that. My work is an antidote to that.”
Meditation Park opens March 9 at Fifth Avenue Cinemas.
