Updated December 4, 2025 at 3:48 PM CST
When Irene picks up her teenage Joe from school, they engage in a warm, almost cheerful exchange. The conversation, which comes early in the new film Rosemead, carefully avoids potential minefields: Joe's increasingly erratic behavior and Irene's cancer battle.
That silence on sensitive issues is a familiar one for Lucy Liu. Playing Irene, Liu paints a wrenchingly compassionate portrait of an immigrant mother struggling to navigate multiple challenges in the wake of her husband's death.
"In a lot of immigrant families, we don't necessarily unpack our feelings in real time," said Liu, who was raised by Chinese American parents and who learned to speak English when she was five. "There's a sense of protection by being quiet and that silence can feel loving, but it's also very heavy."
It's far more introspective compared to some of her other roles: Liu has charted a trailblazing path for Asian American representation in Hollywood from Charlie's Angels to the swashbuckling Kill Bill saga. Despite all those successes, Rosemead is her first dramatic leading role. The film has a limited theatrical release in New York starting Dec. 5.
Director Eric Lin wrote this moody drama, centered around a small set of characters, with Marilyn Fu based on a real life story. The title is the name of a neighborhood in California's San Gabriel Valley, home to a vibrant Chinese American community.
Liu brushed up on her Mandarin to better portray Irene's mannerisms and accent, although the character that her film role was inspired by was a Cantonese speaker.
Central to the film is mounting anxiety on the part of both Irene — about Joe's schizophrenia, making sure he takes his meds and lacking confidence that his therapist (James Chen) can save him — and Joe (Lawrence Shou), worried that his mother's health is worsening.
Liu, who also produced the film, hopes Rosemead will prompt more discussion about mental health and lift taboos on the issue. She told NPR's A Martínez in an interview for Morning Edition about "the struggle of not talking about feelings or even identifying our feelings" in her family as a child.
Irene and Joe feel increasingly isolated in a predominantly Asian community that shuns airing dirty laundry, despite some support from friends. Irene isn't sure how to integrate the help that is available to her. "It's a very big cultural shift to ask her to do, especially when she's doing it on her own and trying to run a business and then, you know, at the same time grieve," Liu said.
Their isolation ultimately leads to a calamitous end.
"People seem to highlight excellence, not so much anything else, and that's what people brag about," Liu said. "So I think that there has to be a lot more discussion about just everything. There should be more visibility about just living and surviving, and not so much just excelling only."
Liu, a single mother to a 10-year-old son, acknowledges that parenting can be "really terrifying."
Children, she said, "have to fall and they have to feel a sense of agency, even from a very young place. So that's when you give them choice."
She continued: "Hopefully, they make good choices at some point on their own, but they have to learn by kind of falling down."
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Lindsay Totty. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.
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