Lucy Liu

Did anything except for maybe hang out in the alleyway in Queens and played or was just at home really at that age.

So understanding the struggle of, I guess, the fragmentation of...

not fully understanding.

I mean, I went to school, I continued to go to school, but I really didn't have a grasp of, I guess, the bigger picture of what was happening and how everything was happening.

And so when this project came up, it was really vital to make this authenticity sing.

And I worked with this wonderful coach, Doug Onoroff, who's just

just a master at all different kinds of languages and he really understood the nuance and we went into the dialogue and we dissected the language and made sure that it was conversational when it was in Chinese and also made the English

I don't want to say stilted, but very clear.

Because I think when somebody speaks a different language, it's much more direct.

There's not this nuance, let's say, of us going back and forth.

It's more direct.

So when it's more direct, I think there's a vulnerability that shows.

And that was something that I thought was very important to bring that humanity to Irene.

To show that she was not able to really...

express herself fully when she was outside the home and also to I guess receive information from the therapist or from her own doctor when she was outside the home and I think that feeling of those gaps were really important to show how porous she was and how vulnerable she was.

I felt such a great depth of tenderness, and it just reminded me so much of, you know, the community and just the beautiful poetry of Mandarin and how some words just cannot be expressed in English.

Absolutely.

I think that for me, I really had grown up in that environment of seeing my aunties or my mother or my parents and just living in that world of going to Chinatown, going to Flushing, you know, the very...

immersed in that community and understanding you know that that's this was just what it was and how it looked and how it felt and I think what I really brought to I guess to Irene was not so much my parents as much as it was myself as a child watching my parents and it's a very different thing to see how my parents were at home or in Chinatown or in Flushing and

and then how they were outside of that.