{"id":30046,"date":"2026-02-20T18:59:36","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T10:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=30046"},"modified":"2026-02-20T18:59:36","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T10:59:36","slug":"why-alice-wus-saving-face-is-the-most-important-asian-american-lesbian-film-ever-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=30046","title":{"rendered":"Why Alice Wu\u2019s Saving Face is the most important Asian-American lesbian film ever made"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This is the latest instalment in a feature series reflecting on instances of East meets West in world cinema, including China-US co-productions.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes seemingly modest films have the greatest making-of stories. So it is with the 2004 romcom Saving Face<\/em>, the first American film about an Asian-American lesbian couple to get a cinema release.<\/p>\n

The story of New York surgeon Wilhelmina \u201cWil\u201d Pang (Michelle Krusiec), her new love Vivian (Lynn Chen) and her pregnant \u2013 and, crucially, unmarried \u2013 48-year-old mother Ma (Joan Chen<\/span>), Saving Face<\/em> was written and directed by the remarkable Alice Wu.<\/div>\n

Born to Taiwanese-American parents in California, Wu studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aged just 16, then Stanford, before taking a job at Microsoft.<\/p>\n

She enrolled in a screenwriting course \u201con a whim\u201d and wrote Saving Face<\/em>, a fictionalised account of how she came out to her mother, as her first script. Next, she left her job, moved to New York and gave herself five years to actually make the film. Just before her self-imposed deadline, she succeeded.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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This is the latest instalment in a feature series reflecting on instances of East meets West in world cinema, including China-US co-productions. Sometimes seemingly modest…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[3562,9618,3507,1900,1703,16066,9436,13328],"class_list":["post-30046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bored-interesting","tag-alice","tag-asianamerican","tag-face","tag-film","tag-important","tag-lesbian","tag-saving","tag-wus","wpcat-33-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}