Ever wondered what it would be like to grow up Chinese in suburban America? According to Michael Kang's impressive debut, The Motel, it would be a bleak experience, saturated with misconceptions about sex, problems with parents, racist taunts and a pervasive loneliness.
The story revolves around an introspective, 13-year-old Chinese boy whose mother runs a grimy motel that's used primarily for sex. His only solace is a porn book - until he meets an older Korean lad who helps him take the first few steps into adolescence. 'It's a film about going into puberty in a pretty bad place,' says Kang. And it's hard to disagree.
The Motel is, by all accounts, an accurate picture of working-class Chinese life in the US. But its director, as his name suggests, is an ethnic Korean. Kang, who was born on Rhode Island in the US, decided to make a film about a Chinese family to distance himself from his subject matter.
'I thought it would be easier to work outside my own culture,' he says. ' If it was a Korean story, I'd have been too wrapped up in my own personal issues - memories of my own puberty - to allow me to step back and make these characters believable. This gave me an objectivity.'
Working outside his own culture meant that Kang had to do more research. 'I felt the need to get it perfectly right,' he says at the Asian American International Film Festival in New York.
'So, I was very careful to cross-reference things and check with my Chinese friends. When we shot the Chinese-language scenes, I deferred to them to make sure the cadence of the dialogue was right. I was very careful to make sure it was all accurate. I wanted to make this film realistic, so you won't see anything corny like a big Chinese gong in it. I took a lot of care to get the details right - how the characters ate, what their rooms were like, small things like that.'