Chinese-American’s short film fulfils a dream and, she hopes, speaks to the dreamer in us all
- Jingjing Tian’s film about a young Chinese New Yorker who wants to become a cowboy, to his father’s incomprehension, is surprisingly autobiographical
- Growing up in China she knew she would make films; grown up and in Texas, her parents disapproved. Cowboy Joe is her riposte to all the doubters
The emotional core of Jingjing Tian’s new short film, Cowboy Joe, is a conversation that will seem painfully familiar to many Asian-Americans: a son, excited and nervous, tells his father he wants to leave the family business to follow his dreams; the father is stern and uncomprehending, and ultimately crestfallen.
Except that in this case, the son (played by Conder Shou) is dressed boots-to-spurs in western garb, and his dream is not to become an artist or an actor, but a cowboy.
As fanciful as the film appears, it is surprisingly autobiographical. Tian grew up in China and moved to the United States (where her chemist father went to graduate school) 24 years ago, when she was nine.
“I landed in Texas. Texas and northeastern China, two very different places,” she says. One of the few constants was her dream: she had wanted to be a filmmaker since she was a little girl.
“I was eight years old when I knew. It was Pretty Woman, dubbed into Mandarin. I was sitting next to my grandmother, underneath an itchy blanket next to the furnace,” she remembers. “My grandmother and I stared at the television in enchantment. We had never seen such a world.”