Go Back to China marks return of film director Emily Ting, inspired by her stint in the family business
The Los Angeles-based director and producer recalls how being pushed into the family’s toymaking business in Hong Kong put her moviemaking dreams on hold – but not for too long
Goodbye China My grandparents left China in 1949, with the Communist revolution. They arrived in Taiwan penniless and my father grew his business from nothing. I was born in Taipei, in 1979, the year my father started a toy factory in China. In the 1990s, he moved the headquarters to Hong Kong. His goal was always to pass the business down to his children.
Hello America My family dynamics are a little complicated. My father has been married five times. My younger brother and I are products of the first marriage. My father has two daughters with his second wife – they are in their 20s and live in London – and I have a 14-year-old sister and a 12-year-old brother who live in China.
After my parents split up, my brother and I moved to the United States with my mom, when I was 10. We lived first in San Francisco. Although I’d learned English at school, when we got to the US it was as though I’d forgotten all I’d learned and I had to pick up the language quickly. The first year was difficult, and we moved around quite a lot until we settled in upstate New York, where my aunt lives.
My brother and I went to high school there and I went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. After college, I worked for a couple of years for a film distribution company in New York. I consider myself a New Yorker.
I was 24 and wanted to be a filmmaker, and all my friends were in New York. Although it was going “home”, I felt like a fish out of water because I didn’t know Cantonese and didn’t have friends in Hong Kong. I saw it as an obligation that I had to fulfil for at least a year to appease my father, and then I could go back to my real life in New York.