| In May 2005, a young Xanga blogger Simon Sek Man Ng's final blog entry shocked the internet community and helped the New York police solve his own murder. As a fellow Xanga blogger, I was simultaneously shocked, saddened and moved by his murder. Reminding me of myself when I first came to this country, Simon was a happy-go-lucky slacker immigrant teenager in his second year of community college in Queens. He was trying to reach out of his shell with his blog… and he finally did right after he died. |
| Remaining hauntingly on-line, his last blog entry reveals the last moments of his life and the identity of the killer who brutally murdered both him and his sister. Six years later, while the memory of him faded on the internet his poignant story has remained within me. |
| When I received a commissioned short film assignment from Vancouver Asian Film Festival as part of "Love Letters to Vancouver," I decided to adapt Simon's story into a short. I was offered CAN$500 to make a short film to celebrate the diversity of Vancouver. I couldn't find it more fitting to adapt Simon's story as an ironic love story to Vancouver where it is almost 40% Asian with a predominant Chinese population. Very much like Queens in New York (where Simon lived) that has become a Chinese American suburb, Richmond in Vancouver is a Chinese Canadian suburb. |
| In making the film, I wanted to focus on telling the facts of the crime without judgment and portraying the solitary world of a young Chinese immigrant with a sense of hope and goofiness. Clements, my protagonist, is such a happy-go-lucky slacker that his favorite past time is to skip Japanese class and tinker on the computer. Like Simon, Clements is a latchkey kid whose parents are abroad in Hong Kong. He lives in a suburban house with his sister whom he wistfully longs to connect with but he barely knows. Clements’ dilemma represents an entire generation of immigrant Chinese kids literally dumped by their parents in North America. |
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A video I found on-line with the real Sek Man Ng in his Japanese class
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| On more categorical level, Clements also represents the insularity of Chinese immigrants in Vancouver. Many have come with money and very few care to integrate or understand the very country that they have immigrated to. Imagine that my cousins have been in Vancouver for over a decade and they can barely speak English. Their wealth and insularity have provoked an unspoken level of tension against them. I can only hope that Clements’ end is not a foreshadowing of future violence against Chinese immigrants. But I can feel the tension in a city that I call my second home, you know what I mean? |
| With CAN$500 and whatever I could chip in on credit cards, I made the short with a skeleton cast and crew of volunteers in one day the past summer. |
| So thank you for making my vision a reality. Simon Sek Man Ng shall be remembered. |
