Dispatch • Lucy Liu Asks How Far Love Should Go in 'Rosemead'

The tragedy in Lucy Liu’s newest film Rosemead isn’t that her character doesn’t care enough; it’s that she cares so deeply, and feels so responsible, that she comes to believe her final choice is an act of protection.

Directed by Eric Lin, the film follows Irene (Liu), a widowed Chinese immigrant living in California’s San Gabriel Valley, as she navigates terminal cancer while caring for her teenage son Joe (Lawrence Shou), whose schizophrenia is rapidly worsening. As Joe’s fixation on mass shootings intensifies, his eighteenth birthday looms—the moment when Irene will no longer have legal authority over her son. She faces an impossible question: how far should a parent go to shield their child, and where does protection end?

Following a Los Angeles screening on Dec. 14, 2025, the film’s creative team gathered for an onstage discussion moderated by Matt Brennan, editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Times’ The Envelope. Brennan was joined by Liu, producer Andrew Corkin, executive producer and Los Angeles Times journalist Frank Shyong, and screenwriter Marilyn Fu to reflect on a film that resists easy judgment.

Shyong began by explaining why the original case stayed with him long after it passed through the news cycle. At the time, it registered publicly as another incident of domestic violence in the San Gabriel Valley. But among people who knew the family, the story never fully settled.

“In the Asian American community, typically, the way we like to handle these stories is to kind of not speak about them,” Shyong said. His reporting sought not to soften the outcome, but to restore the human texture lost in early news coverage. “Behind a lot of these really painful and outrageous incidents, there are people who try to hold on to each other,” he added. “That’s not an ugly truth, but a beautiful one.”

The real story carried the same painful contradictions. In the 2017 feature Shyong reported for The Los Angeles Times, the mother was Lai Hang, a terminally ill immigrant who believed time was running out—not only on her life, but on her ability to protect her teenage son George.

After learning her cancer prognosis, Hang began the legal process to purchase a handgun, triggering California’s waiting period. Her husband Peter had died of cancer three years earlier, and George—then 17—had grown increasingly withdrawn. He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, a condition Hang struggled to manage amid cultural taboos around mental illness and fear shaped by a country awash in news of mass shootings.

In July 2015, once the waiting period ended and she picked up the gun, Hang checked into a motel in Rosemead, California, with her son. There, she waited until George fell asleep, then shot him—believing she was preventing a future tragedy. During the investigation, she told Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators she feared her son might become a mass shooter. Hang didn’t attempt to take her own life, explaining that she wanted to live with the punishment of what she had done. She died months later from cancer after being granted compassionate release from jail.

For Corkin, who optioned Shyong’s article shortly after publication with producing partner Theo James, the story was impossible to set aside. “It just sat in my stomach like this pit that I couldn’t not focus on,” he said.

What followed was an eight-year journey through the realities of independent filmmaking: financing hurdles, creative recalibration, and the patience required to handle material this delicate. “This is a story of very complicated love,” Corkin said. “In the wrong hands, it could have become very black and white.” Instead, the team kept returning to a single belief: trust the viewers. “Please believe in what we’re pitching,” he recalled telling potential backers. “There is a community. There is an audience for a film like this.”

Liu embodies that trust in her performance. She deglams here, inhabiting Irene as a woman pulled between worlds: judged by her community for seeking Western medicine, and unable to communicate fully with the systems meant to help her.

“This is a woman who loved deeply,” Liu said. “There’s a severe break between how she presents outside of the home and how she’s at home with her child.”

That divide helps explain Irene’s choices. Liu pointed to a scene in which Irene tells her son’s therapist, “Just because you look like me doesn’t mean you understand us.” The line carries the weight of every obstacle Irene faces: language, culture, time, and a system that never quite meets her where she is.

“She really tried to follow and obey,” Liu said. Irene attends therapy appointments and abides by Western medicine. At one point, she even calls the police—though she stops short of revealing her suspicions about her son’s fixation with violence. She does what she believes she’s supposed to do.

“The healthcare system really failed her,” Liu added. “She should have had an advocate in those rooms with her, speaking her language and describing to her exactly what was happening.”

Shyong expanded on those failures with the clarity of someone who has spent years reporting on them. He described riding along with mental-health teams paired with local police departments—setups meant to respond to emergencies but often arriving too late, or with consequences no one intends. Schizophrenia, he explained, isn’t cured; it’s managed. And that management depends on resources, timing, and laws that make involuntary commitment nearly impossible.

“It’s extremely difficult to get people into care,” he said. “Oftentimes, the best way is to arrest them. And to arrest them, violence is usually involved.”

Fu, who adapted Shyong’s article into a screenplay, described the discipline required to hold these realities without losing sight of the relationship at the film’s center. “At the core of the film, it’s about a mother’s love for her son, and a son’s love for his mother,” she said. “Everything has to echo back to that.”

Liu later returned to the idea of understanding through isolation—how easily people are condemned when only the outcome is visible, not the long stretch of loneliness that comes before it. “She came and acted from a very lonely place,” the actress said.

She closed the evening by reflecting on her decades-long career, comparing her body of work to a constellation of stars. Some stars, she said, only become visible when you shift your position—when you step away from bright lights into darker spaces where more comes into view.

“This movie and this role have always been there,” Liu said. “Maybe the lights have been a little too bright. But when you shift into a different space, you can see more.” Art, she added, isn’t only entertainment. “It’s also a form of protest, a form of growth, and a form of protection.”

What the film asks of viewers is a similar adjustment: to dim the instinct to judge and sit with the conditions that narrow a person’s choices. Rosemead doesn’t ask us to condone Irene’s choice; it confronts us with the world in which it could feel like the only one left to make.

Rosemead is now playing in select theaters.