Pulled out of Los Angeles at thirteen and dropped into Taipei, Fen has to learn a new city, a new school, and a mother she no longer knows how to talk to.
What is American Girl about?
The move is not Fen's choice. Her mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer, and treatment means going home to Taiwan, so the family leaves Los Angeles behind and settles in Taipei. Fen arrives as an American teenager in a Taiwanese classroom, out of place in the uniform, the language of instruction and the expectations, and she makes little effort to hide it. At home things are harder still. Her father, from whom the family has been separated for a long stretch, is suddenly a daily presence again, and the two of them have to feel out what a relationship looks like now. Her mother, meanwhile, is frightened and ill and short on patience, and each of Fen's small rebellions widens the distance between them. The year is 2003, and when Fen's younger sister falls ill during the SARS outbreak and is wrongly suspected of carrying the disease, the pressure inside the household reaches a point where mother and daughter can no longer avoid saying what they have been holding back.
About the cast
Caitlin Fang, Karena Lam and Kaiser Chuang top the cast, with Audrey Lin, Bowie Tsang, Hsia Yu-chiao, Teng-Hui Huang and Winnie Shih-Ying Chang completing the ensemble. The story is a family piece at heart, so much of it plays out in two- and three-person scenes inside the home and the school.
Context & significance
Fiona Roan directed American Girl, a Taiwanese production released in 2021 that runs one hundred and one minutes. It is a family drama built around a return-migration story, and it uses a specific historical moment, the 2003 SARS outbreak, as the backdrop against which a private family crisis unfolds. That pairing gives the film a double frame: the public anxiety of a city on alert, and the private anxiety of a teenager who feels foreign in the country her parents call home.
Watching American Girl on Ktime
American Girl is on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can hear it in Farsi or keep the original soundtrack and read along. You can read this page freely, but streaming requires a K-Time account login. The Farsi-first interface is designed for Persian speakers living outside Iran.