Notes on Adrian: A City That Forgot You, A Self That Didn't

It starts in 1997, when Hong Kong was handed back, and somewhere in the background of that enormous historical event, a girl was growing up in Changsha who didn't fully understand yet what borders meant — that they could be crossed, or that crossing them would cost something. It moves through a high school exchange program, a plane ticket, a new country. It passes through the specific loneliness of a university campus where you understand the language but not the texture of the jokes. It ends — or doesn't end — somewhere in your thirties, still negotiating your right to exist in a place you've lived in for half your life. I tried to write that story. I couldn't. Not because it isn't true, but because no single film can hold that much time. And maybe more honestly: I wasn't sure I wanted to give it all away. So I made a different choice. I found a container.

Oakland.

Specifically, Oakland Chinatown — a few square miles of produce markets, dim sum restaurants, old men playing chess in Laney College plaza, and a particular quality of afternoon light that feels both exhausted and alive. A neighborhood that has survived redlining, urban renewal, the 1989 earthquake, and decades of being the thing people pass through on the way somewhere else. Oakland is the city people mean when they say the Bay Area, but won't claim. It is the city that gets compared, unfavorably, to the city across the water. It absorbs people who couldn't afford to stay anywhere else, and it holds them. It has been declared dying so many times that its residents have stopped listening.

I chose it because a city that is perpetually overlooked has a particular kind of freedom in it. No one is watching too closely. The stakes of performance are lower. You can be something unfinished here without it being a failure — unfinished is just Tuesday in Oakland. Adrian lives in that space.

The story all the characters are me.

Adrian is not a self-portrait. She is one face — the face that acts, that moves, that makes choices with incomplete information and lives in the consequences. But Dominic is also me. Norah is also me. The people around Adrian who love her badly, or well, or from too far away — they are all faces I recognize when I'm not being careful. This is not a confessional film. It is not autobiography dressed as fiction. But it comes from a belief that the most honest thing a writer can do is admit that she doesn't fully know where she ends and her characters begin. The distance I maintain from the material is a formal choice, not an emotional one. What I am interested in is this: what does it cost to become the author of your own life? Not the author of your own success — that's a different, more optimistic story — but the author in the deeper sense. The person who decides what the story means. Who gets to say what happened, and why, and whether it was worth it.

On structure.

The conventional wisdom is that nonlinear storytelling is a stylistic indulgence. Put the story in order. Let the audience follow. I understand this argument. I've also watched enough films to know that chronology is itself a kind of lie — the implication that events have a clean sequence, that cause and effect are legible in the moment they occur.

Adrian's story needed a different shape because the meaning of what happened in her past only becomes available once you know where she ends up. The extended flashback in the middle of the film isn't a delay — it's the argument. You need to love Dominic before you can understand what it costs Adrian to lose him. You need to have lived inside that time before the ending is anything other than sad. The hourglass also mirrors something I find true about memory: you don't understand what you were running from until you've already arrived somewhere else and turned around.

On the ending.

Adrian goes into the river after Norah. Norah lets go. I've been asked — by myself, mostly, in the way writers interrogate their own choices at 2am — whether this ending is too much. Whether it punishes the characters for wanting things. Whether it lets anyone off the hook. I don't think it does. Norah's choice is not a failure. It is the most sovereign act in the film — a woman deciding, on her own terms, what she will and won't be saved from. Adrian surviving is not a reward. It is a continuation. She drives away. She returns a lighter to a man who has lost his son. These are not gestures of resolution. They are gestures of someone who is still here, still in motion, still not finished. Freedom, in this film, is not the absence of loss. It is what you do after.

On Oakland Chinatown as a location.

I am still in the early stages of production. The screenplay exists; the world is being built. When I walk through Chinatown — through the specific blocks that Adrian walks, past the specific storefronts I've put in the script — I am aware that I am asking this neighborhood to hold something it didn't agree to hold. That is always the transaction of location filmmaking, and it requires honesty about what you're taking and what you're giving back. What I want to give back is visibility of a particular kind: not the Oakland of crime statistics or gentrification thinkpieces, but the Oakland of people who chose to stay, who built something in a place everyone kept writing off. The community in this film is not backdrop. It is load-bearing. I am also aware that I am one kind of Chinese in a neighborhood built by other kinds of Chinese. My Mandarin-speaking Changsha history is not the same as the Cantonese-speaking history of this neighborhood. That difference matters and I'm not trying to smooth it over. Part of what Adrian is navigating is exactly this — the inside of a diaspora is not a single room, it is a series of rooms, and you don't always have the key.

What this film is for.

I'm not sure I believe in "what films are for" as a fixed answer. Films do different things to different people and you can't fully control it. But I know what I needed when I was making this. I needed proof that a story like this — a story about a woman who is neither triumphant nor destroyed, who is somewhere in the long middle of becoming herself, who lives in a city that the world has mostly forgotten — could be a film. Could be a real film, with real stakes, with a shape and a logic and an ending that doesn't apologize for itself. I needed to know that "边缘" — marginal, peripheral, on the edge — was not a limitation. That it was, in fact, the only place from which certain things could be seen. Oakland taught me that. Adrian is how I'm writing it down.

Adrian is currently in development. Written and to be directed by Sunny Xiaoxin Sun.