Alice Wu’s 'The Half of It' offers a unique view on love

Alice Wu wrote and directed her first movie, Saving Face, after taking a screenwriting class while she was working as a program manager at Microsoft. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2004 and opened San Francisco’s Asian American Film Festival (now CAAMfest), where it won the Audience Award for feature film. The movie, a love story set in Queens about two Chinese American women, a surgeon and an aspiring ballerina, was inspiring for many people who didn’t often see themselves on screens, especially at that moment. Comedian Ali Wong of Always Be My Maybe, Lulu Wang, the director of The Farewell, and Awkwafina, the comedian and actress who starred in Wang’s movie, have all spoken about the impact it had on them.

Stephen Gong, the executive directive of San Francisco’s Center for Asian American Media, which hosts CAAMfest, says it was an unusual debut movie. “You could tell right away it was a really well-made film,” he said. “It had a great story line, and the acting was superb. It stood out in all ways. Also the subject matter of queerness in an Asian American context — it was one of the first real expressions of that, and that it could elicit such empathy is exactly what we need.”

Gong thinks that empathy — and all the elements that make a great movie — are also present in Wu’s second feature, The Half of It, which also features a gay Asian American protagonist.

The movie, which recently premiered on Netflix, tells the story of Ellie Chu, a quiet Chinese American high school girl in a rural town in Washington state. She earns money by writing essays for her classmates, and in a Cyrano–inspired plot, she starts writing letters for a football player, Paul, to Astrid, whom Ellie also has a crush on. Ellie and Astrid share much more in common than Paul and Astrid — such as a love of Kazuo Ishiguro’s book The Remains of the Day and Wim Wenders’ movie Wings of Desire

But instead of focusing on romantic love, the movie spends a lot of time on the relationship that develops between Ellie and Paul. In a virtual talk at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, where Wu lives, she said after coming out her senior year of college, she went through a painful time with her mother. The character of Paul was somewhat based on a straight white man who was a close friend at that time.

“We would have the most intense conversations about life, and he was probably the most influential in helping me accept myself as gay. I was coming out, I was freaked out, my family wasn’t speaking to me, and I didn’t know how to tell my previous friends,” she said. “Meanwhile here’s this guy who just totally accepted me as I was, like it was no different to him.”

Wu grew up watching Chinese soap operas and classic films and reading Victorian novels, and she says she got the message that when you find the perfect romantic partner, your life is complete. With The Half of It, she tried to counter that idea. For Saving Face, which she says she wrote for her mother (they are now close), she was asking a question about being able to reconcile romantic love with family. The new movie isn’t really about romantic love, she says.

“I think as a society we don’t always have the vocabulary or the ability to articulate all the different types of love there are,” she said. “I always had this question of what happens if you meet a soul mate and have no desire to have sex with them. How do you give a level of importance to that relationship?”

Wu thought about setting the movie in college, the age when she was going through some of this. But she decided high school made more sense for a coming-of-age romantic comedy.

“For me to get to an ending that I was satisfied with and that I felt would be both earned and would make the audience feel a sense of completion emotionally, high school is a great place,” she said. “In high school, every feeling you have feels so huge. You fall in love with someone, and you think if you don’t get that person, you will die alone. It’s that kind of hugeness. So that’s a great place to cover a lot of emotional territory very quickly.”

Wu was joined at the Commonwealth Club talk by Leah Lewis, who plays Ellie. Lewis, who was born in Shanghai and adopted by a white family in Orlando, Florida, says she knows first-hand the importance of representation, and she’s glad to hear from people who say they’re seeing themselves in her character. She never saw anyone on screen her age who looked like her growing up, she says.

“When I watched To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, that was the first time I as Leah was able to envision myself ever being able to step into a role like this,” said Lewis, who is on the CW series Nancy Drew. “It kind of sparked a lot of dream and goals, and I hope that this film is doing the same for people out there.”

After Saving Face, Wu worked on various projects and sold a pitch for a show to a network. But then a writers’ strike derailed that project, and her mother became ill, so Wu returned to the Bay Area from Los Angeles to help take care of her. Her mother recovered, and Wu started to think about writing again.

“I write from a very personal place, and to be honest at the point I’m writing it I don’t think that film is probably going to get made,” she said. “That frees me up to write in the most honest way.”

Wu didn’t want to have a typical romantic comedy ending, since this movie wasn’t really about who gets the girl. Rather it’s Ellie taking a risk and realizing there is life beyond her small town and high school that’s important.

“High school was profoundly lonely for me, but I think it takes till you become an adult before you realize it’s profoundly lonely for pretty much everyone,” she said. “I’m telling this story through the lens of a queer Asian kid, but I think the reason it resonates is everyone was so lonely — even if they were popular. It doesn’t need to be a big happy ending with a bow tied at the end. The real happiness is realizing it could be OK, your future life could be OK.”