When her grandfather warned her not to use her left hand, the director was shocked. Now she’s made an acclaimed film taking aim at this Taiwanese superstition
T
he teenage Shih-Ching Tsou was at home in Taipei cooking a meal one day when she picked up a knife with her left hand. “My grandfather told me the left hand is the devil’s hand. He said: ‘You should not use that.’” Up until then, the Taiwanese-American film-maker hadn’t even realised she was left-handed. “I was already ‘corrected’, probably in kindergarten, by the teacher.”
That conversation – and the lingering sense of shame – stayed with her, Tsou says. She spoke to her mother about it. “She told me she was left-handed too and got corrected” – forced to use her right hand – “because at the time, they said you had to do the same as other people.”
Decades later, she has turned that childhood incident into a scene in her new film, Left-Handed Girl, which follows a sweet-natured Taiwanese five-year-old, I-Jing (Nina Ye), grappling with what she believes to be her own “devil’s hand”. Her mother, Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), a noodle stall owner, is struggling with money problems while I-Jing’s rebellious older sister, I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), is dealing with the fallout from an affair with her married boss. I-Jing starts to shoplift, her left hand taking on a sinful life of its own.
