The acclaimed new film exploring the myths about left-handed people

“Throughout the years before I made this, I kept on telling Sean that I really want to tell a story about women. The way I grew up in Taiwan, there’s a lot of expectations, a lot of limitations that we put on girls. You have to be a certain way, you have to fit in, you cannot stand out. Especially when you’re a young kid growing up, you’re told not to be different, and it really affects you. This is more than left-handedness; it’s a story about how you cannot be yourself.”

Casting a left-handed actor

In 2023, Taiwan still had some of the lowest reported rates for left-handedness in the world, at around 5%. Nearby China was the lowest, at 2.64%. By contrast, nearly 13% of people in the Netherlands were reported to be left-handed, and the world average is 10.6%.

Tsou says that children in Taiwan are still being taught to use their right hand instead of their left, especially by people of older generations. “Before I made this film in Taiwan, a lot of people told me, ‘Oh, your story is so old because the left-handed taboo doesn’t exist anymore’,” she says. “But I told them, ‘Well, it’s my story and I’m going to tell it’. Then when I cast Nina Ye [the young actor who plays I-Jing] in 2022, she was six years old, and her mother told me on the first day that Nina was naturally left-handed but had already been ‘corrected’ by her grandmother, who didn’t like the idea of it. So, when Nina was on set, we had to retrain her to use her left hand for things like drawing and throwing a ball. We constantly needed to check whether she was using the correct hand for a scene or not.”

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The idea of the left being somehow “wrong” is still present in Chinese and Taiwanese culture. According to a 2013 study on the topic by Howard Kushner, Emeritus professor of Science and Study at Emory University in the US, the Mandarin character for “left” can be translated as “weird”, “different”, “incorrect”, “contrary”, or “opposite”. Many Asian (and African) cultures traditionally use the right hand to eat, and only use the left hand when something is dirty. Kushner points out that the Mandarin character for “right” means “to eat with the right hand”.