These are the choices given to a young girl: you can aspire to normality by “correcting” the evil thing within you, embrace evil and do bad things, or live with the constant assertion that you are fundamentally wicked.
In March 2021, a number of Taiwanese people legally changed their names to include the character for “salmon.” With these fishy new names, they could now take advantage of a promotion at the Japanese sushi chain Sushiro, where customers with “salmon” in their name were offered free sushi (homophones received discounts). The event, translated to “Salmon Chaos” in the English-language media, was exactly the kind of story that the Taiwanese media loves: wacky, vaguely political, and somehow involving food. News stories in Taiwan covered the goofiness of the names as young people chose increasingly silly variations (one man in particular was horrified to learn that his name change to “Salmon Dream” was possibly permanent), and discussions about generational splits, government paperwork, and even food waste circulated. As the story grew bigger and got picked up by major international outlets, parts of Taiwanese media began describing Salmon Chaos as a national embarrassment—they felt it made their civic processes and people look like a joke on the world stage.
A clip of a Taiwanese news station covering Salmon Chaos can be overheard in Shih-Ching Tsou’s new film Left-Handed Girl (2025), signaling a connection between the delightfully goofy story and commodification of life the movie explores. Though it only appears in the briefest aside, its inclusion in Left-Handed Girl made me reflect more deeply on the gravity of the silly event: how it expressed the way that identity can be shaped by markets, how this mode of branding exposes the inherent worth we already ascribe to names, and how, in a capitalist society, you really can sell anything. Plenty of people would rather be Salmon than hungry. Of course, there can be liberation in recognizing the arbitrariness of our names (and consequently, our selves). But Left-Handed Girl suggests that selling or trading one’s identity is something else entirely. When we make these exchanges, at least in Tsou’s film, we are not choosing a life for ourselves, but rather, practicing a kind of self-erosion in the language of optimization with conformity, consumerist desire, and class mobility as its end.
Left-Handed Girl shows how these bargains happen across generations by focusing on a family of three moving to Taipei: Shu Fen (Janet Tsai), a young single mother; I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), the prickly adult daughter; and I-Jing (Nina Ye), the energetic and often impressionable child. Debt and money troubles follow the family as they open a noodle stand in one of the capital city’s night markets, as do family secrets that arise from fights with the extended family.
There is something ruthless and even Faustian about Left-Handed Girl’s depictions of transactions involving identity. Just as one might trade in on one’s name for the hope of free sushi and a few laughs, in Left-Handed Girl characters are always calculating life and relationships in terms of social or financial capital. One can trade their name, not for fish, but for the sake of superstition: for example, a former classmate greets a confused I-Ann, quickly clarifying that she changed her name because a fortune teller told her it would bring her better luck for exams. “More than half our classmates changed their names,” she explains. In one subplot, we see Shu Fen’s mother (Xin-Yan Chao) regularly flying to America on behalf of a shady operation that brings people to the United States. In these journeys, which Tsou states were inspired by a real news story, we see the reckless exchange of pricey passports, visas, and identities that put the grandmother at risk of arrest. Left-Handed Girl, then, lays out the multitude of ways we can calculate the worth of a person’s life or identity. Tsou repeatedly portrays moments when her characters clearly weigh lives as numbers. Shu Fen, who is often on the bad end of deals, shoulders her ex-husband’s debt and eventually even pays his funeral costs, much to the chagrin of those around her.
As Shu Fen’s taking on of her ex-husband’s debt illustrates, this pricing of life is, of course, gendered. Tsou’s film, which was Taiwan’s entry for International Feature Film at the Academy Awards this year, uncovers the many negotiations—and even deceptions—that women and girls have to make in order to live in Taiwanese society. Marriage and children are costly, in more ways than one. In multiple scenes with the grandmother, we also see how the grandmother values her only son far more than her daughters—something that has clearly sowed pain and bitterness in Shu Fen and her sisters, who fight about money, loans, and inheritance. At one point the grandmother yells out a common saying:: “A married daughter’s like water that’s poured out.” When one lives in a culture that prizes boys over girls, and where the structures of family capitalism still dominate, this cruelty inevitably expresses itself in family dynamics, professional life, and everywhere else. There is a lose-lose conundrum: male characters repeatedly make each female character’s life harder in some way (debt, romantic disappointment, etc.), yet the absence of a patriarch or “protector” is its own burden.
Tsou’s frames often show us I-Jing quietly sitting off to the side during these family fights and discussions, suggesting that even when she does not fully understand what is happening, she is nevertheless absorbing the stress and misery of her surroundings. In the face of this conundrum—of how girls and women navigate the intersections of patriarchy and capital—I-Jing, the titular left-handed girl, quite literally embodies the split between tradition and rebellion. After being harshly told off by her traditional grandfather (Akio Chen) for using her left hand, the young girl comes to understand her left hand as a “devil’s hand.” So, she acts accordingly and uses it to steal and do devilish things. This split in how I-Jing understands her body is at times funny (she blames her wrong-doing on “the Devil”), but it is also traumatic to be told that you have evil inside you. With the simple, but drastic logic we often see in children, she quietly contemplates chopping off her hand with a cleaver. These are the choices given to a young girl: you can aspire to normality by “correcting” the evil thing within you, embrace evil and do bad things, or live with the constant assertion that you are fundamentally wicked. While I-Jing does not cut off her hand, we see that the women around her have already been giving up parts of their lives for the sake of survival, whether that be their education, their relationships, or their self-respect.
These are the ingredients that feed the family melodrama, a genre which thrives off of inheritance disputes, sibling rivalry, and long-simmering resentment. Examining films from the 20th century, Joseph Bitney notes that “exemplary family melodramas are actually stories about family businesses,” suggesting that the genre is fundamentally defined by “the way that the personal relations of the family are treated like the impersonal, contract- and exchange-based relations of the market.” It is no surprise that Left-Handed Girl feels especially attuned to this family-market dynamic. Those familiar with Tsou know her as a frequent collaborator of Sean Baker, who edited and co-produced Left-Handed Girl (Tsou also produced many of Baker’s films). This long-term collaboration has led many to compare Left-Handed Girl to films like Take Out (2004), which Tsou co-directed with Baker, as well as The Florida Project (2017), which similarly features a strong performance by a child actor. Tsou and Baker’s shared interest in the secret exchanges that lie beneath the surface of American life (counterfeits, sex work, etc.) is certainly apparent in Left-Handed Girl’s portrait of a struggling family, as is their fondness for handheld cinematography and bathing their character in bright neon lights.
However, while Tsou’s debut resembles her collaborative work in these respects, the emotional stakes, trade-offs, and negotiations that form the texture of Left-Handed Girl specifically reflect the state of Taiwanese family values—stunted and entangled with both regressive superstition and the questionable promises of modernity. Moving into her solo-directorial debut, Tsou has talked about the excitement she felt in preparing to tell “a story that was mine alone,” rooted in her experience growing up in Taiwan. The night market where Shu Fen opens her noodle stand is an ideal stage for this story, as each family member helps us experience the space differently. Shu Fen diligently and stressfully leads the operation, while beginning a relationship with a neighboring vendor. It is notable that there is no secret recipe or gimmick in Shu Fen’s noodle stand—the story is not one about entrepreneurship as a passion project or as a dramatic success story. Rather, Tsou displays the practicality of the decision, demonstrating the ways that the space permits the family to stay afloat. For instance, I-Ann, the older daughter, works as a betel nut girl. These girls are iconic figures in Taiwan, typically seen selling betel nuts behind a brightly-lit glass wall in revealing clothing. (They have become rarer in recent years because of regulation and health concerns.) In I-Ann’s plot, the anxiety about women’s self-worth that permeates the film manifests in the fear of romantic interchangeability as well. Her affair with her boss is first threatened by his interest in the stall’s new hire, and then, by his wife (in response, she angrily spits out the news of her pregnancy in their faces and quits).
Even with the mounting pressure of the noodle shop’s maintenance costs, however, Tsou repeatedly portrays the market as one of the few places our family of three finds generosity. I-Jing is one of the many Taiwanese children who grow up in the night market; she helps out at the stand, all of the market’s store owners know her name, and she loves the street games and the toys (which she begins to steal). It is in many of I-Jing’s scenes that the style of the film shines. Very often, the camera will drift between I-Ann or Shu Fen’s height to I-Jing’s eye-level, allowing us to visually register the differences between the child’s perspective and the world of adults. Filmed on an iPhone with Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao as cinematographers, the camera movement feels unencumbered and dynamic, even in the crowds. We see how vast the night market must feel to I-Jing, who experiences it as her playground, her job, and her education.
The iPhone camerawork of Left-Handed Girl effectively navigates Taipei’s crowded streets, and the pedestrians, motorcycles, and food carts that fill them. Reflecting on the ways that shooting on location meant “little control over the environment,” Tsou has claimed that this “chaos is part of the energy you see in the film,” and that it “mirrors the emotional urgency of the characters.” This filmic technique was previously employed by Tsou and Baker to high praise in Tangerine (2015), which was shot on three iPhone 5s. The “shot on an iPhone” form, simultaneously evoked as marketing for Apple and as a valuable resource for independent, investigative, and guerilla filmmaking, embodies a core paradox wherein consumerism and “democratization” appear hand-in-hand. The most interesting smartphone films often deal with this tension directly, or make these constraints their own commentary: consider Tangerine, with its meandering look at sex work on the streets, or This Is Not a Film, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s documentary which incorporates iPhone footage of Panahi’s house arrest (to give two examples across the spectrum). In contrast, “shot on iPhone” produces little more than a (very entertaining!) advert in Olivia Rodrigo’s music video for “get him back!” which attached an iPhone to comically expensive pieces of filmmaking equipment. As professed fans of the Danish Dogme 95 movement, Tsou and Baker draw on the smartphone as an apparatus for modern life and social realism. Left-Handed Girl’s smartphone footage has an additional resonance with its Taiwanese setting: it gestures at Taiwan’s growth as a semiconductor hub, which occurred in Tsou’s lifetime. Building on the exploitation and fungibility of this society, Tsou’s film is captured on the very technology that makes up Taiwan’s “silicon shield” and established the country as a force in the global marketplace.
From the opening scene of the film, where we see Taipei’s skyline through I-Jing’s kaleidoscope, we understand that Left-Handed Girl is putting aside a B-roll, generic story of urban life. The city’s biggest landmark, Taipei 101, only ever appears in a handful of shots, and always off in the distance. To that end, Tsou’s night market is also distinct from the bustling streets in tourism videos or snappy Instagram and TikTok travelogues (which, if not shot on the iPhone, are eventually edited to fit on one). In this gap, we discover a general dissatisfaction with what the metropolis thinks its citizens want, what it offers or showcases, and what it withholds. Tsou’s night market feels complementary to legendary Taiwanese New Wave director Edward Yang’s propensity for staging scenes in American chains. Yang’s characters convene and dine at McDonald’s, TGI Friday’s, and the Hard Rock Cafe in Taipei, expressing an emerging culture of consumerism and alienation in a newly democratic, capitalist and globalized Taiwan.
By moving outdoors, Tsou explores the night market as a mini ecosystem that is—in contrast to the branding of the chain restaurants—constantly changing in relation to industrialization, mass-productions, trends and gimmicks, and tourism. Once a place for laborers to gather and eat, it has since become one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions with stalls even earning Michelin stars. At the night market, a mixture of new and old (e.g. temples, fortune tellers, and traditional medicine) is maintained to some extent. And while the night market is regulated by the government, it is also a place of peddlers and counterfeits. In Left-Handed Girl, the night market provides a compelling stage for the starts and stops of women’s lives who are living under the weight of both tradition and late capitalism.
Left-Handed Girl reaches its climax at the grandmother’s 60th birthday celebration, an event that gathers all our characters in one place. Things appear to be going well, until I-Jing’s former boss and his wife crash the event to confront I-Ann. Not knowing that she has miscarried, they offer to “pay for everything” and take the child in—but only if it is a son, since they only have daughters. The celebratory mood is soured, leading other relatives to try and smooth things over with toasts. It is then that a disheveled I-Ann snatches the microphone and tells I-Jing to wish her great-grandmother “Happy Birthday”—explosively revealing that I-Jing is actually her daughter, not her little sister. Left-Handed Girl’s melodramatic plot thus complicates the multi-generational family drama genre; it is no surprise that Baker and Tsou name-checked Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996) as one inspiration. Narratively, these uncomfortable confrontations force all the family’s secrets into the light, eventually allowing our three protagonists to move forward less burdened.
Left-Handed Girl reveals that the central bargain of the film was made long before the start of the film, when Shu-Fen decided to protect I-Ann from the social stigma of an unplanned pregnancy and young motherhood by taking it on herself. With this revelation, we see the family’s repeated insistence on self-sacrifice, self-denial, and concealment have only festered and made them more miserable. Who was this trade-off supposed to protect? When Shu Fen cries that she didn’t want to spoil her daughter’s future chances of marriage, I-Ann cries back: “Why do I have to marry someone?”
Left-Handed Girl unfolds with a sharp emotional insight into the weariness and anger of living in these suffocating systems of financial and social capital, and the depths of shame and secrecy they breed. Independence and resolution feel painfully hard-won in Tsou’s film, and all the more remarkable by the end. Following the confrontations at the grandmother’s birthday, our characters return to their noodle shop routine. Little has changed on the surface; our characters are likely still one incident away from a financial crisis. Nevertheless, everything feels lighter. By choosing the difficulty of their own lives over the ones that they have invented, the family emerges a bit stronger, a bit more harmonious, and a bit more durable. This is the realistic victory that Left-Handed Girl allows its characters. Tsou uncovers the corrosive secrets born from the tangles of patriarchy and capital, suggesting that we can—at the very least—do more than sell our names or hack off our hands.
Charline Jao is a lecturer at Tufts University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century radical print culture, abolition, and representations of children. Her Salmon name would be Salmon Belly.
Article Illustrations by Carolyn Jao