My first question for Lulu Wang, about her new Hong Kong-based TV show Expats, is softball (or so I thought): How would you describe it? “Gosh, I’ve not been asked that. I should probably figure that out,” the Chinese-born American filmmaker, 40, says with an apprehensive laugh, before coming up with a thoughtful answer, almost immediately. “I think it’s a show about perspective. It jumps around, both in timeline and perspective, to show you different sides of the same story.”
This is, I learn over the course of our interview at a London hotel, a classic Wang response. Sometimes funny, sometimes serious, she always has a considered response at hand. That quick-thinking attitude likely proved helpful while directing Expats: a twisty thriller-cum-family drama with a side of socio-political commentary. It is an ambitious undertaking.
The six-part series, available on Prime Video from January 26, is based on the 2016 novel The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee. Nicole Kidman bought the film rights to the book and approached Wang. Despite liking the source material, Wang had her doubts about an adaptation. Crazy Rich Asians, a rom com set in the world of the Singaporean elite, had just come out. “We’re all obsessed with watching wealth,” she tells me. “That’s why we have the Kardashians and Crazy Rich Asians and Bling Empire. And I just wanted to make sure that while we were depicting it, we were not participating in the celebration of it.” Wang was also keen to weave in Hong Kong’s political background as the show is set in 2014, during the lead up to the Umbrella Revolution. Luckily, Kidman, who also plays the lead role in the drama, was “very game for all those perspectives”, Wang says: “She trusted me.”
Kidman’s character, Margaret, has been living a wealthy expat existence with her husband Clarke (Brian Tee), which breaks down when her youngest child goes missing. Ji-young Soo plays Korean-American nanny Mercy, who was in charge of the child when he disappeared. And then there's Margaret’s friend, Hillary (Sarayu Blue), whose marriage to Englishman David (Jack Huston) is imperilled by infidelity. The result is an intriguing romp through Hong Kong of the recent past: glitzy, but claustrophobic. A place where well-kept apartments hide badly-kept secrets. With its helpings of misery and glamour, the show has traces of prestige hits like Big Little Lies (and there is, of course, the Kidman connection) and Succession. And, like those shows, Expats is happy to linger with uncomfortable feelings.
Wang was born in Beijing to a Chinese diplomat father and editor mother; the family moved to Miami after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Wang was six at the time. She studied at Boston College, majoring in English and then began taking film courses. Her breakout hit was her second feature film: 2019’s funny, wistful The Farewell, starring Awkwafina, about an adrift New Yorker who travels to China to see her dying grandmother. Together with her partner, Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, Wang is a fresh perspective in Hollywood.But while she found success in America, Wang acknowledges that she left a good deal of her history behind in China. “We weren’t learning about Tiananmen Square in the history books in America, and people weren’t learning about it in the Chinese mainland. It wasn’t something that was recognised in my life,” she says. “Going to Hong Kong, where there was a yearly commemoration, was incredibly moving. I saw my own history being upheld in Hong Kong.”
A team of consultants worked on the television show, from translators who would point out if any words were inaccurate as well as a script co-ordinator who could advise about which characters might live in which areas. “It was a really large undertaking,” Wang says, “and I definitely had a lot of pressure.” A television show set in Hong Kong, a region fraught with long and ongoing turmoil, will attract heated questions. “As a storyteller, you just do your best to represent and bring people from those worlds into the perspective, but ultimately there’s no way to capture it,” Wang says. “No one story can represent everybody and everything.”
Often, it is the smaller moments in the show that evoke time and place best. One episode, which is told from the perspective of Margaret and Clarke’s housekeeper, opens with a group of maids singing Katy Perry’s “Roar”. In another scene, two friends meet at a restaurant which evokes an image of Hong Kong that many have in their mind: neon lights, small coffee shops, pouring rain. But that is a vision of the city that may soon belong to another time. When Wang complimented the real-life owner on his established, he replied with a line that made it into the television show, spoken by a waiter at the restaurant: “Hong Kong is dying.”
Back to unfathomable wealth. What does Wang think of Crazy Rich Asians? The film is sometimes criticised for an unthinking embrace of materialism and gauche excess: important representation, yes, but at what cost? “Oh you can’t ask me that, it’s too complicated,” the writer-director says, no laugh this time. “I feel like it would be a very long conversation.” Here is what Wang will say on the blockbuster: “I love that we are living in a time where Asian people, all kinds of people that haven’t been represented on screen before, can make all kinds of films. We can have our Crazy Rich Asians, but we can also have Minari and we can have Beef. I think that’s what we need. We just need more.”
‘Expats’ airs on Amazon Prime on 24 January
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
