Directly north of Toronto, Canada’s biggest city, is Markham: a suburban town that’s home to a giant Chinese immigrant community. New film Fresh Off Markham, which has its North American premiere at this year’s Reel Asian Film Festival, takes place in this oft-ignored corner of the world and dives into the specificity of the lives lived in this community.
Fresh Off Markham is a collection of three interconnected stories. Directed and written by Kurt Yuen, Cyrus Lo and Trevor Choi, who each helmed one of the stories, the episodic film is a comedic exploration of class and migration within the Chinese community of Markham. The first story follows a newly-arrived immigrant from Dongbei who gets caught up in an old friend’s scheme to rob a restaurant, the second introduces a Black Uber driver who unwittingly becomes the pair’s getaway driver while also picking up an influencer from Hong Kong and the third in the triptych stays with the influencer at an unsettling open house.
“Markham is like Chinatown but magnified and expanded into a whole city, versus just a few blocks or streets,” says Choi. “It’s a very Canadian thing, where we have more of a cultural mosaic.”
For the three directors, who met while studying film in Hong Kong, Markham was the perfect place to tell stories about the Chinese community. The three interconnected tales all follow a character whose journey shows the audience a new shade of Markham: These experiences include a new, struggling working class immigrant, a person outside of the Chinese community living in Markham, and a wealthy person observing property and workers in the suburbs. Together, they weave a tale of a community that is as full of contradictions as it may be homogenous.
One of the key dividers of the community, and a major theme of Fresh Off Markham, is wealth. All three stories centre on money, getting it, or even investing it. Yuen says that their characters are all over the wealth and class spectrum: from a broke immigrant looking for just enough to survive, to an Uber driver hoping to win the lottery and a super wealthy Hong Konger looking to buy an investment property in Markham. “We wanted to examine how they view money as a tool in this world to get what they want and get by and to what extent they will do or become to get money,” explains Lo.
Race is another major divider in the film, as in real life. Of course, there’s the anti-Black racism that’s all too common among Chinese immigrants, typified by the second story, which opens with a scared middle-aged Chinese woman clutching her purse in the back of an Uber driven by the Black man. The driver, desperate to maintain a five-star rating, easily bends to the whims of his passengers. And the riders, many of whom a part of Markham’s Chinese community, either stay scared or ambivalent to the man who’s being paid (way too little!) to ferry them around town.
But there’s also the less obvious racial conflicts: in a community full of Chinese immigrants from around the diaspora, tensions can arise from those from different parts of the world, or even different cities. “To other communities, Asians are just Asian, they don’t differentiate,” Choi says. “But we care about where we come from. We wanted to reflect that when we’re writing this story about Chinese immigrants.”
“Whether you’re from Hong Kong or Taiwan or mainland China, there are actually some difficulties between us,” explains Yuen. Even when you immigrated to Canada and how long your family has been in the country is a marker of difference. Yuen says he wanted to show how difficult it is for new immigrants, even when they arrive somewhere where they have linguistic and cultural communities. The three directors also wanted to counter stereotypes about Chinese immigrants always being well-off.
All in all, the film is a look at modern-day Canadian multiculturalism: a collection of different people all living together and trying to get by, and sometimes not understanding each other. “I don’t think I’ve seen a movie where it’s like, four people of different ethnicities trying to communicate with each other and solve a problem,” says Lo. “I wanted to see what we could do with that, while keeping it fun for the audience.”
‘Fresh Off Markham’ is playing as a part of this year’s Reel Asian Film Festival and will be screening on November 15 at 5:30PM at the TIFF Lightbox. You can purchase tickets here.
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