Known for picking up the tab for friends on nights out, shopping at expensive boutiques, and waking up late in her luxury Los Angeles apartment, Sasha (Anna Akana) is used to a certain quality of life, namely blowing through her allowance every month, and then some.
But things are about to change. When her dad cuts her off, Sasha quickly realises how reliant she was on the family fund. Meetings about her clothing designs aren’t going well, and her so-called friends suddenly aren’t so interested when she isn’t flashing her cheque book, ultimately she’s given a choice; back to to the family home in China and chip in on the family business, or be cut off forever. The next day, she’s on a plan back to Hong Kong.
A story of culture clashes and family drama, Sasha struggles to adapt to the change of pace at the family-owned toy factory, as Go Back To China charts Sasha’s struggle to adapt to the change of pace, and new responsibility.
But as Sasha tries to forge new relationships with her father and sister, the film unfortunately struggles to find a deeper meaning too. Though Go Back to China is a semi-autobiographical tale from writer/director Emily Ting – she too went back to China from the US, to help out in the very same factory where much of the film is shot – the film feels oddly impersonal. The dialogue is quite simplistic and you can predict every plot point long before the narrative takes hold. It’s strange, because for a film with quite a unique story, the heartfelt care and attention that clearly went into crafting every scene, the end result is unfortunately quite bland.
On-screen Anna Akana and Lynn Chen are exce llent though, and somewhere inside Go Back to China there is a great story trying to fight its way out, I just don’t think this film hit the heights it set out to achieve.