Little Fierce Loong

Ten-year-old Huahua, a Chinese immigrant girl, feels lost and unsatisfied with her life in a foreign land, selling goods with her single mother at the local market. Her only companion is a wooden dragon toy she believes can talk and will grow up with her. But everything changes when nine-year-old Alex—a wealthy yet neglected white boy—enters her life. Drawn by rumors about the dragon, Alex insists on buying it at a high price and takes it home.

Director Statement

When I was little, I lived with my unemployed single mother, who always harbored a mixture of envy and resentment towards other children at school who were better off. But as I grew older and began to know my father, who was far away but successful, I discovered he had a temperament, personality, and even values ​​completely different from my mother’s. As a child, I was conflicted, confused, and torn, unable to distinguish right from wrong. Yet, these contrasting voices also helped me to view different perspectives and prejudices more objectively. I began to realize that, often, most adults’ prejudices are one-sided and subjective. The estrangement and division between my parents stemmed from their different experiences, and ultimately, from their childhoods. As I grew older and encountered all sorts of people, I felt even more strongly that so much conflict, contradiction, and war in this world might originate from the complex experiences of each individual’s childhood. During my studies in the United States, I witnessed another form of division—the barriers between race, class, and gender. As an Asian woman, this segregation was not unfamiliar; in fact, it was no different from my own childhood experiences.