Directed by Vancouver-based Anthony Shim, Riceboy Sleeps tells the story of single mother So-Young (Choi Seung-yoon) and her son Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang), set in the 1990s. Their immigrant narrative begins after So-Young’s partner, Han Won-Shick, struggles with schizophrenia and commits suicide, leaving Dong-hyun to be born out of wedlock and therefore delegitimized for South Korean citizenship.

Moving to British Columbia, the mother and son navigate obstacles that have become common, almost mundane, racist tropes—the pressure to change ethnic names like Dong-hyun to David, “stinky” ethnic lunches, slurs like “riceboy,” slit eyes, and adolescent Dong-hyun’s eventual replacement of Korean with English at home, along with his bleached hair and coloured contacts. Yet, Shim delivers an exceptionally heartfelt story that eats away at any of the viewer’s numbness to the well-told and repeated immigrant narrative—so much so that I turned to my friend, bewildered, “What made that so striking when the stories were so familiar?”

Mother and son are put in parallel, as their alienation in predominantly white spaces are reflected in Dong-hyun’s experiences of bullying at school and So-Young’s confrontation with sexual assault in the workplace, where the only handful of women amongst men are of colour. As the film develops, the external pressures increasingly loom as a third presence in their home. The intimate sphere of the car is intensified by the teacher’s advice that Dong-hyun change his name, as men drive by yelling, “Learn how to fucking drive,” invoking yet another trope. A scene of Dong-hyun assisting So-Young in making kimchi at home, as she flies “planes” of kimchi into his mouth, transitions into Dong-hyun asking her to pack him “what the other kids eat” for lunch.

Yet, it is exactly the intimacies of home that emerge and disrupt the experiences of alienation, and the tensions that form between So-Young and an adolescent Dong-hyun, that nod toward the interstices of diaspora and make Riceboy Sleeps the moving story it is.

In an early scene, the camera looks through a frame and into the living room, where So-Young and Dong-hyun are curled up together on the couch, reading a Korean children’s book. Dong-hyun asks about his father and why he can’t come back, recognizing that the other kids have two parents. So-Young navigates the often-dreaded conversation of death with a child with not only an admirably humble and truthful admittance, “I don’t know. I’m curious as well,” but also with the promise that holds up much of the film’s tenderness and pain: “It’s just the two of us now. Dong-hyun and mom.”

At the factory, So-Young notices a struggling new employee, Mi-sun, and the two instantaneously bond, “I’m so relieved there’s another Korean person here.” Within seconds of meeting, Mi-sun shares the 젓갈 (jeotgal, or salted seafood) that her mother-in-law brought from Korea, a rarity from home that So-Young savours, as So-Young reassures her about the workplace. Their bond expands into a community of women of colour who become family in an otherwise white and/or male space. In one scene, the women sit outside with their packed lunches, as one of them tries to come up with an English name for her son, only to find all the names have already been used by the others for their children and partners, including comedically “Stanley Park”—highlighting the ridiculousness resulting from efforts to Westernise and homogenise immigrant communities and their cultures.   

As Dong-hyun grows up and increasingly resists parts of his Korean identity, including his mother, the distance between mother and son grows. Yet, peeks of the sustained intimacies of their bond are revealed in how So-Young recognizes when a shirt is new or not his, or when she goes out of her way to share a breakfast with him, adding expensive seafood to increase nutrition.

After So-Young reveals her diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, Dong-hyun finally stands up for the other South Korean student who has been continuously bullied; while his first time picking a fight as a child was an act of self-defence against racism, his second time signifies a rejection of racism after striving for whiteness as survival. In a way, it is in preparation of returning home to his Korean identity, to his mother.

In fact, when Dong-hyun returns beat up, So-Young treats his cuts—the expression on her face revealing the first-hand pain in seeing her son hurt. The camera pans down the hallway of their home—the space that has witnessed and held years of their intimacies—and transitions from memories of young Dong-Hyun’s hair being stroked to current Dong-Hyun allowing himself to be held in bed. So-Young pats him and hums, deciding, “Let’s go on a trip, the two of us.”

As Christopher Lew’s shots span across the Korean countryside, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s original score builds and billows, culminating in Dong-Hyun’s visit to a home/land he has never been to and So-Young’s reconnection with Won-Shick’s family. At his paternal grandparent’s home, Dong-Hyun confronts a family history of trauma that his grandma is still unprepared to reconcile with, while being embraced by his uncle who instructs Dong-Hyun to call him 작은아버지 (“little father”) and his grandpa who teaches him how to drink. While Dong-Hyun connects with his paternal family and learns about his father through inherited belongings, So-Young receives acknowledgement and lament from her father-in-law for a life spent blamed and as a single mother.

Later at a traditional Korean bathhouse, So-Young bathes alone. Meanwhile, Dong-Hyun, bleached hair shaved off, bathes with his uncle and learns the etiquette of scrubbing each other clean. The scene acts as a life transition with So-Young’s lurking illness; Dong-Hyun is introduced to a new home and kinships, a passing on of home from mother to uncle and grandpa. As Dong-Hyun and his uncle splash bathwater at each other, his contact lens—the last remnants of his attempts at whiteness—fall out and are lost.

The last stop of their trip, So-Young and Dong-Hyun visit Won-Shick’s grave. From the top of the mountain, So-Young lets out screams that become visibly more cathartic and painful at the same time—tears welling, eyes scrunching together, and breath deepening, finally clutching onto her chest. Dong-Hyun stands behind her, with the slightest quiver and almost unnoticeable touch of a mournful smile, as he witnesses his mother finally releasing all the pain she had carried all this time, reaching a hand onto her shoulder.

As So-Young turns to him, uttering “Let’s go home,” Dong-Hyun begins to cry; the two embrace in shared understanding that the home they are returning to has shifted in meaning. Far below and away from the camera, the miniscule figures of Dong-Hyun with his mother on his back walk down a path through the forest. By the end of the film, “riceboy sleeps” has the multiple meaning of a rejection of an identity that centres a white perspective, the rest and ease in knowing one’s history and finding a new home, and a more sorrowful hearkening to the tender intimacies between mother and son. Despite So-Young’s impending death, the film ends not with their separation, but as it should: just the two of them.  

Riceboy Sleeps is Director Anthony Shim’s (@anthonyshim) second feature film. It won the Flash Forward Audience Award (Busan International Film Festival 2022), Platform Prize (Toronto International Film Festival 2022), and Best Canadian Feature Film and the Northern Lights Audience Award (Vancouver International Film Festival 2022).

Cathy Xu (she/they) is an emerging Chinese and Canadian storyteller. Her work explores diasporic narratives and knowledge productions, bodies as archives of memory and homeland, and sites of BIPOC and queer resistance and futures. She is especially interested in storytelling through food and reinterpretations of mythology and fantasy. In her day to day, she finds comfort in pastries, plants, and bodies of water. Follow her on Instagram (@cathy_jzx).