Vancouver-based director Kevin Cheng thought for a long time about making a film about the relationship between a father and son. His debut short film, Astronaut, blends his own memories with the experiences of other Hong Kong immigrants with largely absent fathers.
The fictional nine-minute film is about a boy named Tom who lives with his mother in an unnamed Canadian city to which they had migrated from Hong Kong. It focuses on a visit from his father, who still works in Asia. Exhausted and jetlagged, the father brings tensions that erupt into arguments. He seems like a stranger to his son.
Astronaut resonates with children of “astronaut” dads who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s – fathers who spent long periods away from their families working in Hong Kong and who only periodically visited them in their new homes. This resulted in uneasy relationships between fathers and their children, while wives were left financially dependent on their husbands.
Part biographical – Cheng is the son of an astronaut father – the director was surprised at how well the film was received by non-Chinese audiences when it premiered in September at the International Film Festival in Edmonton, which is in the oil-rich Canadian province of Alberta.
“Some people there are from families of oil riggers, where the fathers work away for one, two or three weeks; when they come back, they’re tired, they’re not engaged in family activities,” he says. “The children also have the feeling of having strangers at home that they know, but they also don’t know.”
Cheng says that families of pilots or military fathers also encounter this unsettling scenario.
“You always felt when you were young that you didn’t understand why your father was not at home, but the older you are, the more you realise that’s part of life,” he explains.
Language barrier
The term astronaut was coined by Hong Kong media in the 1980s. However, in Astronaut the dialogue is spoken in Mandarin because it was difficult to find a cast of Cantonese-speaking actors in Vancouver on a tight budget.
Ye Xiaoqing, who plays the mother, speaks Mandarin; her on-screen husband, Victor Young, knows only Cantonese; and Tobi Wong, who plays Tom, can’t speak a word of either. Cheng filmed the movie in Mandarin because only Ye spoke either language convincingly. A Taiwanese scriptwriter stood by to help Young with his lines.
Cheng regrets he could not make the film in Cantonese “to be closer to what I envisioned, but given the constraints, the time limits, and we weren’t paying much… it was a smooth production – I’m grateful and glad it worked out.”
The film is set in a sparsely furnished 1990s home with lots of moving boxes yet to be unpacked, which was common for many other astronaut families.
“That’s the vibe of that time, where you had a big house with empty spaces that you didn’t know what to do with,” he says.
Personal observations
Astronaut is inspired by Cheng’s own experience growing up with a largely absent father. Now 27, he was born in North York, a suburb of Toronto. His father visited regularly from Hong Kong and, like in the film, they didn’t have much of a relationship. When Cheng was about six years old he and his mother moved back to Hong Kong. Cheng’s memories of this period are fuzzy because his father died soon after from an illness.
Cheng studied film at Hong Kong Baptist University and, after graduating in 2020, moved to Vancouver where he earned a diploma from the Vancouver Film School. He worked on a handful of films before Astronaut.
Cheng says the waves of migration from Hong Kong that produced the astronaut phenomenon were differently motivated and affected families in different ways. In the 1990s, people moved as an “insurance policy in case things turned really bad” after the 1997 handover. For those families, the sacrifices made to vouchsafe their futures were a “grind”.
Cheng was from the later waves, which “felt more like a retreat”. But there was optimism. “By the time they came here, it felt like they’d given up hope of ever returning. There’s a sense of finality to it, and feels more like they have made up their minds, with a set timeline on when the astronaut model will end and the family will reunite in the new country,” Cheng says.
Common to both experiences, however, were the fathers: those in each generation of migrants were driven to remain by a fear that they would be forced to restart their professional careers on a lower rung in their new home.
“That’s a tough pill to swallow, and it’s a story I’ve heard from other families where the father chose to stay behind,” Cheng says.
He is already thinking of a sequel to Astronaut, when Tom is a teenager and learning to drive, except it isn’t his father who teaches him, but a Chinese immigrant driving instructor.
“It’s about the process of him learning how to drive at the same time that the instructor, who is an immigrant, is learning how to adapt to a new country,” he explains.
“I thought it would be fun if, at the same time, it’s a father-and-son moment, but there’s no father, he has to learn it from someone else. It’s like finding a bit of a father from each person he encounters.”
