The Book

How to Break a Girl is a literary fiction novel following three Asian women, Lily, Elizabeth, and Aurora, across continents, decades, and the quiet wreckage left behind by the people who were supposed to love them. It is a story about survival, identity, and the particular cost of being a woman who refuses to disappear. It is also, in places, a true story.

The Project

This campaign funds the first of three proof-of-concept short films adapting How to Break a Girl for the screen, each centering one protagonist in a defining scene from the novel. Together, they form a trilogy built toward a TV series. Elizabeth Park is first.

This Film

San Francisco. A parking lot. A quiet evening that is about to become someone else's problem.

Elizabeth's Last Seeking Arrangement Client opens on a woman who has already done the math. She has rates, composure, and an exit strategy. And before the scene is over, she uses all three. When her client's girlfriend materialises from the shadows, screaming and desperate, Elizabeth does not panic, intervene, or explain herself. She waits. She collects her payment. She walks. This film doesn't flinch, moralize, or apologize for its protagonist. It simply lets her be.

The Cold Open

There's a version of this story where Elizabeth Park is the villain. There's another where she's the hero. The Last Client isn't interested in choosing.

Set against the unglamorous intimacy of a roadside motel, The Last Client follows two women and a man whose lives collide over the course of a single night, each carrying secrets, each convinced she’s the one in control. The women don't apologize, understand choices that can't be undone, and hold a the particular kind of power that lives in the space between what's said and what's meant.

Why This Story

Asian women on screen are too sacrificial, in need of saving, or cast as cautionary tales. Elizabeth Park is none of those things. She is complicated, calculated, and entirely in control of the one currency available to her: herself. Her story doesn't ask for your permission or sympathy. It asks for your attention. Stories like hers don't get made unless people decide they should exist. Well, not anymore, now that I'm here.

Why Me

What do you mean, why me? I wrote the book. Elizabeth Park is based on me.

I'm a Taiwanese Canadian writer, therapist in training, and the former head of marketing, who went on Seeking Arrangement to fund a 3.5-year divorce lawsuit. I didn't come to filmmaking through a film school pedigree. I came through a Master of Journalism, a Bachelor of English Literature, and a life that kept handing me material too good not to use. Storytelling isn't a career pivot for me. It’s the path I was meant for, always.

I wrote Elizabeth because I couldn't find her anywhere else. Turns out, I just had to look in the mirror and say Action. 

Why This Team

We shot this film with a lean, committed, majority-Asian crew who showed up to a Travelodge parking lot on a cold night and made something beautiful. That level of care and conviction doesn't happen by accident.

My co-producer Kenric Wong met the Travelodge owner 15 years ago, and she still remembered him. She offered us the parking lot without hesitation. That’s not a location deal. That's a testament to who Kenric is as a human being. The fact that he also operates sound equipment and brings film festival-level acting experience, including a lead role in This Is It by Bay Area indie filmmaker Debra Knox, is, as I like to say, a very sweet bonus.

Cinematographer Leo Gong of Small Bite Films is currently in production on his own documentary and owns all the equipment we used. He is, frankly, the primary reason we've been able to keep this film as lean as it is. Editing, colour grading, sound mixing, you name it, Leo does it. He's not just a camera operator. He's a one-man post-production house, and we are very lucky to have him.

And then there's Dokyun Im: a Cell Phone Film Award winner who spent three years working in the Seoul film industry before coming to San Francisco. He worked on Squid Game. No joke. Every gorgeous frame of the Bay Bridge you see in this film? He ducked almost his entire torso out of a moving car window as we drove back and forth on the Embarcadero because he understood, better than anyone, that the quiet beauty of that footage needed to echo Elizabeth's quiet pain. That's not a camera operator. That's an artist.

Now, About The Money...

This team has already proven we can do extraordinary things on a shoestring, but getting The Last Client from production to finished film requires resources we're asking you to graciously help provide. Your contributions will be split equally: half goes directly to paying our crew and talent, because good work deserves fair compensation, and half goes toward post-production costs including editing, colour grading, sound design and mixing, original score, and film festival submission fees. Every dollar has a job. If you'd like to see exactly where yours goes, our full Wish List because transparency isn't just a Seed & Spark requirement, it's how we operate.

Why Now

We are at a moment where Asian diaspora stories are finally being recognized as commercially viable, critically celebrated, and long overdue, which means the conversation around Asian representation in media has never been louder. However loudness isn't the same as depth. Too much of what passes for "complex" Asian female characters is really just Asian women performing liberation on someone else's terms: doing the things that signal freedom without asking whose definition of freedom we're actually using.

The mission of The Last Client isn't that. Elizabeth Park isn't complicated because she's shocking. She's complicated because she's real, and real women don't exist to prove a point about how far their community has come. They exist on their own terms, full stop.

This is the exact right moment for a film that refuses to make its Asian women easy to categorize, easy to celebrate, or easy to dismiss. The Asian diaspora has complicated women. It's time film caught up.