Outside in

The Chinese American screen director Lulu Wangon The Expats, her complex new TV series set in 2014 Hong Kong

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WHAT DOES THE WORD EXPAT MEAN? Its traditional association is with wealthy outsiders lounging around pools in exotic locations, while being waited on hand and foot by the locals. But for Lulu Wang, whose family migrated to America from China when she was six years old, it is more complicated. "When I go back to visit my family, I'm not Chinese any more. Not really. But I look Chinese. I'm also not fully an American, but I'm not an immigrant, right? They don't even understand what that is. And so I'm like, 'Wait up. Am I an expat here?" You know, I studied abroad in college, and I went back, and people thought I was the tour guide, because all my friends were white."

This was the sensibility that animated her name-making 2019 film, The Farewell, a radiant semi-autobiographical account of a granddaughter summoned back to China to await her grandmother's death. The buzz around The Farewell, coupled with the sensibility it projected, made her an obvious choice when Nicole Kidman was looking for someone to adapt and direct her in a Hong Kong-set novel she had optioned. Janice YK Lee's The Expatriates did indeed feature wealthy outsiders being waited on hand and foot. But Wang has updated it into something more widely nuanced, a six-part television series, Expats, that is at once glamorous, empathetic and politically astute.

Wang, 40, has flown over from her home in the US to introduce the series to the London Film Festival when we meet. The series tells the story of three expat women and their families, which include the domestic servants who live in their homes and cater to their every need, while submitting to the fiction that they are cherished friends.