The Brooklyn Rail

Rebecca is late to everything and perpetually broke. She’s the kind of girl who looks flawless in a paper-thin slip dress, nipples showing through, despite having unwashed hair and wearing no makeup. By day, she works as a personal assistant in a stuffy Upper East Side brownstone, sometimes making personal charges on her employer’s credit card. By night, she daubs glitter on her eyes and slips into fishnet stockings for her cam girl persona, a nightly act she puts on to supplement her meager income and fill the void of twenty-first century loneliness. A mysterious follower sends her a gift in the mail: a rare breed of rabbit. But she can barely take care of herself, let alone another creature.

Written and directed by Katarina Zhu, who also stars as Rebecca, Bunnylovr is a debut feature of youthful ennui—of wanting more for your life but not knowing how to get it and feeling like everything you do is wrong. What sets it apart from other coming-of-age films is its uniquely Chinese American take on the genre. As the first twenty minutes make clear, Rebecca’s life is anything but stable. She’s barely employable, a flighty friend, and still hooking up with her fuckboy ex, Carter (Jack Kilmer). But there’s one thing that remains constant in her life, a place that she keeps returning to again and again: Chinatown.

It’s in Chinatown that Rebecca runs into her long-estranged and terminally ill father, William, played tenderly by Perry Yung. When he coaxes Rebecca to watch him play cards in the park—he says he needs his good luck charm—she’s pulled back into the local rhythm of Chinatown life, where the aunties take their granny carts shopping and the men smoke and shoot the shit over Chinese chess. At the same time, Rebecca attempts to keep up with her privileged artist friend Bella, convincingly portrayed by Rachel Sennott (Katarina’s real-life friend and one of the film’s producers), and her art world peers. They often meet in Bella’s spacious Lower East Side studio while Rebecca poses for one of her paintings. Later, when Bella’s art show opens, we see Rebecca anxiously wade into the crowded gallery, the Chinese signage on neighboring businesses peaking through the gallery windows.

I remember navigating a similarly bifurcated version of Chinatown when I landed in New York in the summer of 2008, long before Dimes Square had moved in, and found myself living in a 10-by-7-foot rented room on Eldridge and Canal on an editorial assistant’s salary of $30,000. As a fifth-generation Chinese American who grew up in a leafy, well-to-do suburb of Southern California and graduated from an elite university, it felt like something of a comedown to end up back in Chinatown when my family had worked hard to leave it behind.

On weekends, I’d walk past the track at Sun Yat Sen Middle School, which was always filled with gamblers like Rebecca’s dad. Just a few blocks east on Orchard and Ludlow, hip bars and vintage shops were starting to open up. Once, my then-roommate and I went clubbing at the now-defunct Fat Baby and were surprised when we detected several middle-aged Chinese men among the crowd, apparently migrant workers blowing off steam by flailing on the dance floor. The two worlds within Chinatown that we were so used to slipping between had suddenly collided in the most unexpected way.

Rebecca is caught between these two versions of Chinatown—the working-class Chinese American community and New York’s downtown scene—and trying to figure out where she fits in. Another layer to this complication is her cam-girl life. One gets the feeling that she’s chosen this line of work not only out of economic necessity, but also because she feeds off the affirmation she gets from loyal fans.

Her online relationship with John, the admirer who sent her the rabbit, advances unevenly. Austin Amelio, the actor who plays him, walks a fine line between potential love interest and menacing sexual deviant. His demands get kinkier as he asks Rebecca to do increasingly questionable acts with her pet rabbit, now named Milk. The cute, innocent white bunny becomes a proxy for Rebecca, the prey of middle-aged men on the internet. This point is hammered home when Bella unveils her portrait of Rebecca, which has evolved into a nude with the bunny resting between her bare breasts. “I kind of improvised and think it turned out better,” Bella dismisses Rebecca’s objections, “because now it’s like a deconstruction of the feminine identity.”

The film comes to a crescendo when Rebecca’s social isolation prompts her, against common sense, to drive to Philadelphia for an in-person date with John, whose idea of a romantic night is watching a blood-curdling slasher flick together. In every interaction with John, there is a lurking tension, a feeling that at any moment their harmless flirting will turn into something much darker. Asian women have long been objectified and fetishized. Even before the COVID-related assaults made headlines, I’d unfortunately grown accustomed to the recurring news item about an Asian woman disappearing or her body being discovered bound and gagged in the trunk of an abandoned car.

I, too, did a lot of dumb things during the years I lived in Chinatown. I was the girl who responded to some guy’s “u up?” text at 1 a.m. I dated people I didn’t like to avoid being alone. I hitchhiked a ride to the airport from a strange man in the middle-of-nowhere Queens. What is Bunnylovr if not a Chinese American version of all the mistakes we made in our twenties? It’s through this mess that Rebecca finally finds her voice, if not to speak up for herself, at least to do so for Milk. She lies to John that Milk is dead, implying his sick fetish is what killed the rabbit. Then, just as John is groping her leg in the middle of the movie, she gets up and drives back to New York. And when she runs into Carter by chance on a subway platform, she walks away and texts him that she doesn’t want to be in contact anymore. These small acts of Rebecca reasserting agency over her life point to a new chapter that will take place off screen.

Critics have faulted the story for being aimless and hollow—a film where nothing happens. But Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls was nothing if not navel-gazing. Perhaps to a viewer unfamiliar with the Chinatown ecosystem, the film’s setting seems foreign and even vapid. This misunderstanding reminds me of that famous line at the end of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”––exposing the filmmaker’s own cultural blindness. To him, Chinatown is an inscrutable, unknowable place where crimes go unsolved and justice is never served.

But for a Chinese American like me, to brush over Bunnylovr’s Chinatown is to misread the entire film. Chinatown is the story’s spiritual center and the one thing that grounds Rebecca in a community where she never feels other-ed. There is a universality to the idea of Rebecca as the outsider—that being Chinese American entails a certain amount of dislocation from mainstream American life. Chinatown is the one place where Chinese Americans feel a sense of belonging even if we don’t speak the language or understand all the customs. If we’re feeling lost, it’s our one true north—the thing that will always guide us back to safety. To us, Chinatown is simply home.