Film Introduction
Ru Wen was separated from her parents at the age of five. Forty years later, she is still unable to connect the fragmented pieces of her childhood. For Ru Wen, survival meant burying her own curiosity to know why she had been abandoned by her birth parents in Taiwan – a curiosity that grew into a silent longing over time. That is, until her youngest daughter Tiffany started asking questions: “What was your first memory as a kid, mom?” “Did you have a favorite toy?” “Where did you live, and go to school?” What started out as a journey to piece together Ru Wen’s past, soon cascades into Tiffany’s own yearning to understand her mother. Asking difficult questions goes against the rules of traditional Asian families, but for Tiffany, it was the voice her mother was missing. Armed with a pocket translator and a couple of Chinese names scribbled on a napkin, Tiffany travels from Toronto, Canada to Ru Wen’s birthplace of Taipei. What she discovers there begins to reverberate across her relationships with the women who have come before her. ‘Sing Me a Lullaby’ unravels the complex tensions between love and sacrifice. Told through the intertwined journeys of daughters and their mothers, this is a story about recovering familial history, healing inherited pain, and understanding that love comes in many forms.