'Blue Sun Palace' explores grief, survival, and immigrant lives in Queens

Constance Tsang’s debut feature "Blue Sun Palace" reveals the quiet struggles of immigrant women in Flushing, New York, through a lyrical tale of grief, friendship, and resilience.

Amy (Ke-Xi Wu) appears in a scene from “Blue Sun Palace.” (c) Dekanalog

By Anna Fadiah and Hayu Andini

The opening moments of Blue Sun Palace are deceptively quiet. A man and woman sit across from one another at dinner, speaking Mandarin, sharing a succulent roast chicken. The man, Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng), is older. The woman, Didi (Haipeng Xu), is younger. The atmosphere feels familiar yet uncertain, like a first date hiding under the guise of routine. There’s an underlying tension, hinting at a deeper story beneath their polite conversation.

This understated beginning sets the stage for Blue Sun Palace, the emotionally intricate debut feature from Constance Tsang. At its heart, the film is about grief, but its unfolding narrative slowly reveals itself to be much more—a story of migration, of women surviving in systems not built for them, of quiet companionship, of the moments that define us in a city like New York.

A story grounded in Flushing’s immigrant underworld

It’s only after the couple’s post-dinner trip to a karaoke bar that we begin to understand who they are. Cheung is a Taiwanese migrant, a married man working a low-wage job in New York to send money back to his wife, daughter, and mother in Taiwan. Didi works in a Flushing massage parlor that officially disavows sexual services but frequently hosts clients seeking just that. Despite the assumptions outsiders may make about her workplace, Didi and Cheung’s bond is distinct, rooted in mutual understanding and something approaching affection.

Didi sneaks Cheung into the massage parlor to spend the night—an act that speaks to their unusual relationship, one built on quiet trust rather than transactional dynamics.

Her closest friend at the parlor is Amy (Ke-Xi Wu), another Chinese migrant who shares not just a workplace with Didi, but hopes and dreams as well. Together, they imagine a better life—starting a restaurant in Baltimore near where Didi’s daughter lives, leaving behind the constraints of Flushing and the ambiguous moral compromises of their current jobs.

Tsang captures this friendship with a light, affectionate touch. Amy and Didi eat lunch on staircases, gossip about clients, and find laughter in the mundane. Their bond is touching, made real by Wu and Xu’s naturalistic performances and the gentle, floating cinematography of Norm Li, which captures light, air, and intimacy in equal measure.

Sudden tragedy and a shift in tone

But the warmth that blankets Blue Sun Palace is brutally disrupted. On Lunar New Year, tragedy strikes the massage parlor. The moment arrives without warning, shot with understated finality. There’s no melodrama—just a sense of how fast joy can turn to anguish. It’s only then, thirty minutes into the film, that the opening credits roll, signaling that this is where the true story begins.

The focus shifts from a tale of female friendship to a meditation on grief. Didi is gone, and the film becomes about the people she leaves behind—especially Amy and Cheung, two strangers connected by loss and loneliness. Their interactions, once peripheral, become central. Cheung invites Amy to the restaurant he once took Didi to. He brings her to the same karaoke bar. These acts of repetition, almost rituals of mourning, speak to how people attempt to keep the past alive even as it slips through their fingers.

Amy’s journey through grief and quiet defiance

Amy is not Didi, and she refuses to be treated as a stand-in for her lost friend. Tsang makes it clear that Amy is her own person—one shaped by trauma, yes, but also by her refusal to surrender to the forces that want to reduce her to a stereotype or a placeholder. The men around her, including Cheung, might hope she steps into a role she never asked for, but Amy’s path is more complex.

There’s a quiet bravery in her defiance. While technically she could leave the massage parlor, and technically Cheung could find a different life, the truth is more nuanced. Both characters are trapped—not by literal bars, but by obligations, past mistakes, and systems that rarely offer second chances. Cheung is haunted by what he left behind in Taiwan. Amy, too, feels the weight of duty and an uncertain future, yet carries a sliver of hope that perhaps, one day, she can escape.

Cinematic choices that elevate the story

What makes Blue Sun Palace remarkable is its ability to tell such a layered story with such minimal dialogue. Much of what we learn comes through gestures, silences, and glances. Tsang is a master of restraint, trusting her audience to understand without being told. The cinematography often floats through scenes, capturing the quiet details—a curtain blowing in the breeze, the flicker of fluorescent light—turning even mundane spaces into poetic ones.

The film’s closest spiritual relative may be Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, another film that uses the structure of storytelling itself to explore grief. Like Hamaguchi, Tsang holds back, letting the audience piece together emotional truths at their own pace.

There’s also a kinship with Support the Girls, a film about women forming communities within jobs that require them to smile and endure. But where Support the Girls leans into energy and comedy, Blue Sun Palace opts for something gentler—introspective, melancholic, but no less powerful.

A microcosm of unseen lives in New York

New York City is often called a city of neighborhoods, but Blue Sun Palace suggests it’s a city of hidden worlds. We pass by places like this massage parlor every day, never stopping to think of the lives inside. Tsang's film gives voice to those often left out of mainstream cinema—the immigrant women, the aging laborers, the people who find fleeting moments of beauty in lives filled with compromise.

By the time the credits roll, Blue Sun Palace has taken us deep inside a world most viewers have never seen. It’s not just a film about grief; it’s a film about survival, quiet defiance, and the fragile webs of connection that keep people going when everything else falls apart.

In a cinematic landscape often dominated by spectacle and simplicity, Blue Sun Palace is a rare gem—intimate, unflinching, and unforgettable. It’s a debut that marks Constance Tsang as a filmmaker to watch, and one that will leave viewers thinking about the lives around them long after they’ve left the theater.