Fresh Air: Best Of — Lucy Liu / Zadie Smith (December 20, 2025)

Episode Overview

This "Best Of" episode of Fresh Air features two intimate and thought-provoking interviews. First, Lucy Liu discusses her powerful new film, Rosemead, delving into themes of parental love, mental illness, gun violence, and the immigrant experience. Later, acclaimed writer Zadie Smith reflects with characteristic honesty and wit on her new essay collection Dead and Alive, exploring aging, generational divides, language, race, class, and the experience of being “raised by TV.” Critic Justin Chang also shares his picks for the best films of the year.

Lucy Liu: On "Rosemead," Representation, and Vulnerability

[02:45–26:22]

The Film “Rosemead” and Why It Matters

• Liu’s Role: Rosemead is based on a true story. Liu stars as Irene, a terminally ill Chinese immigrant mother in California’s San Gabriel Valley, grappling both with her own mortality and her teenage son's growing fixation on school shootings amid untreated schizophrenia.
  • “I think that this story is so devastating. And I also realize that there's nothing like this in our lexicon. We don't have a story about an immigrant family struggling with cancer or even mental health.” (Lucy Liu, 04:29)
• Purpose: Liu signed on as both producer and lead, after years shepherding the project. It’s her first dramatic lead role in a feature film.
  • She sees the film as a catalyst to spark conversations about mental illness and cultural stigma, especially in the AANHPI community, but with resonance for many cultures.

Humanizing Tragedy and Navigating Stigma

• On True Stories: The events in Rosemead emerge from “clickbait” articles that don’t humanize the families or their struggles.
  • Liu highlights a gulf between appearances and reality, pressing for empathy: “I wanted to highlight the love in this family... to really talk about what happened behind closed doors.” (04:29)
• Isolation and Language: Irene’s fluency and comfort in Mandarin contrast with her vulnerability and marginalization outside the home due to language barriers and lack of advocates.
  • “She had a fragmentation in the language... there was nuance and poetry and love and humor [in Mandarin], and when she was outside in the world, there's a vulnerability that she has.” (06:14)

Mental Health and Cultural Barriers

• Stigma: Mental illness is undiscussed and misunderstood within Irene’s community.
  • “They are not as open... to mental health services like therapists... there's the feeling of the stigma of, well, that's not how you do it. We've got herbal medicine... Or, you know, thinking that it's not a real diagnosis, not understanding that it's a medical thing.” (Lucy Liu, 07:22)
• Generational and Cultural Dynamics: Liu describes a powerful dinner scene—her character communicates in Mandarin, her son responds in English, highlighting a gap both linguistic and emotional ([08:48]).
  • “There’s just this void between them… the two of them are trying to protect each other, but they're not really on the same wavelength.” (Lucy Liu, 10:00)

Embodying Authenticity

• Mandarin on Screen: Liu, who spoke Mandarin until age five, worked with a coach to reclaim the language's nuance for her role.
  • “It was really vital to make this authenticity sing... when somebody speaks a different language, it's much more direct... there’s a vulnerability that shows.” (Lucy Liu, 11:21)
• Personal Experience: Liu drew on her own childhood as the daughter of immigrants, particularly the experience of translating and advocating for her parents.
  • “You become the parents in that situation, even though they're the ones who have the authority. So there's a very strange dynamic that occurs.” (Lucy Liu, 15:13)

The Pain and Growth of Immigrant Childhood

• Childhood Trauma: Liu opens up about trauma and the process of forgetting aspects of her childhood, often feeling “othered” and rarely seeing herself reflected on TV.
  • “It's probably because it was a lot of trauma of, you know, not feeling like you belonged or, you know, wanting to seem like everything was perfectly normal and not looking like everybody else.” (Lucy Liu, 16:34)
• Turning Point: She describes ultimately finding her own voice and individuality when she left home for college ([25:46]).

Breaking In, Representation, and Perseverance

• Early Career: Liu recounts being scouted on a New York subway and her skepticism, having grown up in a protective, insular immigrant household. Her first roles were commercials, but available auditions were rare due to systemic bias.
  • “You might have 10 auditions a year... rejection was on my resume.” (Lucy Liu, 23:20)
• Lessons Learned: Liu attributes her early success to sincerity and naivete, despite being shy and often unsure if she’d ever fit in.
  • “I really left that little girl behind… it's kind of sad, you know, that I forgot this little girl that didn't have a voice.” (Lucy Liu, 24:41)
• Quote Highlight:
  • “Without a map to follow, I don't know. But I feel like it was like an angel on my shoulder.” (On acting ambitions, 21:02)

Justin Chang: Best Films of 2025

[26:26–32:55]

• Critic Justin Chang remarks that, despite industry challenges, 2025 has been a year of cinematic richness, especially outside the U.S.
  • “I saw more terrific new movies this year than I have any year since before the pandemic... All of them are well worth seeking out.” (Justin Chang, 26:53)
• His Top Picks:
  1. Sirat (Oliver Lache): Survival thriller in Morocco, “the most exhilarating and devastating 2 hours I experienced in a theater this year.” (27:25)
  2. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson): DiCaprio stars in this political action-satire (27:40)
  3. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhanke): A hybrid portrait of China’s transformation.
  4. Resurrection (Bi Gone): A genre-blending odyssey.
  5. My Undesirable Part One: Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktive): Documentary about Russian journalists.
  6. The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho): Resistance during Brazil's dictatorship.
  7. Sound of Falling (Masha Shalinsky): Spooky German generational drama.
  8. April (Dea Kulumbegashvili): Georgian drama about women’s health.
  9. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni): Zambian domestic drama.
  10. It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi): Iranian moral thriller.

Zadie Smith: Generations, Identity, and Melancholy

[34:08–51:54]

On Turning 50: Perspective and Preoccupations

• Smith, lauded for her debut White Teeth at age 25, now writes from midlife.
  • “I'm always incredibly grateful for the girl who wrote that book because she enabled my entire life.” (Zadie Smith, 35:33)
• Obsessed with Time:
  • “I would have assumed that everybody’s obsessed with time... I thought that's just the way people went through life.” (36:42)
• Her obsession stems partly from her parents' unusual 30-year age gap (mother: 20, father: 50).
  • “I was living with someone who went to see Casablanca in the cinema... and someone who’d come from a completely different world.” (Zadie Smith, 37:52)

Family and Generational Gaps

• Generational Discourse: Smith finds discourse around generations both “vicious” and “nonsense.”
  • “When I think of myself as a child and my mother's generation and my father's ... there are things ... you find absurd... but the key difference is structural and economic... I did not think of them as eating up my resources, ending the planet, or making my future impossible.” (Zadie Smith, 39:08)
• On Young vs. Old:
  • “If you are young, you are absolutely going to become old. So it would seem to me not really worth making an absolutely vicious discourse out of something that you were about to enter literally before you know it.” (Zadie Smith, 40:40)

Language, Slang, and Intergenerational Connection

• Smith delights in how street language evolves and laments not being able to authentically write her children's slang.
  • “The creativity of street level language is something that I just find endlessly thrilling... the kind of slang and street language in my early novels is antique now.” (Zadie Smith, 43:38)
• Example of “tune” (pronounced “choon”) as a term for a good song, now mortifying to her children ([42:17]).

The Search for Belonging via TV

• Smith describes herself as a “latchkey kid” who, left alone after school, watched TV for up to nine hours a day.
  • “TV... it was like a clue, like what is going on?” (Zadie Smith, 46:16)
  • “I used to play like a lot of people of my generation, you know, spot the black person. I was watching TV to try and find us anywhere and always completely thrilled to find anybody.” (Zadie Smith, 47:21)
• The Cosby Show was a revelation, representing class and identity unavailable elsewhere.
  • “I had all kinds of crazy ideas about America as a consequence, as you can imagine. I now know the Cosby Show was not an accurate representation of the great majority of black life at that point in America.” (48:34)

On Aging, Physical Vulnerability, and Melancholy

• Turning 50, Smith faces new physical vulnerabilities (recent eye surgery), describing the experience of aging candidly.
  • “There's decrepitude... here it comes. This reminder of your human weakness. So there's that, trying to work out what kind of a sick person you're going to be.” (48:56)
• She recounts breaking her leg badly after falling from a window in her youth, and how that fed assumptions about her mental health.
  • “I was smoking a cigarette... trying to do it surreptitiously and it went wrong... I broke my right leg very, very badly.” (50:05)
• On Melancholy: Writing helps articulate sadness and melancholy but does not resolve it.
  • “The melancholy is not going anywhere at this point. This is part of me and life is melancholy. It would be strange not to feel melancholy about it. There's a lot of sadness.” (Zadie Smith, 51:10)

Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• Lucy Liu:
  • “There's nothing like this in our lexicon... We don't have a story about a family, an immigrant family, struggling with cancer or even mental health.” (04:29)
  • “When you become more fluid with the language [as a child], you become the parents... it's a very strange dynamic that occurs.” (15:13)
  • “It's kind of sad, you know, that I forgot this little girl that didn't have a voice.” (24:41)
• Zadie Smith:
  • “If you are young, you are absolutely going to become old... it's one of those deep delusions that you don't realize you're in until it's too late.” (40:40)
  • “You pass through ages, historical moments, political moments. It's not easy for anyone to keep moving.” (44:29)
  • “I used to play... spot the black person. I was watching TV to try and find us anywhere and always completely thrilled to find anybody.” (47:21)

Episode Structure & Flow

• [02:45–26:22] Lucy Liu discussion: Rosemead's themes; growing up in an immigrant family; language, stigma, and authenticity; career beginnings and industry challenges.
• [26:26–32:55] Justin Chang's best movies of 2025, highlighting global stories and the strength of international cinema.
• [34:08–51:54] Zadie Smith interview: aging as a writer and woman; generational divides; language; being “raised by TV”; physical decline; and persistent melancholy.

In Summary

This episode brings together two major voices—Lucy Liu and Zadie Smith—for illuminating, unguarded conversations about art, identity, and the unique pressures of their respective communities and generations. Both reflect on how personal history and cultural forces shape their sense of self, with memorable honesty and insight. Justin Chang’s film roundup further underscores a year rich in bold, global storytelling. For listeners, it’s a bracing, deeply human “best of” episode that lingers.