The teenage Shih-Ching Tsou was at home in Taipei cooking a meal one day when she picked up a knife with her left hand. “My grandfather told me the left hand is the devil’s hand. He said: ‘You should not use that.’” Up until then, the Taiwanese-American film-maker hadn’t even realised she was left-handed. “I was already ‘corrected’, probably in kindergarten, by the teacher.”
That conversation – and the lingering sense of shame – stayed with her, Tsou says. She spoke to her mother about it. “She told me she was left-handed too and got corrected” – forced to use her right hand – “because at the time, they said you had to do the same as other people.”
