2026 Poster Design by Zand Gee

A portrait of poet and playwright Genny Lim in the 1980s. This rarely-seen film, recently restored and remastered, was screened for the first time in more than 40 years at CAAMFest in May 2026.

Genny Lim, San Francisco’s first Chinese American Poet Laureate, who premiered Paper Angels, her groundbreaking play about Chinese immigrants on Angel Island in 1980, has been a vital creative voice on the Asian American experience and social justice issues for fifty years.

The Only Language She Knows is an intimate portrait of Genny, her family and San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early 1980s. It features a moving performance of “Conversation with Ma,” her exploration of her conflicts with her mother, Lin Sun Lim. Shot in three days with no budget, it was a collaboration of Asian American artists during the unemployed stages of their careers. It was the second film by Steven Okazaki, who received his first Oscar nomination two years later and later won the Oscar for his documentary Days of Waiting. Producer Amy Hill, then an actor with the Asian American Theater Company, has been most recently heard a voice on Kung Fu Panda and seen in main roles on Magnum P.I. and Ballard. It also features cameos of the late great Victor Wong and Dennis Dun who went on to co-star in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China; and Kelvin Han Yee, the star of Peter Wang’s A Great Wall, familiar for his tv performances in Beef, Law & Order and Glow.