Mean Girls actress Jo Chim on hiding her Chinese side, and being remembered for more than her day job

We spoke Chinese at home, but out on the streets I’d only speak English. I was ashamed of being Chinese. We ate Chinese food at home, but when kids would ask what we ate, I’d say, “Burgers and fries”.

When new immigrants came in, they were fresh off the boat, but I was one of the cool kids. There was a little bit of self-loathing in terms of my Chinese side.

Bearing Witnesses

I think Dad realised he wasn’t cut out for the stress of being an entrepreneur, so he went back to work in Africa. For four or five years, we only saw him at Christmas and in the summer. My mum was effectively raising us as a single mother.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are austere. There’s no pageantry or celebrations, no birthday or Christmas presents. After two years, my brother and I finally put our foot down and revolted, and we were no longer Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Small world

When I was 12, Dad got a job in Nigeria and we went out to join him. I went to the American International School of Lagos.

I was thrown into a melting pot, with kids from many other countries. It changed how I looked at myself and I realised how interconnected we all are and how small the world is.

The Lagos school only went up to ninth grade, so when I was 15, I went to school in the US state of California. Initially, I was in a big public school, but coming from a small school in Africa I felt lost, so I moved to an all-girls boarding school, Castilleja School, in Palo Alto.

Tons of fun

In 1987, I went to Brown University. My official major ended up being political science, but it was a very liberal arts college and it was known for its open curriculum, so I took a lot of different courses.

For my first two years, I played volleyball for Brown and then got more into acting. In my senior year, I played Cleopatra in a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

After graduation, I moved to New York and landed an internship with Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Within two weeks, someone quit and I got hired, and spent a year and a half as an assistant in the photography department.

I didn’t get a lot of pay, but it was tons of fun and right in the middle of SoHo, so every lunchtime I’d hop to a gallery, and there were free screenings everywhere.

I went to Paris for six months to improve my French, and then came to Hong Kong. I wanted to see what Hong Kong was like in the run-up to the 1997 handover [of sovereignty from Britain to China], because that was such a large part of why my parents had emigrated and why we had got our Canadian citizenship.

Hollywood hustle

In 1997, I met Guy Bertrand. He’s a photographer and we met at a photo shoot for Elle magazine. I was the model. Later that year, I moved to Los Angeles to get into acting.

I was 28 and decided to give it a shot so I wouldn’t have any regrets by the time I turned 40. Guy and I were separated for about six months, and then he came over.

I did a few walk-on parts for sitcoms, like The Parkers. I was an extra in the 2000 remake of Charlie’s Angels. I was a pink blur in the party scene in a Japanese restaurant – and that’s how I got my SAG (Screen Actors Guild) card.

Mean feat

In 2001, Guy and I moved to Toronto. I started doing a lot more theatre and guest-starring in television series. Because of the exchange rate – the Canadian dollar was a lot cheaper than the US dollar – a lot of the major Hollywood films were shot in Toronto or Vancouver.

I still get residuals from that movie and every few years my Mean Girls meme (“You could try Sears”) goes viral. Teen girls and gay men in their 30s and 40s are my biggest demographic.

Feast or famine

I had my first son in 2007 and in 2009, after eight long Canadian winters, we decided to move back to Hong Kong. I was pregnant with my second child and he was born here. They are now teenagers. By that time my parents had retired in Hong Kong.

As an actor, you really are just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. That level of control is fine when you’re in your twenties and thirties, but once you hit a certain age it gets harder.

My husband and I were both freelancers; it was always feast or famine. I could be a starving artist for me, but now I had children to think about and needed to find something more stable.

Building a legacy

In 2013, I started working at Education First as an executive producer to help run the studio. My speciality is writing and branding for videos.

I wanted to start building my own legacy and doing my own thing. I’d started writing a short film script a couple of years earlier and, in 2020, I focused on getting that made.

Space mission

Her grandmother suggested they make a stop. They were invited in for tea by Neil Armstrong’s parents and he was home as well. It was full of amazing coincidences.

It premiered at the LA Shorts Fest and we ended up taking one of the two top prizes, so then it became an Oscar consideration in the Live Action Short category in 2023. We have been travelling around with it.

Nasa got hold of it, and we went to the Nasa headquarters in Washington, which was amazing. The tag line is “From space, you see that borders that divide us don’t exist” and it’s really about how interconnected we are, how small the world is, how fragile we are.

I’m such a “wanderluster”, so travelling to screenings all over the world was a great way to meet new people and speak.

Getting personal

That was just a short and it took three years from first draft to production. I’ve decided if I’m going to put that much time and effort into it, the next one should be a feature.

I’ve got an idea. This one is more personal, it’s about my mum and me. She died by suicide last year. For me, it is a way to work through the shock of her death. Writing for me is a way of processing. I’ve always kept journals.

Miller time

In 2011, I did a show at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre for the French May festival called God of Carnage.

The same director had been working on a play called Salesman in China, about Arthur Miller’s visit to Beijing in 1983 to direct Death of a Salesman in Chinese, not knowing a word of Chinese.

The play is being put on by Canada’s Stratford Festival. It started 70-something years ago as a Shakespearean festival. When I was an actress in Canada, all I ever wanted to do was a play at Stratford, but 20 years ago there weren’t many parts for people who looked like me.

I have quit my job and this month I’m going to Canada to start two months of rehearsals. We open in August. The play will run until the end of October.

I always gravitate towards themes of culture clash, the misunderstandings, the miscommunication, and then through the power of art finding community, connection and points of shared humanity.