When Deconstructing Zoe had its world premiere at Translations: Seattle Transgender Film Festival in 2016, it offered something that felt both revolutionary and deeply personal: a rich, unfiltered portrait of gender and racial identity through the lens of a singularly magnetic subject. Chowee Lee, known on stage and screen as Zoe, is a London-based Malayan Chinese actor and producer who proudly identifies as a gender-illusionist. Directed by Rosa Fong, this intimate documentary explores the beautifully complex intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in Zoe's life, and challenges the audience to reflect on their own assumptions about identity.
At first glance, interviews with Zoe and her close friends might feel disorienting, as pronouns shift between "he" and "she" with little consistency. But the inconsistency is intentional and illuminating. Zoe identifies as genderqueer and openly embraces both her male and trans female identities without shame or confusion. She exists somewhere in the middle, fluid and adaptable, equally at home in the skin of Chowee or Zoe.
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What's remarkable about Zoe's story is that her gender expression doesn’t stem from gender dysphoria, nor does she strive for surgical transition. Instead, she claims that her femininity aligns with a broader cultural pattern among Asian gay men living in the West, where assimilation into the dominant, hypermasculine gay culture can feel alienating or even impossible.
This elegant and thought-provoking documentary weaves together interviews, candid footage, and reenactments from Zoe’s semi-autobiographical stage play, An Occasional Orchid. Written two decades earlier, the play served as a response to the frustrating lack of opportunities for Chinese actors in London, where roles, if they existed at all, were steeped in stereotype. The documentary draws on the theatrical roots of Zoe’s performance identity to deepen our understanding of the constructed nature of race and gender. It is not merely a portrait of a performer but a layered, scholarly interrogation of performance itself.
Zoe’s life, as captured in Fong’s film, is defined by performance, not just in the theatrical sense but in the Butlerian one as well.
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Judith Butler wrote in Gender Trouble (1990) that gender is not something we are, but something we do: “manufactured through a sustained set of acts.” If gender is performed, then can race be performed too? Can we speak of racial identities not just as inherited but enacted, stylized, manipulated?
This is one of the key research questions embedded in Deconstructing Zoe, and the documentary doesn’t shy away from engaging it. Over two years of filming, Fong documented Zoe on and off stage, capturing both conscious and unconscious moments of identity construction. Zoe’s theatricality bleeds into daily life, particularly when she talks about the power of exotification. “When I walk down the street as a guy, people perceive me one way. But when I’m Zoe, I’m this exotic Asian woman, this feminine creature that Western men want to protect or fetishize,” she says. The orchid, an enduring motif in her stage work, becomes a metaphor for this exotification, beautiful and fragile, but also a symbol of racialized desire and cultural projection.
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Fong’s filmmaking choices are deliberate and impactful. She avoids voice-over narration, allowing themes to emerge organically through juxtaposition. Scenes from An Occasional Orchid are intercut with candid interviews and confessional monologues. Editing techniques create ruptures, close-ups of Zoe’s stubble or Adam’s apple, continuity cuts that subtly undermine the illusion of gender fixity. These editorial decisions mirror Zoe’s own resistance to static identity categories. A viewer at one screening remarked that such cuts made them uncomfortable, precisely the point. The discomfort is productive; it compels reflection on the viewer's own complicity in assigning meaning to race and gender.
Zoe is not the only performer in the film. Her close friend Ebonknee, another drag artist, offers a parallel narrative of racial and gender performance. While Zoe embraces the “Madame Butterfly” archetype, playing with the submissive, exoticized Oriental woman, Ebonknee enacts a glamorous English femininity. Notably, Ebonknee’s name, chosen for her by a friend, evokes strength and blackness, but she disavows a direct connection to Black identity.
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In this dual portrait, Fong invites the audience to consider the constructed nature of all racial and gendered identities, not just those on the so-called margins.
Zoe’s insights into Western projections of Asian femininity are razor-sharp. She explicitly links contemporary stereotypes to colonial histories, remarking: “That’s why a lot of mail-order brides come from the East, because these men have this perception that Asian women are great cooks and whores in the bedroom, the perfect wife.” Here, Zoe references the enduring legacy of the colonial narrative that cast Asian women as submissive and Asian men as emasculated. Scholars like Claire Lowrie and Chong-suk Han have written extensively on these themes, noting how white masculinity was historically constructed in opposition to the supposed femininity of Asian men and the sexual availability of Asian women.
Fong, herself a Chinese woman, does not remain a detached observer. She acknowledges the tensions Zoe’s performance stirred in her. Where Zoe sees power in reclaiming the Oriental stereotype, Fong felt constrained by it.
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By restaging scenes from Zoe’s play and juxtaposing them with documentary footage, Fong confronts her own discomfort and invites viewers into that same space of ambivalence. The result is a film that is not just about Zoe, but about how all of us grapple with identity performance, our own and others’.
One of the most powerful aspects of Deconstructing Zoe is its refusal to participate in trauma narratives that so often define transgender media representation. Zoe’s life, though marked by challenges, is not defined by suffering. She is remarkably self-assured, secure in her fluidity, and unapologetically herself. Her friends, too, testify to her joy and resilience, noting that whether she is Chowee or Zoe, she is fully present and fully loved.
The documentary doesn't probe deeply into Zoe’s romantic life, perhaps intentionally. Instead, it focuses on friendships, chosen family, and creative expression as sites of affirmation. In doing so, it challenges the audience to expand its definition of intimacy and identity beyond traditional romantic frameworks.
At 52 minutes long (Scent of an Orchid offers a condensed 21-minute version), Deconstructing Zoe stands as an essential contribution to trans cinema and postcolonial feminist film. It dares to ask hard questions about what it means to be seen, what it means to be desired, and what it means to perform identity in a world that insists on binary categories.
The documentary has been screened at various festivals and events, including Liverpool Pride on the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. For many in the transgender community, it has been deeply validating to witness a narrative that centers joy, artistry, and intellectual complexity. As one audience member at Refuge (2017) noted, “It was empowering to see trans women speak positively about their experiences.”
Deconstructing Zoe is more than a film, it is an interrogation, a celebration, and a mirror. Through the layered and charismatic presence of Zoe, Rosa Fong offers us an invitation to rethink what we think we know about gender and race. The documentary doesn’t pretend to offer answers. Instead, it offers the possibility of something even more powerful: liberation through complexity.
In a world obsessed with clarity and classification, Zoe reminds us that some of the most honest lives are lived in the blur.
Image credits: YouTube
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