SYNOPSIS:

John Chang is a socially awkward high school student who has a dysfunctional relationship with his father, Mr. Chang, an unemployed male nurse and a first generation Chinese immigrant. Mr. Chang wants John to focus on getting into a university with a good pre-medical school program and John is too scared of Mr. Chang's irascible temper to confess that he has been lying about his grades since middle school. Instead, John vents his frustration by picking fights with other students until he is forced to transfer to a different school. At his new school, John develops a crush for Claudia a hot up and coming actress and an anorexic drug abuser with an overbearing mother. Claudia is initially dismissive of John's awkward attempts to engage her but when John auditions for the school play, in which Claudia is the lead actress, she coaches him to winning a key part opposite herself. John is ecstatic at this opportunity until he realizes that play practice conflicts with his commitment to attend AP Biology tutoring and he intends to resign from the play until Claudia persuade him to pursue his newly discovered talent and passion for acting. John and Claudia become close as they rehearse together and help each other lie to their parents until John can no longer ignore Claudia's dangerous drug habit and tells her mom about it, in retaliation Claudia exposes John's lies to Mr. Chang. When Mr. Chang confronts John about Claudia's revelations, they argue until Mr. Chang loses his temper and physically attacks John. Then John run out of the house, confronts Claudia and verbally abuses her until she breaks down into a fit of tears. Mr. Chang apologizes to John and confesses that he had once hit John's mother and she then fled their house and fatally crashed her car. He continues to reveal that his guilt over her death eventually lead him to drop out of medical school and to relocate to the United States. John realizes that he has repeated his father's mistakes and predicts that Claudia may die until Mr. Chang uses his nursing skills to save her from a lethal drug overdose. Things got better for John after that fateful evening and though he never qualified for AP Biology, he also never got into another fight at school again and yes, he did get a chance to reconcile with Claudia before she took some time off from everything to travel the world with her mom. But before all of that happens, that same fateful evening after Mr. Chang had saved Claudia's life, John asks his father about his mother and then they talk for hours.

MY FATHER'S SON