“I got picked up at a Denny’s on Vermont in K-Town,” Tiffany Chu says.

She’s talking about getting some prep work for her role in “Ms. Purple,” in which she plays a Korean American woman who works as a karaoke bar hostess, ingratiating herself to drunk, handsy men and scrounging together enough cash each night to care for her terminally ill father.

“You get shuttled around.”

Chu hedges around the details of getting a ride into that lifestyle. But for a night, the 25-year-old actress embodied a version of the life of her character in the new film. The experience was sobering.

“I would say to any other actor out there, I would never do that again,” Chu says.

That night, and the film, are far removed from where she is a week after this conversation, strolling through Townsend Park in San Jose, where she was born and raised. Chu’s turn as Kasie, the protagonist of “Ms. Purple,” is her feature film debut, an indelible breakout role that astounded earlier this year at Sundance, where the film premiered to rave reviews.

And yet, Chu’s own life is decidedly distinct from that of Kasie, a young Korean American woman living in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, attempting to reconnect with her brother, Carey (Teddy Lee), as they watch over their father in his final days. Chu grew up in San Jose as an only child of Taiwanese immigrants, her father supporting the family as an IT professional. But the distance between these realities, and what also remains the same, is integral to the film’s power.

“We’re both from immigrant parents, with immigrant families, who grew up with a different mind-set and a special sense of connection, loyalty, love or, I guess, duty, as some people might call it, with our parents,” Chu says, comparing her life with her character’s. “Because they sacrificed their dreams and everything that they know with their education, and we struggle to fulfill them in our own way.”

Kasie and Carey, though, are raised by a single father in a working-class life.

“There are so many struggling families that we see out there, but they’re not really being shown and they’re not really acknowledged,” Chu says, specifically referencing Asian and Asian American families.

To help her family, Kasie resorts in desperation to a line of work that is in direct opposition with the well-to-do cutouts of the model minority myth. This unique lens into Asian American lives — one that offers a striking contrast to those of the ultra-wealthy Asian diaspora in last year’s paradigm-shifting “Crazy Rich Asians” — has become a focus for the “Ms. Purple” director and writer Justin Chon, who himself grew up in a working-class family in Southern California.

In his last film, “Gook,” Chon offered an explosive slice-of-life account of young Korean American brothers working at their Paramount (Los Angeles County) shoe store on the eve of the Rodney King verdict and subsequent riots. That film, Chon’s second, was an impressive, impassioned entrance for him as an auteur. The 38-year-old had previously been known mostly as an actor for his part in the “Twilight” series.

“It was a powerful, moving film, and it was a statement,” says Phil Yu, a Korean American culture writer whose blog, Angry Asian Man, has for years served as a leading voice on Asian American issues. “It felt like a flex move — like, we can do this.”

“Ms. Purple,” he adds, is confirmation of the arrival of a mature artist.

Indeed, Chon has become one of the leading Asian American creatives clawing his way — using unrecognized actors, working on shoestring budgets and relying on crowdfunding — to broaden the parameters of Asian American representation, a scrappy role taken in part by choice. After “Gook,” he was met with offers to helm studio projects, including a book adaptation he started and ultimately quit.

“I realized after ‘Gook,’ in the response, that I really serve the community the best by telling these much more intimate stories about the other 99%, the blue-collar people that don’t have a voice, especially in our community,” Chon says by phone from Mississippi, where he is in preproduction for “Blue Bayou,” his next film, about a Korean American adoptee. “There’s a lot of us that struggle with different issues that’s beyond just having tiger parents and being kitschy and being sort of like jesters. I want to show the reality and the soul of who we are.”

It’s what he calls the necessary “counterprogramming” to subvert expectations around Asian American experiences, perhaps even for Asian Americans themselves — storytelling that spotlights the lesser seen, and asks the more nuanced questions that the lucrative spectacle of “Crazy Rich Asians” has made space for.

“What do we bring with us? And what do we leave behind as we become sort of our own ethnicity as Asian Americans?” Chon says of the questions he wants “Ms. Purple” to raise. “Because we’re not quite of the old country. We have different needs and ways of thinking.”

This dynamic was ripe for exploration in Koreatown, an enclave that contains, even amid gentrification, a preserved bubble of Korean culture, fostered by immigrants who arrived decades ago with a specific version and era of their country. But, in the film, Chon’s questions land most squarely on the notion of filial piety, as Kasie toils to keep her father alive, refusing hospice care.

It’s an understanding that most immigrant children like Chu recognize to varying degrees. “I do owe everything I have to them,” she says.

But, in “Ms. Purple,” Chon interrogates the limits and the costs of maintaining this sense of duty. Of course, these feelings are not isolated to Asian American lives or more extreme situations like Kasie’s. “The specificity of the story is what ultimately makes it more universal,” Chon says. “That’s the ultimate goal — being represented, but also for it to speak to people outside of our community.”

He references the work of Lulu Wang, a friend whose film “The Farewell” has been one of the year’s more acclaimed releases. “We’re all fighting on our fronts. And you know what’s great? I feel like there’s some competition, which is f—ing good. Thank God!”

His voice, on the phone connection coming from Mississippi, swells with anticipation as he talks about the future of his films, and Asian American cinema. “There’s more to come.”

“Ms. Purple” opens in Bay Area theaters on Friday, Sept. 20.

Related articles

Review: Low-budget yet powerful ‘Ms. Purple’ testifies to the brother-sister bond

‘The Farewell’ director Lulu Wang wants diversity to stay on the table