Rich Lee Portrays Lives of Immigrants in Taiwan The migrant workers from Southeast Asia who swarm through the cities of Taiwan in Rich Lee's debut film, "Sincerely Yours," take the same kind of low-paying menial jobs as many immigrants in the United States. Setia (Lola Amaria), the film's central character, is a divorced, 27-year-old Muslim woman from East Java with a 6-year-old daughter in Indonesia; as the movie opens, she is about to begin a new job scrubbing floors in a Taipei massage parlor. Her best friend at work, Wonpen (Li-Qi Wu), is a slightly older Thai woman, divorced with two children, who has breast cancer and cares for an ailing old man in the owner's upstairs apartment. Wonpen, who also gives erotic massages, conceals her mastectomy from clients who interpret her reluctance to undress as an appealing demureness. Setia's devil-may-care older Thai boyfriend, Supayong (Banlop Lomnoi), works for meager wages laboring on construction crews. For Supayong, scuffling for a living and evading the police is high adventure. In one scene he gleefully steals a motorbike parked at a curb and takes Setia for a joyride. He is not averse to selling his body to men for cash, unpleasant as the encounters obviously are to him. Supayong and Setia, who are in love but don't speak each other's languages, converse in halting Mandarin. Their bosses are harshly demanding, and each must be constantly on guard against police raids that would lead to deportation. For these workers the cellphone is a life line to family back home as well as the surest connection to a loose network of peripatetic fellow migrants, many of whom go back to their native countries only to return to Taiwan under new aliases. "Sincerely Yours," which begins a one-week engagement at the Museum of Modern Art, used to have a more descriptive English-language title: "Detours to Paradise." Gazing dispassionately at the seedier Taipei neighborhoods where Setia and Supayong rendezvous in cheap hotels, the movie, a high point of the museum's ContemporAsian film series, conveys a mood of urban desolation in an impersonal universe. If the narrative leaps in this leisurely paced movie often seem abrupt and unprepared, "Sincerely Yours" offers complex, humane portraits of determined, hard-working people doing whatever they must to survive in an unwelcoming environment. Most of the available jobs are either demeaning or dangerous or worse. For the characters who practice sex work, there is no implied moral judgment. An unspoken rule of behavior is to do as you're told and never complain, even when your wages are less than what was promised. Setia takes a job working for Man-Guang Fei (Kuei-Mei Yang), an alcoholic former Taiwanese movie star paralyzed from the waist down and in excruciating pain from a car accident. As the two form a bond, it is clear that Setia's wealthy employer is much worse off than Setia. Even after Supayong is swept up in a raid on illegal workers crammed in the back of a truck, her fighting spirit only momentarily flags. The movie is a collective picture of a people living on hope although there is little chance of their dreams coming true any time soon. Produced and directed by Rich Lee; written by Shu-Wen Hu, Mr. Lee and Shou-Qian Ho; director of photography, Mark Ping-Bin Lee; edited by Ching-Sung Liao; music by Rahayu Supanggah; production designer, Wen-Ying Huang; released by Zoom Hunt International Productions Co., Ltd. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. WITH: Lola Amaria (Setia Xiao Li), Banlop Lomnoi (Supayong), Keui-Mei Yang (Man-Guang Fei) and Li-Qi Wu (Wonpen).