The team that made the American underclass gems “Take Out,” “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project” turn their eyes to Tapei for their latest, a story of a child growing up in economic hardship and family dysfunction in the anything-for-sale markets of capitalism-crazy Taiwan.

“Left-Handed Girl” follows a “Florida Project” age pixie named I-Jing, growing up with a broke, almost-defeated single mom (veteran character actress Janet Tsai) and a bitter, high-school drop-out older sister I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) who has to work at betel bean shop in one of the city’s down-market markets to help support them.

We meet this trio on moving day, but there’s little hint of the “fresh start” cliche in this move. They were gone from the neighborhood. Now they’re back, with I-Ann taking five year-old I-Jing (Nina Ye) to school on her motorscooter and mother Shu-Fen hitting up her parents (Xin-Yan Chao and Akio Chen) for money and occasional baby-sitting.

Grandpa is the superstitious one, fussing with his daughter for letting her granddaughter grow up left-handed. The left is “The Devil’s Hand,” he insists. When Shu-Fen isn’t around, he enforces that superstition on the kid.

Grandma is too busy working out the particulars of hr part in a mainland-Chinese illegal immigrants smuggled to North America scheme to care.

The other hustler in the story is Johnny (Teng-Hui Huang), a kitchen-aids and the like huxter who floods the air around his sales stall with his incessant pitches. He’s sweet on Shu-Fen, who is wary of his little kindnesses. She’s trying to get her little ramen shop going amidst a sea of competitors. And she still has an estranged husband, a dead weight who represents nothing but debt even after his terminal stay in a hospital.

I-Ann is all about acting-out — scantily-clothed, putting it all out there in the last year of her rebellious teens, putting out for her boss in that betel-nut fast-food joint.

I-Jing processes all this working poor poverty and dysfunction — she can’t figure out why Mom isn’t telling her she’s visiting Dad — and starts shoplifting. But only with her “evil” left hand.

Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker co-wrote and co-directed the New York Chinese immigrant drama “Take Out,” a minor marvel that announced their presence in the indie cinema of 2004. Baker went on to direct their later collaborations, with Tsou producing them. Baker then wrote and directed and collected Oscars for “Anora.”

Tsou shows the same sure eye for street life as Baker and the same unwillingness to look away from the sordid realities of hard lives that drove “Red Rocket” and “Tangerine,” a predeliction which Baker went on to wallow in with the Oscar-winning “Anora.”

This story, with transactional sex and secrets and death and debt, is straight-up melodrama. Ask anybody in that income class about their struggles and it’ll feel and sound just like this (in Chinese with English subtitles, or dubbed) — ind of soap operatic.

But it is the child’s-eye-view of this life that stands out in “Left-Handed Girl,” and Tsou shows off the casting instincts that made “The Florida Project” the movie she and Baker SHOULD have won Oscars for.

Young Nina Ye is the very picture of innocence — wide-eyed, learning the wrong lessons before she learns the right ones, living her part of a lie until it’s exposed and clinging to a childhood doomed to end in her tweens.

And with this film, Tsou belatedly announces herself as “The Next Sean Baker,” a sure-handed director with an ear, an eye and empathy for the huddled masses whose story she tells.

Rating: R, sex, smoking

Cast: Janet Tsai, Shih-Yuan Ma, Teng-Hui Huang, Akio Chen,
Xin-Yan Chao and Nina Ye

Credits: Directed by Shih-Ching Tsou, scripted by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48