As a movie, I found Wayne Wang's first feature a disappointment. But as a social document and an artifact of the Independent Film Movement, especially applied to the Asian-American Film, CHAN IS MISSING presents the viewer with a landmark.

For over a hundred years prior to World War II, the Western Powers looked cormorantly on the natural resources and markets of China. Several, like the British and Portuguese, established coastal enclaves. All dabbled in attempts to bring down the doddering Manchu Empire (in power since 1644). Following the Boxer Rebellion against colonial influences on Chinese affairs, the United States gradually came to the fore in order to challenge Japanese expansion into mainland Asia. We supported Sun Yat-Sen and his military advisor, Chang Kai-Shek, in forming the Kuomintang to combat the warlords after the Manchu collapse in 1911. Upon Sun's death in 1925, America put all its chips on Chang, aiding him in his fight against the Japanese advance into China, after their invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

Meanwhile, a Communist peasant army under Mao Tse-tung and Cho En-lai burgeoned in North Central China. Eventually, after the defeat of Japan, they turned to concentrate on Chang, and in 1948, drove him into exile on the Island of Taiwan. A stalemate was established which continues to the present.

As a result of the ascendancy of the People's Republic of China, large numbers of refugees loyal to Chang joined established Cantonese settlers on the West Coast of the United States. By the late 1970's, following President Richard Nixon's surprise turn-about reproachment with "Red China," the powerful bearing of Communist Chinese diplomacy, trade, cuisine and visitors was being felt in cities like San Francisco.

In the City by the Bay, far from Hollywood, Hong Kong-born Arts graduate Wayne Wang, in 1982, hired a couple of professional actors and threw the remainder of some tens of thousands saved and borrowed dollars into 16mm monochrome film stock. He and Isaac Cronin fashioned a rough screenplay for CHAN IS MISSING from several current events, local locations and a desire to show audiences that Asian-Americans as people have lives and families far different from Asian stereotypes represented in popular Hollywood movie series like "Charlie Chan" or "Mr. Moto."

As is often pointed out, the heroes of these popular B-pictures, based on characters created by Earl Derr Biggers and John P. Marquand, were played by actors of Western nationality: Hawaiian Chinese Detective Charlie Chan (by Swedish Actor Warner Oland, and later by Americans Sidney Toler and Roland Winters); Japanese Sleuth Mr. Moto (by Hungarian Peter Lorre).

[Villains were similarly disguised (e.g., the Englishmen Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee as Sax Rohmer's Fu Man Chu). Only Japanese military sadists were, in American W.W.II propaganda films, portrayed by Asians, often by Chinese actors.]

And so, Wayne Wang (named by his father after John Wayne), started with a conceit that Charlie Chan would be "missing from his film." In newspaper accounts, he found two useful stories. The first one was about a Hong Kong engineer who had brought his family to the Golden City of San Francisco in the Golden State of California in the Golden Nation of America. But Chinatown, despite its quaint shops, was a ghetto in the early 1980's. The engineer could find work only as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. The family's savings dwindled. The man took what was left of the money, went to Reno, evidently put it all on one turn of a Circus-Circus roulette wheel, lost -- and then just disappeared.

The second story involved the two rival traditional parades held in Chinatown during October: the original one supported by Taiwanese-oriented Citizens of San Francisco, the other by followers of the rising Communist cause. An old Taiwanese man shot another for waving a flag of The People's Republic of China during one of the observances. He disappeared, and it was in all the local papers.

Based on these two signs of his times, over ten weekends, Wayne Wang shot CHAN IS MISSING in black and white, the first significant Chinese-American independent film to be noted by the larger American society. The story is of two Chinatown fleet cab drivers, Jo (Wood Moy) and his son Steve (Marc Hayashi), who decide to invest their $4000 savings in a cab of their own. (They will be able to take shift about, generate their own business, and not have to kick back their fares to anyone.) They find an old Chinese businessman named Chan Hung who promises to procure the cab they want through his contacts -- for the cash money, no questions asked.

Unfortunately, Chan is soon missing, and so is their savings. They set about to find him after discussing their plight with friends like Amy (Maureen Chew -- who two years later starred in Wang's DIM SUM). The search takes them far and wide in Chinatown. A visit to Chan's flat elicits various stories as to where the old man has gone. On the edge of Chinatown, they go to the Old International Hotel (afterwards subject of a long lasting bitter controversy), where they interrogate Mexicans and Filipinos about ethnic connections with Chan. Presco (Presco Tabios) shows them references implicating Chan in the shooting of the man who waved the P.R.C. flag at the October parade.

They visit the Golden Dragon Restaurant (setting five years earlier of a rare but serious gang shooting in the City) to root out more information. They find Chan's wife (Ellen Yeung), who is reluctant to speak with them, but later are contacted by a more sympathetic daughter Jenny (Emily Woo Yamasaki) and her friend (Virginia Cerenio).

All the information seems ambiguous.

In the end, the solution as to why Chan is missing is simply that there is no answer. At least, not one. Money problems, understated racism, age, cultural differences, politics, intrigue, domestic depression may all play a part. Or then again, they may not.

Chan's disappearance, like Jo's Cheshire Cat smile in the film, is a metaphor for what is missing in Asian-American Life. Asians, who contributed so much to building our railroads, influencing our modern architecture and interior design; who gave us half a dozen new cuisines, advanced our scholarship and fought our wars, are liked and suspected with equal vigor, often at the same time. Wang drives home this ambiguity by mixing his Asian cast and blending them with other nationalities during encounters with Jo and Steve. Asians, he seems to say, unlike Black Americans (for instance), are embraced by the general public, admired, but not wholly accepted.

A long-standing exotic attraction felt by Americans for Asians both unites and divides the groups: Another functional, and most difficult definition of racism.

While recognizing Wang's accomplishment here, I must say CHAN IS MISSING is not a very good film in any sense beyond its premise. Moy Wood (Mr. Tong in Phil Kaufman's 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS) is wonderful as the wry philosophical Jo, but Marc Hayashi (also a professional actor) is uneven as Steve. Much of the dialogue was improvised, and Wood does much better than Hayashi in bringing it off. Ellen Yeung is competent in her brief scenes. However, some of the amateurs are pretty terrible in their equally brief screen time, appearing to read their lines off cards.

Wang and his photographer Michael Chin let several cinema verite scenes go on and on, which, combined with the lack of a coherent plot, implies that the film maker doesn't know what he is doing.

Wang, who went on to make DIM SUM (1984), SMOKE (1995) and others, including a big cross-over film, THE JOY LUCK CLUB (1993), knows what he's doing alright. He knew then, and I suspect, he knows now, that for everyday Chinese Citizens of the United States, Chan is in some sense still missing -- and yet with them (particularly in our media).

At 80 minutes, CHAN IS MISSING, gives all of us a quiet, polite message in that regard from a Chinatown ghetto which no longer exists the way it once did -- but is never-the-less scattered somewhere not too far from you at the moment. It is worth your time to experience CHAN IS MISSING: A piece of cultural history in the slow, periodically tortured democratization of America.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older
Special Effects: Well at least you can't see the strings