Asian American history Archives

Chan is Missing (1982)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first historical film review we posted on Not Even Past. As the author says, Chan is Missing is: “an early classic of Asian American cinema, it holds up well to multiple viewings.”

By Madeline Hsu

In this affectionate insider’s portrait of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1970s, director Wayne Wang riffs on the well-known adventures of Charlie Chan, the stereotyped Chinese-American 1930s film detective, by following the meandering investigation of two cab drivers. Joe and his nephew Steve are searching for another Chan, their friend Chan Hung, who seems to have disappeared with $4,000 of their cash. Along the way, they encounter a gallery of Chinatown personalities and settings, revealing aspects of the district that are rarely visible to visiting tourists. They venture past the bustling restaurants and the pagoda roofs and dragon-embellished streetlights of Grant Avenue into the tight quarters of greasy commercial kitchens; the packed fish markets and grocery stores of Stockton Street; narrow, laundry-festooned residential alleyways; a local senior citizens center; and the Neighborhood Language Center offering English classes for new arrivals.

Along the way, the search for the elusive Chan uncovers a rich pastiche of the possibilities of being Chinese in America. Chan could be a victim of police misunderstandings; a possible murderer and political extremist; an aeronautical engineer who developed the first Chinese word processor; a genius who could find no other job than working in a restaurant kitchen; a sentimental music lover; a disappointing husband who refused to adapt and get US citizenship but was a good father. Joe and Steve find themselves increasingly befuddled as the movie unfolds.

The 1970s witnessed a reinvigorated Chinatown, with the civil rights movement and new waves of American-born advocates and new immigrants adding to the agitation of community rights groups. Through a cacophony of dialects, accents, and background noises, Wang skillfully shows that the earlier film hero Charlie Chan does not represent Chinese America in the 1970s. Wang obscures his subjects by shooting at angles and through windows even as he offers glimpses into a richly textured community framed by competing divides of generations and genders: American-born and immigrants; leftists and rightists; business successes, community activists, and the striving working-classes. Joe and Steve’s banter captures not just their strategizing about how and where to find Chan, but also whether and how Chinese can claim a place in America. If a man of Chan’s abilities and character seems to have fled the United States, what of those with less promise?

“Chan is Missing” was Wayne Wang’s first feature film and still his most enduring. Along with “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart” (1985) it is the most intimate of his movies before he launched into commercially successful hits such as “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and “Maid in Manhattan” (2002) as well as collaborating on independent films with writers like Paul Auster and Yiyun Li. An early classic of Asian American cinema, it holds up well to multiple viewings.

photos by Nancy Wong

Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books on women and gender for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month.

A number of people suggested books about crossing borders: about people traveling or emigrating to countries foreign to them or about people creating new hybrid identities in the places they lived. Since they don’t fit into our usual geographical categories –and raise interesting questions about those categories — we are lumping them together here in Crossing Borders.

Madeline Hsu recommends:

Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong (2013)

Teng traces mixed race Chinese-white families in a number of societies and political and social circumstances to complicate presumptions about racial hierarchies and the porosity of racial border-keeping in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By tracking mobilities through north America, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Teng demonstrates that intermarriages occurred at higher rates than previously acknowledged, and that intermarriage with Chinese could be vehicles for upward, and not just downward, mobility depending on local circumstances.

Sam Vong recommends:

Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (2008)

Fujiwara’s study uncovers the detrimental effects that welfare reform in the 1990s had on immigrant women, particularly President Clinton’s authorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 that aimed to end welfare programs. This book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways welfare reform policies redefined immigrants as outsiders and how immigrant women resisted these attempts at denying their claims to U.S. citizenship and belonging.

Michael Stoff recommends:

Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

I’ve used this book in classes and like it a great deal. Here’s a blurb from Cornell University Press:

“In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the “New Womanhood.” She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers’ unions.”

Jeremi Suri recommends:

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2014).

This deeply researched book artfully examines the interaction of race, sex, and gender in the conduct of American soldiers stationed in France and their interactions with French civilians during World War II.

Lina del Castillo recommends:

Magical sites: Women Travelers in 19th century Latin America, edited by Marjorie Agonsin and Julie Levison

This collection brings together several travel narratives written by women brave enough (and wealthy and educated enough) to travel through different parts of Latin America. Some of these writers, like Mary Caldecott Graham and Flora Tristan, found a measure of liberation from a feminine imperial mindset that justified their prescriptions for reform of the societies they encountered. Others, like Nancy Gardner Prince (a free born African American woman who traveled to Jamaica and Russia) tell their experiences from very different perspectives. The narratives these women wrote about the places they moved through show them as women who both threw off the chains of domesticity and convention and nevertheless, were in many ways still bound by them.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Asian American Immigration: Read More

By Madeline Hsu

Liping Bu, Making the World like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (2003).

Entwining education, missionary, and international history, Bu traces the overlapping influence of these constituencies in the evolution of international education programs in the United States. The YMCA and the privately run, foundation funded Institute for International Education set the ground rules and institutional practices for fostering international education in the United States with the goal of promoting U.S. influence abroad, agendas and strategies coopted by the Department of State after World War II.

Gordon Chang, Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China (2015).

Since colonial times, Americans have been fascinated by the promise of great fortune and material prosperity through trade and other kinds of relations with China. Even the discovery of the American continents was driven by the European quest for more direct routes to acquire Chinese silks, porcelains, and tea. China’s ancient civilization attracted admiration even as its seemingly irreconcilable differences drew disdain and contempt. As skillfully depicted by senior historian, Gordon Chang, this love-hate has evolved across several centuries of contested friendship and enmity, and characterizes early 21^st century fears and hopes even as China ascends again to world power status.

Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003).

Klein scrutinizes “middle-brow” American culture at the mid-twentieth-century to reveal how such popular entertainments such as Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, James Michener novels, and Pulitzer Prize winning plays such as “Sayonara” convey U.S. efforts to display and persuade of American integration of Asians and Pacific Islanders and its benevolent domination of the Pacific world.

Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (2006).

This vivid cultural history of the rapid transformation of Japan from America’s deadly foe to best friend in Asia after World War II. American views of Japanese shifted from rejection of male labor competitors and fascist military enemies to embrace of ultrafeminine geishas, wives, and prostitutes stemming from the US military occupation (1945-1952) of Japan. These changing relations produced not only new immigration influxes of war brides and professional class shin issei, but also secured the close economic and political partnership of the two former enemies.

Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (2014).

This comparative study tracks the remaking of outcast Chinese and Japanese Americans after World War II through government programs and media representations that emphasized their positive cultural traits such as family values, hard work ethic, self-sufficiency, and respect for law, even though both communities still faced significant issues such as high rates of juvenile delinquency, under and unemployment, poor health outcomes, and other forms of urban blight. Wu argues that such campaigns to position Asian Americans as “definitely not-black,” in contrast to their pre-war condition as “definitely not-white,” has fed the model minority image as a form of rebuke to minority populations associated with lower levels of attainment.

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