The first scene of “Chan is Missing” is a close-up shot that highlights Jo in the cab picking up a rider. The cinematography choice of someone entering the cab gives the audience a feeling of being brought through a journey that encounters the different possibilities of being Asian in America. The film's general focus was to find Chan, but his search was used as a metaphor to discover the different ideals and stereotypes that people have for the Chinese community.
The film gives a perspective of what an Asian American culture looks, sounds, and feels like as a result of the history behind their experiences. Everyone in the film sees Chan differently which contributes to the different perceptions of the diversity of Asian American identities. The director, Wayne Wang had Jo and Steve roam through the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, not in search of Chan but a search of their true identity in spite of their ethnicity. The film gives a perspective of what an Asian American culture looks, sounds, and feels like as a result of the history behind their experiences.
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The scene where Jo and Steve knocked on the neighbor's door looking for Chan was significant because the neighbor talks to them without opening the door. The Chinese neighbor asks them if they are Chinese or if they are the police and he tells them that he is Chinese but wants nothing to do with the Chinese. This scene was crucial because of what many Asian Americans engrained from the beliefs of their past such as The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1942. This historical moment enforced the exclusion of them as being undesirable immigrants due to the negative perceptions of their “diseases” and threat to white Americans. During this time, Asian American identities were rather given due to these negative stereotypes, than chosen by each individual. In Keywords for American Cultural Studies: Race”, Ferguson states: “In the United States, the minority movements of the 1950s and 1960s fundamentally changed how racial minorities thought about their identities and cultures and the ways that race worked within US society(Omni and Winant 1994)”(Ferguson 191-195). The quote states that race was seen as a biological inheritance, meaning that they were seen as outsiders. Doing so made them different and isolated for Americans to maintain white racial purity. As the film proceeds, we see that Jo and Steve begin to question their identities, Jo mentions, “it's hard enough for guys like us to find an identity.”
Many scenes of the film contribute to a timeline of historical moments for the Chinese community. The multiple moments of long shots had specific purposes to help narrate the film's goals. The intention of making the film black and white in addition to the focus on the actors allowed the audience to focus on the visual images. The dark lighting gives the film a depressing feel, representing that sadness occurred. It offered moments to help the viewers get on a personal level with every scene. For example, the scene of the chef at Golden Dragon. The visuals of the kitchen scene and facial close-ups of the people at the restaurant allowed viewers to compare the difference of being a customer and working in a low-labor job to help sustain a living. The time and focus on the cook give us an insight into his surreal experience and intake of his identity. The chef mentions that kitchen work “sucks” and that Americans don’t want the Chinese to come to the US to be aeronautical engineers, they want them to make spring rolls and wonton soup, which was a form of discussing issues of unemployment and the portrayal of the low work expectations and poor treatment for the Chinese.
The scene in the kitchen takes us back to 1942 when the Bracero program was introduced it certainly correlates with the film due to race, immigrant, and contract laborer issues that the Chinese and Mexicans dealt with. During this time, many growers believed that War World 2 would cause labor shortages in agriculture, therefore hiring braceros to fill in those gaps. In “Impossible Subjects” Ngai interprets some of the agricultural workers: “Workers who left farms in Arkansas and were apprehended by the INS in Indiana in 1949 explained why they deserve their contracts, ‘The company did not furnish me meals. We were promised room and board but had to pay for it. We could not see how much cotton we picked because they would not let us weight it ourselves to see how much it weighed.’.”(Ngai 127-166) These words reveal the working conditions that these individuals had to face without being able to resist and risk of disemployment. The film and Ngai emphasize on the discrimination and stereotypes against Asian- Americans, demonstrating that they were only goofing at industrious jobs because they were considered to be marginal individuals. As a result, we see the truth of the many encounters of the Asian-American community.
Work Cited
- Ferguson, Roderick A. “Race.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York University Press, 2007, pp. 191–195.
- Ngai, Mae M. “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.” Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, by Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press., 2004, pp. 127–166.
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