Film Screening:

Chan is Missing
(Wayne Wang, 1982, 80 min, USA, Cantonese & English w/ English subtitles, B&W, DVD)

-- Introduced by Prof. Eileen Cheng-ying Chow (AMES)!

Costing less than $20,000 to produce, photographed in grainy black-and-white, with a cast composed entirely of Asian-American actors, Chan is Missing is a matchless delight and a seminal work of Asian American cinema. The movie is about Jo (Wood Moy), a middle-age taxi driver with the face of an Oriental Job, and Jo's nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi). Jo and Steve, in an effort to get their own taxi medallion, have entrusted their savings of $4,000 to a fellow named Chan Hung, a wheeler-dealer from Taiwan who has apparently absconded with the loot. A very funny movie, Chan is Missing is not a spoof of its characters or even of its so-called "mystery", which, like everything else in the film, is used to illustrate the film's quite serious concerns. These are identity, assimilation, linguistics, and what one hilariously earnest young woman, describing Chan's argument with the traffic cop, defines as "cultural misunderstandings."

Cost: Free and Open to the Public!

Sponsors: The Asian Pacific Studies Institute (APSI) and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), and The Program in Arts of the Moving Image.