Chan Is Missing

Wayne Wang's first feature film, Chan Is Missing (1981), is widely considered to be a groundbreaking film for Asian American cinema and a hallmark work in the history of American independent film. Directed, produced, and cowritten by Wang, Chan Is Missing features Asian American characters who question the stereotypical representation of Asians in U.S. popular culture. Produced on a budget of almost $22,000, and shot on black-and-white 16mm film, the innovative 80-minute documentary-style Chan Is Missing joined a wave of clever, low-budget feature films that stood in contrast to the Hollywood blockbusters that characterized the 1980s. In 1995, Chan Is Missing was named to the National Film Registry, a list of films deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Set in San Francisco's historic Chinatown, Chan Is Missing follows two Chinese American cab drivers, Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi), as they search for Chan Hung, a friend who took $4,000 that was loaned to him as part of an agreement to secure a cab license. As they pursue leads as to Chan's whereabouts, Jo and Steve meet a heterogeneous Asian American community living in Chinatown and across San Francisco. Every encounter with a Chan family member, acquaintance, or clue, however, raises more questions about Chan than provides answers about his location. All the clues, Jo and Steve realize, reveal Chan to be a complicated and contradictory figure. Was Chan a naïve immigrant who still needed to learn the lessons of America or was Chan a genius inventor? Was Chan duplicitous with his finances or was he honest and trustworthy? Was Chan an ashamed husband who failed to make enough money to support his family? Was Chan a dedicated political civil rights activist in the United States or was Chan a Chinese patriot who returned to China to build the country? Or was Chan from Taiwan, where he was disputing his family inheritance? Was Chan unchangingly “Chinese” in his customs or was he a cultural eccentric, revealed by his love of mariachi music? Jo ponders these questions when he and Steve end their search for Chan, never solving the mystery of the film.

In the context of Asian American representation, Chan Is Missing responds to the limiting stereotypes of Asian Americans popularized in American culture. The title and genre of the film Chan Is Missing refer to novelist Earl Derr Biggers's fictional character, Charlie Chan, the [Page 467]Chinese American investigator who launched a detective mystery franchise that perpetuated myths about Chinese Americans and envisioned the Chinese American experience in yellowface. In place of the orientalist representations propagated by Charlie Chan and other stereotypes in popular circulation, such as the martial artist, model minority, dragon lady, or inscrutable foreigner, Chan Is Missing offers a complex Chinese American experience. The ambiguous and contradictory observations about Chan's identity, and the textures of a heterogeneous Chinese American community, encourage speculation about the nature of Chinese American identity and its representation.

Wang animates this narrative trajectory with documentary-style techniques and playful references to literary and cinematic conventions, such as the genre of film noir. The black-and-white film and the setting of San Francisco frame Chan Is Missing with the conventions of a film noir mystery. The pairing of the older Jo with the younger Steve mimics the pairing between Charlie Chan his Number One Son sidekick. While Chan Is Missing makes use of familiar conventions, relying on them to build the narrative, the film does not follow them. Instead, Chan Is Missing is a story without a protagonist, a narrative that ends without closure, a mystery in which clues lead to more riddles, and an Asian American tale without Asian American stereotypes.

...