Forever Her Chinatown: Where Is My Grandmother in Chinese American Feminist Film History?

This essay adopts and adapts memory work, as developed by Annette Kuhn, as a method to search for the author's grandmother in Chinese American feminist film history. Foregrounding a trans-feminist perspective that moves across and between nations and film cultures, it introduces readers to a relatively unknown “orphan” documentary film, Forever Chinatown (1960). For the author and her family, the film carries with it a history of trauma that shapes what is remembered about it. Drawing on work in feminist film studies, particularly the notion of an archive of feelings, the essay blends life writing, theory, and visual-textual analysis to both allow the author to write her way into the film and trace her grandmother's presence in and labor on the film.