During the past forty years in Asian American cinema there have been three premieres that took my breath away: Chan Is Missing in 1982. Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002. Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022. Twenty years apart, all signaled that the earth had shifted on its axis and the creative landscape of Asian America was on a collision course with the old, retrograde images of the past. Something gloriously new and essentially Asian American was on the horizon.
Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing, about two San Francisco cabbies on the hunt for their missing friend and their missing four thousand dollars, was the first. I was just out of college and working as the first paid staff person at New York’s Asian Cine-Vision, back in a time when a clueless twenty-one-year-old could run an Asian American arts center. ACV put on the Asian American International Film Festival,...
University of California Press