Chan is Missing (1982)

directed by Wayne Wang

Jenny Wu

In the 1982 film Chan is Missing, Wayne Wang’s directorial debut and the first Asian American independent theatrical feature to be made in the US, a Taiwanese immigrant named Chan Hung vanishes from San Francisco’s Chinatown. Wang’s grainy black-and-white film, which was made on a $20,000 budget, follows two “ABC” cab drivers, the middle-aged Jo, played by Wood Moy, and Jo’s nephew Steve, played by Marc Hayashi, as they search for the missing man. Before disappearing, Chan had taken Jo and Steve’s savings—$4,000—with the promise of helping his friends get their own taxi medallion. While Steve is angry and anxious about his money, Jo ignores Steve’s requests to hand the matter over to the police. As the two cabbies play detective, the film flits between various cinematic traditions such as arthouse and noir; its dialogue switches fluidly between English, Mandarin, and Cantonese; and Jo introspects, in a voiceover that is by turns humorous and melancholic, about his own identity and place in America.

At the heart of Chan is Missing are the Chinatown residents with whom Jo and Steve interact in their attempts to discover Chan’s whereabouts and the motivation for his disappearance. These range from Henry, the cook at the Golden Dragon restaurant who likes to sing “Fry Me to the Moon”—his take on the 1954 jazz classic “Fly Me to the Moon”—to Mr. Lee, Chan’s immigration sponsor, an insurance agent with a combover and a cluttered office who believes that Chinese immigrants are “wise guys” who are “hard to educate.” Instead of helping to resolve the mystery, each character offers a vivid but one-sided account of Chan’s background, ambitions, and allegiances. At the Manilatown Senior Center, which Chan allegedly frequented for the mariachi music, Jo and Steve find the missing man’s jacket. In one of the pockets is a newspaper clipping about a murder in a Chinatown boarding house: an 82-year-old PRC supporter had shot and killed a 79-year-old Taiwan supporter. When it is suggested that Chan had something to do with the murder, Jo and Steve find themselves even further adrift in a sea of tall tales.

Taken together, the accounts of Chan paint a picture of an immigrant caught between belonging and alienation. What I see reflected in Chan is Missing is also an episode in my own family’s history: the time we went looking for my great-uncle, who’d gone missing in another Chinatown on the opposite side of the country. 

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My story begins in winter 2010, my sophomore year of high school, when my father packed the car and announced that we’d be driving up to New York from the small Southern town where we lived, so that I could tour the colleges in the city. The college tours ended up being a ruse: once in New York, I spent a solid minute standing on the lawn of Columbia University’s campus in the cold, before being called away to begin what I realized was a frantic search for a relative I’d never met.

From what I could gather, the missing man was my paternal grandmother’s younger brother. His surname was Wu/吴—not to be confused with mine (Wu/伍). When he came to the US in 1995, he would have been one of over 23,700 Chinese migrants to enter New York City that year. His motivation for leaving home is unknown to me, though it may have been because his family was blacklisted during the Cultural Revolution of the sixties and seventies, as his father—my great-grandfather—had been a colonel in the army of the ousted Nationalist government during World War II and was subsequently executed by the Communist Party.

Like Wang’s characters Jo and Steve, my father and I went around speaking to Chinese workers in stores and restaurants, traversing lower Manhattan first by car and then on foot. What I remember most from the trip was how the wind bit through my meager coat. I remember wondering how I’d tell my boyfriend about the trip without mentioning my lost relative, who was, according to what my father was willing to tell me at the time, an undocumented migrant who’d lived alone in Chinatown for decades but had recently fallen out of contact with us and with our family in Hainan, China. I remember my father speaking Cantonese loudly and awkwardly at a butcher shop, something I seldom heard since it wasn’t his native dialect. I recall my father showing a slip of paper to the butcher, who paused his work to read it, his knife still raised in the air.

Chan remains missing at the end of Wang’s film; likewise, we left New York empty-handed in 2010. However, to my surprise, my great-uncle turned up three years later: When we got word that he’d been admitted to a hospital in Manhattan, my father drove up again, this time by himself, to collect my great-uncle’s things and take him back to Hainan. From then on, the missing and exaggerated parts of my great-uncle’s story began multiplying. In 2015, I was told he’d been taken to the hospital because he’d broken his leg while out collecting cans, something that many poor, elderly Asian immigrants in New York do to make money. Last year, I was told he was receiving treatment at the hospital for the disease that claimed his life in 2017. When I asked this year, it was the leg again, but I was told it wasn’t broken. He needed a tendon transfer, my father said, before promptly changing the subject.

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In one of the scenes in Chan is Missing, a lawyer played by Judi Nihei stops by Chester’s, a café where Jo and Steve are dining. She is also looking for Chan; she says he missed a court appearance related to a traffic accident. The scene is funny, if a bit tedious thanks to the lawyer’s penchant for jargon. She explains that after the accident, a police officer asked Chan, “Did you stop at the stop sign?” and Chan, “rather than giving him a yes or no answer, began to go into his past driving record, how good it was, the number of years he’d been in the states, all the people that he knew, trying to relate different events or objects or situations to what was happening then,” at which point “the policeman became rather impatient.”

It occurred to me that the plot in Chan is Missing progresses the way family histories are often narrated: in a scattered, nonlinear, gossipy and mercurial fashion. For instance, instead of describing how my great-uncle managed to get to the US and how he survived when he arrived, my father described an episode in which someone stole my great-uncle’s watch: he apparently tailed the suspect across the city, staked out the suspect’s apartment, and eventually got his watch back. In lieu of facts about my great-uncle’s living situation—what kind of room he’d rented, whether he’d had roommates—I was told that he’d glued all his cash to the walls to make it more difficult to steal in the event of a break-in. When I asked my father where in Chinatown my great-uncle had been living, the answer was not a street or intersection but “near the Confucius statue,” which is to say, possibly in Confucius Plaza, a forty-four-story apartment complex that stands where Division Street meets Bowery (back in the seventies, the brown brick tower was the first major public housing project aimed at Chinese Americans in the city). Earlier this year, I learned he didn’t have an apartment at all: he’d been living under someone’s staircase—in which building I still don’t know.

According to Chan’s lawyer, the clash between the native English-speaking police officer’s preference for straightforward facts and Chan’s profuse, associative style of speaking exemplifies a typical “cross-cultural misunderstanding.” Of course, she is oversimplifying things, and, judging from the looks Jo and Steve throw each other across the table, Wang knew this. Likewise, linguistic conventions are not to blame for the fragmentation of my great-uncle’s biography. How can one tell a straightforward story about the US immigration system, about permanent economic and legal precarity, or answer a question about a person’s life with just “yes” or “no”?

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Nowadays, I find myself often at the intersection of Division Street and Bowery, waiting to cross the intersection in order to catch the opening of an exhibition or a performance at one of the many art galleries that have, since my great-uncle’s tenure in the city, moved into his former neighborhood. I gaze up at the fifteen-foot bronze Confucius statue. Made by an artist named Liu Shih in 1976, the statue stands atop a large stone plinth on which a chapter of the Chinese philosopher’s teachings is inscribed in gold. It occurs to me that the imposing plinth and the dense text eclipse the effigy of the philosopher, who looks tired and all too human against the trees. It also occurs to me that my great-uncle could have stood where I’m standing. 

How did the intersection look to him back in the nineties? Who did he pass on his way to work? Did he ever get into altercations with his friends over money? Did his watch ever need repairing?

Towards the end of Wang’s film, the camera lingers on a photograph of Chan in which he’s standing next to Jo. The upper half of Chan’s body is ensconced in shadow: “Here’s a picture of Chan Hung,” Jo narrates in voiceover, “and I still can’t see him.” It’s clear that the real question at the heart of Chan is Missing is not “Where is Chan?” but “Who is Chan?” A few years ago, my father showed me a photo on his phone of my great-uncle back on Hainan Island. He looked nothing like how I’d pictured. He was sitting out in the sun, with members of our extended family. He was shirtless and had a potbelly that was deeply tanned. They were playing cards, and there were palm trees in the distance. That’s what I remember, at least. I didn’t want to let on that I was still playing detective, so I didn’t ask my father to send me the photo—which is to say, I still can’t see the man in the center of it.

Jenny Wu is a critic, essayist, and associate editor of ArtReview, where she writes a monthly column about New York’s art scene. She teaches at Brooklyn College CUNY and is working on a novel.