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And in Hong Kong, in those days, the better education was provided by Catholic institutions. My parents were pretty conservative Chinese, but they believed in education. My dad was always saying, “So-and-so is probably a spy.” It’s funny, growing up like that. It’s like “Casablanca.” Everyone from all over China went there, and there were people from all over the world. Growing up in Hong Kong in the fifties was pretty strange. I’ve had an anxiety-attack problem all my life, and the doctor keeps saying it’s probably from, you know, being in the womb when she was going from place to place. I was born soon after she got to Hong Kong. They basically went to Hong Kong and restarted their lives. My parents escaped from China after the war. Still, there are consistent themes and questions that seem to run through his work: whether community is something rooted in the past or the future, and how people can make the most of the time they have left. His career throughout the nineties and two-thousands was astonishingly eclectic, ranging from collaborations with Paul Auster, such as “Smoke” (1995) and “The Center of the World” (2001), to fish-out-of-water romantic comedies, such as “Maid in Manhattan” (2002) and “Last Holiday” (2006).
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These successes elevated Wang’s profile, and, in 1993, he directed “The Joy Luck Club,” the path-breaking adaptation of Amy Tan’s best-selling novel. After graduating from art school in Oakland and working briefly in Hong Kong, he made “Chan Is Missing” on a meagre budget and then, four years later, “Dim Sum,” a film about a Chinese-immigrant widow who decides to make the most of her life when a fortune-teller gives a grim prophecy of her death. He became entranced by the various movements and subcultures around him-the grass-smoking hippies, the Black Panthers.
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Wang was born in Hong Kong in 1949, and moved to California’s Bay Area for school in the late sixties. The film was recently issued in a special fortieth-anniversary edition by the Criterion Collection. These different accounts make Jo and Steve wonder how well they really knew Chan and, to some extent, the community around them. Some speculate that Chan has become mixed up in a local murder, and others guess he’s simply gone back to China. But everywhere they go, from restaurant kitchens to community centers to Chan’s own home, people describe a different version of their friend: to some, he was naïve and kooky to others, he was brilliant and sarcastic. The film follows a clever, Columbo-like cabdriver named Jo (Wood Moy) and his wisecracking nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) as they search for their missing friend, an immigrant from Taiwan named Chan Hung, who has disappeared with the money they pooled together to buy a cab license. “Chan Is Missing” is a masterpiece of eighties independent film, and it remains one of the most profound meditations on immigrant identity ever made. Not only was it accepted but an unexpected, glowing review by Vincent Canby in the Times meant that there were soon lines around the corner at Wang’s screenings. His expectations were low when he submitted it to the 1982 New Directors/New Films Festival, in New York. When he retrieved the reels, he realized that the festival judges hadn’t even bothered to watch the movie. Wang submitted “Chan Is Missing” to a local film festival but was told that it had failed to make the cut. All they knew was that nobody had tried to do something like this before. The cast and crew, a mix of professionals and friends from the community, shot on weekends, and it was sometimes unclear whether Wang was making a documentary or a noir mystery. After seeing decades of stereotypical portrayals, Wang wanted to take in the breadth of experiences, histories, and languages that made up the so-called Chinese American community. In 1981, Wayne Wang enlisted his friends to make a film about the lives of those who called San Francisco’s Chinatown home.