Wayne Wang Has Seen It All

The director of 'Chan is Missing,' 'Dim Sum,' and 'The Joy Luck Club' reflects on his career and the many ways Asian American films have—and haven't—changed

Wayne Wang attends The Academy Presents "The Joy Luck Club" (1993) 25th Anniversary at The Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Aug. 22, 2018 in Beverly Hills.

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Words by Dan Schindel

Born and raised in Hong Kong in the 1950s and ’60s, Wayne Wang was sent to the United States by his parents when he was a teenager. He was supposed to study medicine there, but his passion for the arts led him to filmmaking instead. But at the time, there was essentially no career path for directors of Asian descent in the American film industry. He tried to do what was expected of Asian filmmakers at the time, which was to take the skills and technical knowledge he learned in the States and bring it home. But his brief foray in Hong Kong television flamed out because he was, as he has put it in interviews years later, “too radical.”

Instead, he returned to the United States, teaching English in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was from these experiences that his 1982 feature Chan Is Missing was born. Shot on a minuscule budget, it features a middle-aged Chinatown taxi driver and his nephew, who are both looking for the title character, who vanished while holding a lot of their money. A low-stakes comedy noir, the movie sees the leads encountering numerous denizens of Chinatown who are essentially playing variations of their real-life selves—a cook who’s tired of making sweet and sour pork for tourists, an English teacher, etc. It could easily be called Waiting for Chan—we never do meet the man. Instead we are left to infer on the myriad variations of Chinese American identity, as everyone has a different opinion of him.

Chan Is Missing was a surprise hit, the first film by and about Asian Americans with crossover mainstream appeal. It precipitated a wave of independent Asian American cinema, part of the broader indie boom of the 1980s. Wang’s follow-up feature was 1985’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, which observes the everyday routines and gentle bickering between elderly widow Mrs. Tam (Kim Chew) and her grown daughter Geraldine (Laureen Chew, her real-life daughter).

Wang has since branched out as a filmmaker, directing many kinds of movies both independent and within the studio system, both about the Chinese experience and not—ranging from Smoke to The Joy Luck Club to Maid in Manhattan and more. Chan Is Missing and Dim Sum have been recognized for their landmark status within independent and Asian American film by the Criterion Collection, with the former getting a special edition home release in May 2022 and the latter just now being added to the collection.

Ahead of the release of the new restoration and Blu-ray/DVD of Dim Sum, we spoke to Wang over Zoom about the films and what has (and hasn’t) changed for Asian American cinema in the decades since he started out.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From left, Marc Hayashi and Wood Moy and Steve and Jo in "Chan Is Missing."

Courtesy of Criterion

Daniel Schindel: Thinking back 40 years to when Chan Is Missing came out, how did its success feel at the time?
Wayne Wang: Well, I was at first very surprised, and then I was really happy. Everywhere I went, whether it was New York, San Francisco, L.A., there were long lines around the block. It was great that finally an authentic film about Chinese Americans was being watched and received very well. But it also put me in a fearful dilemma. "What do I do next? What can I do now to be truthful to the people I'm telling stories about?"

DS: And that was Dim Sum. It was originally supposed to focus on the whole group of Geraldine’s female friends. But eventually you narrowed in on just her character and her relationship with her mother. What were some of the stories you had planned about the other characters, played by actors like Amy Hill and Joan Chen?
WW: They were all pretty interesting stories. Amy Hill’s character was divorced from a Black man and has a Black daughter, and she's struggling with that with her mother. Joan Chen—that was her first American film—she played a punk rock singer. My wife, Cora Miao, was in it, and her character was dating a white guy who was intrigued with her feet.

I wanted to make a film about these different friends, but I was not smart or skilled enough at the time to pull it off. It's not easy to do four or five different stories and hang them together, to make them all equally interesting and flow in and out of each other. I decided that Laureen and her mother, Kim Chew, were the easiest idea to go with. We went back and wrote a whole new script based on their relationship and filmed just that. For the Criterion edition, I put back in one scene that was from the original version, with all the girls eating barbecue.

Wayne Wang's "Dim Sum" originally focused on a group of Asian American women, but changed to focus on the mother-daughter relationship of Mrs. Tam and her daughter Geraldine.

Courtesy of CMPR

DS: How much of a role did Kim Chew have in that first version?
WW: At first, she was just a background character, but as we were shooting the original version, I found her more and more interesting. She ran a daycare center in her house, and while we were setting up downstairs, she always had babies crying upstairs. She cooked for us; I have never heard of an actress cooking for the whole crew. Often our lunch and dinner were cooked by Mama Chew. She was always laughing at us, saying things like, "Oh, you guys are so slow. I have finished taking care of all my kids, and you are still setting up." And she always had really interesting conversations with a neighbor. So that's why I decided to make her the central character.

This is also driven by the fact that I was a big [Yasujirō] Ozu fan. His stories are usually about a single parent who wants their child to get married so they can go on and live their lives happily and not worry about them. That’s what inspired the new script. Also, Chan Is Missing was really about Chinatown, about a lot of different characters, a very macro look. I decided to be more microscopic and focus on one relationship, on this mother and daughter.

DS: There’s a lot of Ozu influence in the film—there are ‘pillow shots’ like the opening shot of Mrs. Chew’s sewing machine, or the repeated shots of everyone’s shoes piled in the foyer. Had you wanted to make something like Ozu? Or did that style follow from the kind of story you decided to tell?
WW: That form was very key from the moment I gave up on the group story to focus on mother and daughter. The house became very important. Every room in the house, the shoes by the door, the Richmond District around it, all those things became so much part of the narrative. Even when I was a film student, I was taken with the idea of pillow shots, where the environment takes on the emotions of the characters who live in them.

DS: The revised script was based on the real interactions between Laureen and Kim Chew. How much of the story comes from their reality?
WW: I would say 80 percent, if not more, was based on reality. When we decided to focus on Laureen and her mom, the scriptwriter Terrel Seltzer and I sat down with them for a week and went through their whole lives together. We asked them questions like, "So when you have dinner and ask her about when she’s getting married, how would you say it? What would you say?" We recorded all that, wrote it down, and regurgitated it as dialogue. It was almost like a documentary, in some ways, but structured like a traditional narrative film.

From left, real-life mother-daughter pair Kim Chew and Laureen Chew play Mrs. Tam and Geraldine Tam in "Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart."

Courtesy of CMPR

DS: Chan Is Missing also has a lot of quasi-documentary elements in the way that it involves all the different people from Chinatown. It seems you were doing this a lot early in your career.
WW: It was probably out of a sense of wanting my characters and stories to be authentic. In film school, I was watching Italian Neorealists, German filmmakers like Werner Herzog, and Ozu where everything is very down to earth and authentic. I wanted to develop that sensibility rather than try to do a lot of big drama, big conflict, or big acting.

We were always shot down. Ang Lee and I would come out of some of these meetings and go to a restaurant and literally cry on each other's shoulders over it.

DS: Asian American film came up in parallel with several other independent film movements in the United States—there was the broader indie film movement, New Queer Cinema, and such. Does anything strike you when you look at the trajectory of Asian American film, what’s changed and what hasn’t?
WW: For a long time, there wasn't a lot of change. Ang Lee came a little after me and did some independent films that were really good about Chinese Americans, and then Justin Lin came and did a few. And then we sort of went off and started doing more mainstream projects. It was difficult to pull together an independent so-called "Asian American" film for many years. I remember going to studios, talking to executives, and they were always concerned about how big an audience there is for it, so we were always shot down. Ang Lee and I would come out of some of these meetings and go to a restaurant and literally cry on each other's shoulders over it.

It took a long time for anything to change. Crazy Rich Asians shifted things. Somehow the timing was right, the story was right, it became a true moneymaker, and that sort of broke the spell. And there were also a lot of smaller independent works coming at the tail of that. Maybe it’s also because the industry has a slightly different attitude toward ethnic minorities and wanting to make less-stereotypical films about them. I would say that over the last 10 years, it has been very rewarding to see all these interesting indie Asian American films.

DS: Surveying the films in this new wave, do any trends stand out to you? Is there anything you still aren’t seeing that you’d like to?
WW: Well, my personal opinion is that they're not taking enough risk. A lot of these films are sort of different variations of Dim Sum or Joy Luck Club. I'm happy that kind of film is being done, but look at something like Everywhere, Anywhere, All the Time—whatever it's called, I can never remember the title. It took a lot of risks and did a lot of things in a different way. I want to challenge Asian American filmmakers to do something interesting with narrative and style, especially if you're independent and have the support to take that kind of risk. If you look at a lot of films from all over Asia, their independent films are much more interesting. I go to a festival in Tokyo called FILMeX, and there are always really challenging and interesting films there.