Chan is Missing
It’s kind of surprising that the closest thing I could find to a trailer for Wayne Wang’s directorial debut was a clip of Siskel & Ebert talking about it (especially since the entire thing was on YouTube), but that kind of makes sense, because it was in listening to the ’80s All Over podcast that I first heard about “Chan is Missing,” and was immediately fascinated to watch it for myself. Wang is a filmmaker I haven’t seen much of in terms of his more personal work, but the description of this film had me hooked to see what this was about, and I was not disappointed.
Wang’s film has a simple hook to it- two taxi drivers (Jo, played by Wood Moy, and his nephew Steve, played by Marc Hayashi) go looking for Chan Hung, a guy whom they gave their money to so that they could get certified as cab drivers, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The film plays by the rules of the old-fashioned detective stories narratively, but the meat of the story becomes more about looking at the various cultural and political vantage points of the people they encounter. Chan has been missing since before he was supposed to be in court for a hit-and-run car accident- was he worried about going to prison? What does the upheaval about the annual Chinese New Year’s parade have to do with Chan’s disappearance? How was he assimilating in America? These are just a handful of the questions Jo and Steve need to answer if they’re going to find Chan, and find out who he really was.
The script by Wang and Isaac Cronin is structured like a mystery, but it’s ultimately about the different facets of the Chinese-American experience in early 1980s San Francisco, and I kind of love it. At a brisk 76 minutes, Wang has some truly charismatic leads in Moy and Hayashi to take us on this trip through Chinatown where, we want them to find Chan, but we ultimately enjoy the stops along the way more than the hopeful destination. Shot in black & white for next to no money, it’s shaggy and scruffy and genuine in the way it approaches its story, and the people Jo and Steve encounter during it. By the end, we understand the complexities within an individual community, and within individuals, that aren’t available by just looking at the surface; even Jo’s portrait of who Chan was is muddled by the contradictions he hears, and ultimately, I felt less bad about Jo being unable to find Chan because of the money and more for how he wasn’t able to take this new knowledge of him, and get to know him on a deeper level. This is rich and fascinating and entertaining as Hell to watch.
What makes a film feel universal is not whether it portrays experiences that we can relate to, but feelings we relate to. I can’t relate to the individual experiences of the characters in “Chan is Missing,” but I can relate to how they feel, because even though I don’t know what it’s like to live the day-to-day life of Chinese-Americans, with the barriers in language and political complexities that go into their putting on a New Year’s parade, I feel empathy for the struggles they go through to figure out their way in a larger society that doesn’t always understand them because Wang boils those struggles to an essential element that anyone, regardless of background, has likely experienced for themselves.
