OUR MISSION

In 2001, I was asked to write a short essay about Wayne Wang's CHAN IS MISSING and in it, I make the following statement:

"As a teacher, film festival junkie and general consumer of culture, I’ve sat through more Asian American shorts and features than I care to remember and practically all of them are forced to measure themselves besides Wang’s inaugural achievement. Most fail.

Six years later and I still believe in that sentiment. CHAN IS MISSING remains the finest Asian American feature narrative ever made and the fact that it is also the first should give us some pause.

Documentary work by Asian American filmmakers continues to get better; it has long been our community's strong point and the younger generation that have followed in the footsteps of Arthur Dong, Steven Okazaki, Loni Ding, Spencer Nakasako and Renee Tajima (just to name a few) have not disappointed. Likewise, those lucky enough to see shorts programs by Asian American filmmakers get to see some incredibly promising examples of up-and-coming talent.

But narrative features have been a different story. I've often wondered why, as we're celebrating the 25th anniversary of CHAN, it hasn't been knocked off its perch yet. Certainly, CHAN is an excellent piece of filmmaking - creative, daring, thoughtful and entertaining - but its long reign is also reflective of how challenging it's been to create good Asian American narratives with interesting characters, intelligent scripts, compelling storytelling, etc.

This isn't to say that the last quarter century has been bereft of talent besides Wayne Wang. Filmmakers from Justin Lin to Romeo Candido, Alice Wu to Ian Gomazon, Grace Lee to Greg Pak, Eric Byler to Jon Moritsugu - just to name a few - have turned out exceptional work...

...but...

...none of it has managed to dislodge the singular achievement of CHAN. True, the production quality gets better, the look slicker, the treatments more ambitious but somehow, the basics of visual storytelling and scripting haven't gelled in such a way to raise the proverbial bar. There have been many good movies, a handful of great movies, but it still hasn't been enough.

I created Chasing Chan as both a love letter to Asian American cinema as well as a forum for critique and engagement. I love Asian American filmmaking as a creative form, for its potential, for its imagination. But at the same time, I find myself, time and time again, wanting more from it, expecting something beyond qualifiers such as "that's wasn't bad for an Asian American film" (and let's be honest: we've all said that at some point).

The site catalogs most of the interviews, reviews and features I've written on Asian American film over the years and will fold in new pieces as they come out. I, by no means, am suggesting that I am a definitive expert on the subject or that I contain a vast, encyclopedic knowledge of the topic. There are far, far more capable Asian American film scholars and writers than I.

However, even though my body of cultural criticism is typically associated with music, Asian American film is something I've spent a great deal of time thinking and musing about and given the general paucity of information on Asian American cinema out there (aside from the sites I link in the sidebar), I wanted to collect what I have done and make it available as well as use the site to push some of my own thinking and encourage engagement (both my own and that of the readers') with the ever-growing body of Asian American filmmaking out there. Hopefully, I can be candid and forthright, as well as insightful and enjoyable, in tackling this broad creative practice.

My hope is to build this into a site that will prove to be both informative and provocative as Asian American filmmaking matures past its quarter century mark. After all, the grand desire is not in documenting the chase after CHAN, but in finding the work that might yet overtake it.

Oliver Wang
July 2007
Los Angeles

--O.W.

THE AUTHOR

When it comes to cinema, I am first, and foremost, an enthusiast. I mean that as someone who loves film as a both form of art and entertainment but also as a powerful medium through which identities, anxieties and imaginations are created and projected, literally and figuratively. I wouldn't be so passionate about film (Asian American or otherwise) without both these basic loves for the craft and its potential.

My first exposure to Asian American cinema came through NAATA, the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (since renamed CAAM - The Center for Asian American Media) and their annual SFIAAFF (San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival). I don't remember exactly when I went to my first SFIAAFF (only that it would have been in the early 1990s) but that was an initial glimpse.

My more formal introduction came in the spring of 1997 when, as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I took Asian American Film and Video with instructor and filmmaker Spencer Nakasako. In addition to practically camping out at the SFIAAFF in 1996 and 1997, this was a baptism of sorts, a heady, thrilling leap into a history and community that I hadn't known much about before but one that I was eager to take part in.

I ended up assisting the teaching of the film course in the next year, when instructor and writer Alvin Lu took over from Spencer. Eventually, I became the primary course instructor for the Berkeley course, teaching it over half a dozen times during the academic year and summer session. It is, by far, one of the classes I've enjoyed teaching the most, both because the material is dear to me as well as a class that my students also become invested in as well. It also gave me access to a deep and diverse library of Asian American shorts and features, narratives and documentaries that I might not otherwise have seen as a conventional viewer.

Concurrent with this, I began writing on Asian American film by 1998, previewing the Festival for Asian Week (yeah, that Asian Week) and the SF Bay Guardian in 1999 and 2000. In the fall of 2000, I was asked to join the Festival Screening Committee and for the next six years, served on the committee, mostly evaluating feature length submissions. In the years since, I continue to write for the SFIAFF catalog and review films - something I couldn't do as directly during my committee years given the potential conflict of interest.

Freed from that burden of impartiality, I created Chasing Chan as a way to engage and evaluate the arcs that Asian American cinema has taken, with the eventual intention of molding this site and its contents into a book-length project.

At current, I am a professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach and live in Los Angeles with my wife and daughter. You can find more information here.

--O.W.