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EARNEST DUPES AND A DREAM DEFERRED

by Scott Hall (pseudonym for Scott Aronowitz)

(Published: The Philadelphia Scene, July 1989)

Review: Chan Is Missing
directed by Wayne Wang
Released 1982
77 min.

This small, quiet film by transplanted Chinese director Wayne Wang tells us more about the differing degrees of political affiliation and, more importantly, loyalty of PRC nationals and immigrants in the U.S. than any epic film to come out of either country. And it’s an insightful film about friendship, and how we can maintain a friendship for years without really knowing the other person.

The title character may have been abducted; he may have just disappeared of his own volition. But his two friends/partners in the ownership of a Chinatown taxicab in San Francisco entrusted him with their money, and now they’d like to know what happened to it, and to him.

We learn about Chan from the “investigation” his partners undertake into his disappearance. Fancying themselves amateur detectives, they contact several people who might have seen Chan soon before he became “missing.” They are not interested in uncovering a political conspiracy; they just want to know if he’s absconded with their money. So they talk to Chan’s wife and the teenage daughter they didn’t know he had; they talk to the owner of a restaurant Chan regularly patronized; they talk to a very old Chinese man who had some connection with Chan. Many of them provide unexpected laughs with their quirks and attitudes. But none of these people, including Chan’s own family, knows much about Chan either. However, some know about his involvement in the “flag-waving incident,” which comes to represent the political undertones that help define the film.

In a recent Chinatown parade, a man had pulled out a Communist Chinese flag that, figuratively and literally, flew in the face of the traditionalist theme of the parade. The action angered Chan, who confronted the man. They may have had an altercation; the man may have even been involved with an underground political movement. Neither we nor the central characters ever find out for sure. If Chan’s disappearance was connected to the flag-waving incident, he may even have been killed. However, the more they learn about Chan from their interviews, the more likely it appears that Chan simply took the money and ran.

Cabbie Mark is a young, more exhausted than angry man. His partner Jo is a calm, elderly man who, we come to suspect, had seen some dismal times under communist rule during his earlier years in China. Despite the frustration the two men experience in never coming any closer to learning what happened to Chan, neither man ever loses his temper. In fact, they are wistful over their new insights into a man they thought they knew so well. And they are worried that, if the flag-waving incident was behind it all, the influences they struggled to escape in China have now followed them to the United States.

Is this a brilliant film? Probably. Will you be able to tell while watching it? Almost definitely not. But like any great but modest film, you will think about it afterward, and you’ll come to discover how much for this $20,000 gem has to say than many of its epic counterparts costing upwards of 1,000 times more.