Released in 1982, Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing depicts San Francisco’s Chinatown as a place that defies outsider expectations. Shot in 16mm black-and-white, it captures its time and place with a vividness that belies its low-res production quality.
Co-written with Isaac Cronin and Terrel Seltzer, it’s a DIY take on classic noir: American-born Chinese cab driver Jo (Wood Moy), and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi), turn into detectives to track down Chan Hung, an immigrant who disappeared with their taxi medallion money.
They begin stringing clues together, but the mystery of Chan functions less as a plot device and more of a metaphor for the futility of reducing the Asian-American experience to a single definition. Because Chan is nowhere to be found, Wang lets the camera focus on everyone else.
The cinéma verité style favors two perspectives: Jo’s view from his Dodge Dart and long, static shots of everyday life. His cab driver’s internal monologue is heard over lingering images of streets, bus stops, and people moving through Chinatown’s foreground.
As in the best noirs, the missing money is a macguffin: Steve and Jo are really interrogating Chinatown itself.
The action mostly keeps us inside the neighborhood, underscoring how separate it feels from the rest of San Francisco. Skyscrapers hover in the distance, while the Stockton Tunnel and Dragon Gate act as portals Jo passes through when he re-enters from the outside world. In a remake, I’d half expect to hear his monologue while he ascends the escalator at Rose Pak Station.
But Chan is Missing would be a very different movie today. In 2010, the city hiked the price of a taxi medallion to $250,000. Ride-hailing options like Uber and Waymo have made those licenses nearly worthless, but the drivers who took out loans (many of them immigrants) are obligated to pay them back in full.
The film depicts Chinatown as a place lived and performed in real time by its residents; Wang relegates white tourists to background players, as when an unseen passenger jumps into Jo’s cab and asks, “Hey, uh, what’s a good place to eat in Chinatown?”
Wang never generalizes or mythologizes. His long takes draw our eye away from architecture we already know so we can absorb how residents interact with their environment: a glamorous young woman in sunglasses stands outside a storefront, brushing her hair. Outside a bakery, three generations share fresh pastry. Each person in the frame is both an individual, and woven into the city’s fabric.
As in the best noirs, the missing money is a macguffin: Steve and Jo are really interrogating Chinatown itself.
An early scene leads them to the Manilatown Senior Center, where couples sip coffee and dance to Mariachi music. As the manager answers their questions in his back office, he stands before a photo that contains some of the same seniors dancing outside. They’re in a protest line on the steps of the International Hotel, a since-demolished SRO with a basement nightclub that was the last vestige of the city’s once thriving Filipino community.
Watching Chan, I felt let down that Wang took us somewhere we could only visit through memory.
In 48 Hrs., released just seven months later, Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte chase murderous fugitives through Chinatown's alleys and down fire escapes, with neon glare and steam vents setting us up for car chases and shootouts.
Chan's Chinatown doesn't feel dangerous until Jo receives an anonymous call warning him to drop the investigation. Suddenly, the camera jitters along the sidewalk, discordant music rising as he scans passersby before ducking into a theater lobby to catch his breath.
Wang subverts Chinatown’s reputation in popular culture for violent crime by setting an interlude at the Golden Dragon, where an attempted gang hit in 1977 killed five diners and injured 11. These details are held back from the audience, which gives us permission to laugh at the travails of the Sinatra-singing chef who resents cooking sweet-and-sour pork for tourists all day.
One of the film’s triumphs is its refusal to exoticize. A shot of turtles splashing in a wet-market tank isn’t a curiosity, but treated with the same matter-of-fact attention as a bus stop. What another filmmaker might hold up as spectacle, Wang simply registers as part of the texture of everyday life.
Outside Chinatown, Steve and Jo have more room to breathe: The sunny Richmond district apartment where Chan’s estranged wife and daughter reside feels suburban compared to his SRO hotel across from the Zoetrope Building. On a quiet, tree-lined street in the avenues, a visibly relaxed Steve disarms Chan’s daughter and her friend with rapid-fire jokes. As he hams it up, I thought to myself, he's doing a Richard Pryor impression.
The next line of dialogue: “You think you’re Richard Pryor?” the girl asks him. The recognition jolted me, and I had to pause the movie. AAPI characters on screen in the eighties were boxed into narrow roles, but Steve, a fully American guy, is plugged into Black popular culture, just trying to get a girl to laugh. Wang lets his characters’ identities show up through behavior, outside and beyond stereotype or self-consciousness.
In Chan Is Missing, representation transcends merely being included: Each character is allowed to exist without explanation, an authentic expression of San Francisco values that’s rarely portrayed on the screen.
The movie ends with a montage set to “Grant Avenue,” a number from Flower Drum Song, a 1958 musical written by two white men, adapted from a novel by Hong Kong immigrant C.Y. Lee. Blaring over extended shots of pagoda roofs, servers glimpsed through windows fogged by steaming dumplings, and elders in overcoats, Wang sets up a direct contraposition. Chinatown’s reality is set against Rodgers & Hammerstein’s exoticized fantasy:
You travel there in a trolley,
In a trolley up you climb —
Dong dong! You’re in Hong Kong, Having yourself a time
Chan’s absence gives the film its structure. It also allows everyone else — old women on balconies, kitchen workers, people at Muni stops — to occupy cinematic space that’s usually denied them. It still largely is, even 43 years after the film’s release.
I’ve lived in San Francisco since the 1990s, but I’ll always be a tourist in Chinatown. Watching Chan is Missing didn’t make me an insider, but I learned more in 80 minutes than in three decades here.
Chan is Missing can be found on various streaming platforms and is a Criterion Blu-Ray.
This is the first in a series of film columns by Walter Thompson called San Francisco Plays Itself.
