The director Wayne Wang, in his own words, is an “insider/outsider” — responsible for Hollywood hits such as Maid in Manhattan (2002), critically-acclaimed independent films Smoke and Blue in the Face (both 1995 collaborations with Paul Auster), and pioneering Asian American films such as Chan Is Missing (1982) and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985).
Such a varied filmography demonstrates how Wang defies expectations, particularly in regard to his career arc. Good thing for cinephiles, then, that — unlike other good Asian sons — he went against his parents’ wishes for him to become a doctor. After receiving his MFA in film from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Wang returned to Hong Kong and started directing a popular TV soap opera, “Below the Lion Rock”. “The Hong Kong media was blowing up at the time,” says Wang, and his Hong Kong career seemed set — but he ended up returning to the United States instead.
During the interview, Wang also talked about running, painting, how the film version of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day fell through (”He was worried that I would get too close to the truth about his family, was what he told me”), abortion counselors, YouTube (”The Princess of Nebraska is too experimental, too open-ended, to show in theaters”), Chinese gangsters, specific plot points [sorry, can't post them because of possible spoilers!], his optioning of the film rights to Xiaolu Guo’s novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and cleared up the rumor about a forthcoming Adam Sandler - Zhang Ziyi “movie” Good Cook, Loves Music which he’s supposedly directing (”I don’t know how it ended up on my IMDb page. It’s not happening.”).
His two latest films, a return to his independent film-making roots, both based on short stories by the Oakland-based writer Yiyun Li. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (winner of four prizes at the San Sebastian Film Festival, including Golden Shell for Best Film), is in general release in theaters this month; The Princess of Nebraska will be released on YouTube’s Screening Room in October.
The interview took place in San Francisco.
American Pop [AP]: I know I should be asking about the two new movies, but I’m really curious about 1967 to 1982.
Wayne Wang [WW]: In ‘67, Hong Kong was in the throes of a lot of riots, which was a spillover from worldwide protests and changes. And the Chinese Cultural Revolution was spilling over into Hong Kong, so my parents told me, You better go to the U.S., go away, go to college there. My parents were traditional, conservative businesspeople who escaped to Hong Kong from the communists in China. So I was basically sent over here to Foothill College, down in Los Altos, and I lived on a ranch that was owned by some Quakers. They were obviously anti-war and conscientious objectors, and I remember David Harris and Joan Baez was there a lot, giving talks and meetings. So I became very political during that period.
I was supposed to be studying to be a doctor, but I started taking art classes, I fell in love with art history, painting; I had really good teachers that inspired me. So I told my parents I wasn’t going to be a doctor, I was going to study painting. By that time, I was quite radicalized, quite Americanized. I was a free soul, so to speak, in the early ’70s — and being in the East Bay, in Berkeley, I went to the Pacific Film Archive every night…
When I got out of school, I said, let me go back to Hongkong, because it was impossible in those days for Chinese to make films in the US. This was probably unheard of; it was impossible to break into the business. The best I could do was probably make documentaries for the TV stations.
AP: So this was a deliberate effort on your part, because you knew you couldn’t break in?
WW: Yes, that was part of it. But the other part was that I was beginning to feel that I was really American, and I didn’t know what the Chinese part of me was, and I wanted to track back to that.
“Below the Lion Rock” was popular and working, but I wanted to change it — which was not the thing you do for something that’s already working. They didn’t like that. I was a little more radical.
AP: Do you mean politically radical, or cinematically radical?
WW: I wanted to change it in terms of its narrative, the way the camera moved. I was very influenced by Godard; you are political by changing the film language. I also had problems adjusting with my parents… I think I came back to the U.S. after only eight months, tops.
I returned to San Francisco and did volunteer work in community agencies. I immersed myself in understanding what the community was about on many different levels. I worked there for five or six years, with different jobs — everything from teaching English to an administrator to developing curriculums for bilingual students.
AP: That’s how you fell in with George [Wu] and Laureen [Chew] and Presco Tabios.
WW: That’s right. Met a lot of people, almost everyone that’s cast in Chan Is Missing. George Wu [former San Francisco State University professor and director of the Newcomers' Language Center, who delivers a speech in the film on Chinese American apple pie] was my boss. Chan is Missing came out from all that. That movie is, in a way, almost like a fictional diary of my experiences.
I didn’t think anybody would be interested in seeing it. I gave it to the San Francisco International Film Festival, but they didn’t even open the package, so I sent it around, and finally the New York Museum of Modern Art had their New Directors Festival and they really liked it. Then Vincent Canby’s review came out in the New York Times and that was how it became more popular.
Documentaries and fictional Asian American films were very seriously sort of talking about how we were discriminated against, and how difficult our history was, blah blah blah blah blah, in a way was almost too serious. And almost like perhaps complaining about our experiences. Or trying to be too rah-rah about how positive we have to be. So Chan Is Missing was kinda looking at the complexity of Chinatown in a different way. It helped me find another way to express myself about Chinatown.
AP: I’ve showed your films many times to students in my Asian American Culture class, and once I invited Laureen Chew [star of Dim Sum and Associate Dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University] to talk to the class afterwards. She called Dim Sum “a deeply political act”. Could you talk about that a bit?
WW: [pauses] “A deeply political act.” [laughs] Laureen actually had differences with me about how she was portrayed; she wanted to be tougher, stronger, and not so guilty about her own culture and her own mom. I wasn’t that interested in that, because that would be too close to Laureen herself. [laughs] I was more interested in someone who was more conflicted, because there’s more drama in that.
I think it’s political because anytime you make a film about Chinese Americans and make it in a way that is authentic and realistic, it is political. Because nobody will go out there and do these films. Ang Lee made a few, and there are a lot of young directors doing it now. I think the heart and core of changing how people perceive us is through the humanity of the characters that are portrayed on screen. That’s why it’s political for me.
AP: I know they’re supposed to be seen as companion films, but there’s a sense in which Chan Is Missing is the companion film to The Princess of Nebraska, because they’re both about Chinatown, and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is the companion to Dim Sum.
WW: When I did Thousand Years I thought a lot about Dim Sum. I thought it was almost a similar film in a way, but now I’m older, hopefully wiser, more experienced that I could make the same film but a little different. I loved that Ozu made maybe forty films about the same story, almost, and each one is a little different…
AP: Dim Sum is Late Spring, and Thousand Years is Tokyo Story?
WW: Yeah… [laughs] Pretty much, I would say. Tokyo Story, definitely. Princess of Nebraska is in a way more Godardian. There’s a direct reference when she’s looking at a Godard poster, and lifts her shirt up; it’s like Masculin Féminin. it’s really like the Coca-Cola generation in China, in my mind.
I’d love someday to show Chan Is Missing with Princess, and Dim Sum with Thousand Years. And also Princess was very freeform, shot from the hip, and has a more shaggy-dog narrative.
AP: I figure the contrasting styles of camera work flowed organically from the contrasting themes of the two films as well.
WW: I was always kind of afraid that Thousand Years would be too classic — too Asian for people — so I wanted to just kind of break away from that also. Stylistically, that was part of the aesthetic choice behind Princess of Nebraska.
AP: What was it in the Yiyun Li stories that attracted you?
WW: They’re both about the Cultural Revolution, but I was attracted to the stories, I think, because it’s not obvious in what she writes. They’re more about characters and their complexity; those were the easy connections. But Princess was more about — I keep meeting these younger women from Beijing and Shanghai, and I find that they are lacking of any historical connection, like a lot of them don’t even know about Tiananmen Square.
AP: I was thinking that the line from the movie — where Sasha is asked about Tiananmen Square, and she says it’s something her mother once told her about — was a statement you heard in real life.
WW: Right, a lot of them would say, who would you identify with, and they’d say Paris Hilton. There’s also a line in the movie about that. I just find that that generation, growing up during the economic boom, is so interesting because they don’t really have a past to identify with, and they’re kind of searching for something.
AP: In A Thousand Years, Yilan has a line about how it’s easier for her to speak in English because she was not taught to express her emotions in Chinese. As an immigrant, was that something you experienced yourself?
WW: My parents speak Mandarin, and it’s a very formal language — so often you have to say things in these four-word proverbs, and if you don’t pick the right one it’s not quite understood. It’s just so limiting, it’s like wearing armor. So when I came to America — even though I spoke English in Hong Kong, it’s actually more formal British English. So when I came to America and started learning slang — you know, talking – it really did free my emotions and… I remember when I first met my wife [actress Cora Miao], we would get into fights, and I would shift into English because I could express my emotions so much easier. That’s definitely something true.
AP: It’s interesting that some of the most eloquent scenes in A Thousand Years were the scenes in the park where they seemed to barely understand each other.
WW: You can express yourself if you have common experiences, through body language, through some kind of expression, through just the sounds that you make. I’m very interested in that, something more basic, more primitive, about communication. I think language is pretty sophisticated and sometimes language gets in the way, I think.
AP: Speaking of expression, I was going to say that it seemed to me that the movies that were somehow most personal to you were the ones that came in pairs.
WW: [laughs] Oh, that’s interesting! You know, I’d never thought of it that way, nobody’s seen it that way, but it’s true. The only reason why I would do another one is because I so get involved with the one to begin with. Like with Smoke, I loved what it was doing, I loved everything about it, I loved the cigar store, I wanted to do more. So that’s when I told Paul [Auster], let’s do something very different from Smoke, but let’s use the cigar store and some of the characters. That’s how Blue in the Face came about.
AP: Do you see similar themes in your more mainstream Hollywood movies?
WW: [quickly] No. [laughs] Well, there is a theme in all my work, because I’m interested in this a lot. I was born in Hong Kong, it’s a British colony, I was educated in an Irish Catholic school, my parents were very conservative, traditional Chinese — I’m pretty screwed up. And I don’t really know where I belong. So I’m always kind of an insider-outsider, and I’ve never quite connected to my own family or even the community. So if you look at all my films, they’re always about family, about formal and informal families. Smoke is about a bunch of people who are all isolated, but then somehow find a community. Chinese Box (1997) is about a man who’s from England, lives in Hong Kong, he’s an outsider, but he tries to understand Hong Kong. It’s always that same theme. Anywhere But Here (1999) is about Susan Sarandon going to Hollywood to become Hollywood, so to speak, living on the edge of Beverly Hills. That theme runs through all my work. Chan Is Missing is about a guy who didn’t belong and disappears… In that sense it’s all connected.
The thing I learned most from the studio films is how easy it is to fake emotions. In Thousand Years and Princess of Nebraska I wasn’t going for the easy drama, the easy emotions, I was trying to find what was true about the characters in the scene.
AP: Speaking of “easy” — or rather, the opposite — I remember seeing a lot of puzzled faces at the ending of The Princess of Nebraska when I saw it at the Pacific Film Archive earlier this year.
WW: It was somewhat going back to Chan Is Missing — in my first film, I talk about “what is not there is just as important as what is there”, that there’s no easy answers to things. I like the ambiguity of it.
AP: At the Q&A afterwards, Ling Li [the lead actress of The Princess of Nebraska] was joking that the movie had no ending.
WW: She never understood what it was, but it’s okay. [laughs] What was interesting for me was that I’ve seen The Princess of Nebraska with an audience maybe 20, 30 times, and each time the audience would say different endings, and each time I read it differently too. I really liked that. In the beginning I was always saying, [the movie ended like this]. Emotionally. But now, I’m more mixed, and I like the fact that over time, in different screenings, depending on where I am, I could read different things into the film too. And why does film have to be one way, one answer?