The first Chinese-American feature, Chan Is Missing is a mystery set against the backdrop of San Francisco's Chinatown. With many members of the Chinatown community playing themselves in the film, independent filmmaker Wayne Wang achieves what he set out to do, namely, "to bridge the gap" between the commercial film and the documentary film, "turning the corner away from regular narrative construction to get people questioning their relationship to what they are seeing and hearing on the screen." The story involves two Chinese taxi drivers who are looking for their business partner, Chan Hung, a middle-aged Taiwan immigrant who has vanished with their money. Their search for clues to Chan's whereabouts leads them to his family, friends and acquaintances, who reveal a great diversity of people and cultural backgrounds which make up life in Chinatown. "Chan Is Missing is about how Chinese people perceive themselves as 'Chinese living in America,' 'Chinese Americans,' and 'Americans.' These complex perceptions are distinct sensibilities that are often at odds with Western values. It is this dynamic humanism in Asians which Hollywood moviemakers have depicted as being inscrutable and docile. "I wanted to make a film to dispel or at least to relate to stereotyping. I didn't want to make something like Hito Hata, which is good in its own right, but which is like an Asian John Wayne, where all the characters are good. The problem is deeper. How do we perceive information? How do we perceive images and sound? Chan Is Missing is the story of a missing immigrant. We never find him, but we get different perceptions of him and Chinatown...." --Wayne Wang