Wayne Wang in Person

March 11–April 17, 2022

From defining Asian American identity on-screen in Chan Is Missing and The Joy Luck Club to adapting the writing of Paul Auster and working with Jennifer Lopez, Wayne Wang is a filmmaking original. This series features new restorations of his work.

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Life Is Cheap . . . But Toilet Paper Is Expensive
Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart
The Joy Luck Club

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Films
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Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Chan Is Missing
Wayne Wang
United States, 1982
Chan Is Missing also screens without in-person guests on Wednesday, March 30.
Friday, March 11 7 PM
Wayne Wang and Oliver S. Wang in Conversation
Touted as the first all Chinese American feature film, Wang’s irreverent, refreshingly authentic movie follows two cab drivers searching San Francisco’s Chinatown for an elusive flimflam man. “A small, whimsical treasure of a film” (Roger Ebert).
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The Joy Luck Club
Wayne Wang
United States, 1993
The Joy Luck Club also screens without in-person guests on Saturday, April 16.
Sunday, March 13 4 PM
Wayne Wang, Amy Tan, and Catherine Ceniza Choy in Conversation
Four Chinese American women and their immigrant mothers learn one another’s stories in this intimate adaptation of the famed Amy Tan novel. A landmark in Asian American cinema, “both sweeping and intimate” (New York Times).
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Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart
Wayne Wang
United States, 1985
Director’s Cut
Sunday, March 20 4 PM
Wayne Wang and Laureen Chew in Conversation
An elderly Chinese American widow in San Francisco tries to get her adult daughter married off in Wang’s simultaneously gentle and rowdy tribute to Yasujirō Ozu, Chinatown, and Wang’s Asian American heroines. With Laureen Chew, Victor Wong, Joan Chen, Amy Hill.
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Life Is Cheap . . . But Toilet Paper Is Expensive
Wayne Wang
United States, 1989
Saturday, March 26 7 PM
Wayne Wang, Spencer Nakasako, and Antonella Bonfanti in Conversation
The spirit of independence that runs through Wang’s films finds its most audacious expression in this tale of an urban cowboy tasked with delivering a briefcase to a mob boss, which was shot on location in Hong Kong.
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Chan Is Missing
Wayne Wang
United States, 1982
Chan Is Missing also screened on Friday, March 11 with Wayne Wang and Oliver S. Wang in conversation.
Wednesday, March 30 7 PM
Touted as the first all Chinese American feature film, Wang’s irreverent, refreshingly authentic movie follows two cab drivers searching San Francisco’s Chinatown for an elusive flimflam man. “A small, whimsical treasure of a film” (Roger Ebert).
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Chinese Box
Wayne Wang
United States, 1997
Director’s Cut
Saturday, April 2 7 PM
Wayne Wang and Oliver S. Wang in Conversation
Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, and Maggie Cheung star in another of Wang’s love letters to Hong Kong, this one made all the more memorable and melancholy by its setting and timeline: 1997, at the end of British rule.
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Blue in the Face
Wayne Wang, Paul Auster
United States, 1995
Saturday, April 9 7 PM
Wayne Wang in Person
An all-star cast—Jim Jarmusch, Lou Reed, Giancarlo Esposito, Harvey Keitel, Madonna (!)—improvise their way in and around a Brooklyn cigar store in Wang and Auster’s off-the-cuff, playful ode to the outer boroughs.
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The Joy Luck Club
Wayne Wang
United States, 1993
The Joy Luck Club also screened on Sunday, March 13 with Wayne Wang, Amy Tan, and Catherine Ceniza Choy in conversation.
Saturday, April 16 3:30 PM
Four Chinese American women and their immigrant mothers learn one another’s stories in this intimate adaptation of the famed Amy Tan novel. A landmark in Asian American cinema, “both sweeping and intimate” (New York Times).
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Maid in Manhattan
Wayne Wang
United States, 2002
Sunday, April 17 4 PM
Wayne Wang in Person
Wang demonstrated his wide range of filmmaking influences in this contemporary interpretation of classic 1930s Hollywood romantic comedies, with JLo herself starring as a single mom working as a hotel maid and Ralph Fiennes as a most unlikely Prince Charming.
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Wayne Wang in Person

March 11–April 17, 2022

In the introduction to her interview with Wang in Reel to Real: Race...

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Wayne Wang came to the Bay Area for college, eventually enrolling at the California College of Arts and Crafts. As a student, he frequented screenings at the Pacific Film Archive and, inspired by the possibilities of the film medium, switched his major to filmmaking. Since then he has made over twenty films, two of which—Chan Is Missing and The Joy Luck Club—have been named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. His independent films are now part of BAMPFA’s collection, and in 2017 BAMPFA preserved Chan Is Missing. Commemorating BAMPFA’s collaboration with Wang and the Lightbox Film Center to restore and remaster his audacious 1989 film Life Is Cheap . . . But Toilet Paper Is Expensive, this series provides a sampling of his groundbreaking independent films and Hollywood hits.
In the introduction to her interview with Wang in Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, bell hooks admired “the unique magical aspects of Wayne Wang’s work . . . a passion for ordinary detail, the dailiness of life . . . that hint at a larger metaphysics.” Wang’s eye for detail is especially attuned to the dynamics of intersecting social and personal relationships in communities based on family, culture, or circumstance. From the women around the mahjong table in The Joy Luck Club and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart to the disparate patrons of a Brooklyn cigar store in Blue in the Face, from San Francisco cabbies in Chan Is Missing to the hotel hospitality staff in Maid in Manhattan, his consistent focus on the particularities of the people he depicts provides a vital corrective to still-pervasive stereotypes.
Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator
Read Oliver S. Wang’s fascinating interview with Wayne Wang in the current issue of Film Quarterly.

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This series is made possible with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts for our Out of the Vault series. Thanks to Jesse Pires, Lightbox Film Center; Marcus Hu, Strand Releasing; David Marriott, Ei Toshinari, Arbelos; Alyssa Peeples, Swank Motion Pictures; Jack Durwood, Paramount Pictures; Matthew D. Jones, University of North Carolina School of the Arts; Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures Entertainment; Ellen Moore; and Ross Lipman.