Chinese Americans In Amy Chen's revelatory documentary, "The Chinatown Files," some Chinese Americans tell of enduring endless harassment at the hands of government officials during the McCarthy-Cold War period. It's a part of both American and Chinese-American history that would have remained forgotten had Chen not felt spurred to tell this story, one that has been treated with 50 years of silence.
faced Cold War bias
Amy Chen's "The Chinatown Files"
bares another ugly side
of the McCarthy periodBy Gary C. W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.com"During that time, my family wasn't allowed to send money back home," she said by phone from her Waikiki hotel room Wednesday morning. "So my family tried to circumvent regular channels by finding different ways to get the money back home to their relatives. And when I learned about the trial of three laundry workers who were arrested because of this 'trading with the enemy act,' I was appalled. I wondered how basic American civil rights could not help these men.
"Once I had the idea in mind to make this documentary, it took a long time to make it. The difficulty was that many of the people I wanted to interview for the film were afraid to tell their story. They still felt that saying what they went through would threaten and maybe injure their lives.
"The Chinatown Files" 7:30 p.m. today, with "Made in China," at the Hawai'i Convention Center
"They still had this sense of vulnerability immigrants feel in a new country. These people still don't feel fully American. Even my family was initially against my making this documentary, that it would adversely affect my own life," she said.
But her family came around after seeing her work and appreciated what she had done. "I just showed a Chinese-language version at a Queens library that was standing-room-only. It just shows how hungry we are for this history."
In assembling material for "The Chinatown Files," Chen found it hard to find any official United States archival material. "There was nothing I could find relating to Chinese Americans; I guess it was generally thought they had no social and cultural importance to the history of our country."
Instead, Chen makes good use of photos and home movies from her interviewees' collections. And what documentation she could get, using the Freedom of Information Act, was heavily censored.
"My requests for Treasury, FBI and Immigration records, while I got what felt like tons of documents, the majority of information was still considered classified, and filled with blacked-out sections marked 'Confidential.'"
During the height of the Cold War and the "Red Scare," any Chinese American even slightly suspected of sympathizing with Mao Zedong's communist revolution and against the exiled Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan -- not only sending money back to families back in mainland China, but being associated with a newspaper or youth organization that didn't show outright support for the Kuomintang -- was a target of suspicion and even imprisonment and deportation.
"I feel it's tragic that so many people's lives were ruined by this harassment," Chen said. "What kept me going on to complete this project was to have their stories finally told, an urgency I felt that this needed to be done.
"Even with articulate, well-spoken pillars of the community, they didn't want to speak at first. When I showed a rough cut to them and their families, even their children said they didn't realize what their parents went through.
"There's still a sense of real shame within the Chinese-American community and a stigma attached to being investigated by the FBI," she said.
Their sense of paranoia even touched the Wen Ho Lee case, in which a Chinese-American scientist was arrested in 1999 for being an alleged spy. "So few people spoke up in his defense," Chen said, "and here we think we've made so much progress. But, as we've learned with how some Arab Americans have suffered the curtailment of their basic American rights, we should all have the ability to protect one's rights and to be vigilant in safeguarding them.
"The documentary, if nothing else, shows that it's so easy to scapegoat any minority group of color. And with the xenophobia surrounding the back-and-forth relations between the U.S. and China, it's also a cautionary tale."
While "The Chinatown Files" has had well-received screenings at festivals and universities since its completion in March (along with the National Asian-American Television Association's help in getting a possible future PBS airing), this may be Chen's first and last documentary.
"It's hard enough to raise money for independent films, and when it comes to documentaries, forget it!" she said. "It's tough to find funding for films about social justice. I was lucky to find what little government agency and foundation support to finish it. In fact, someone from the National Endowment for the Humanities told me that one of their panelists said that he was tired of seeing anti-McCarthy documentaries, and why don't they fund something pro-McCarthy!
"Another potential funder said there weren't enough Chinese Americans killed; it's like, if it isn't anything of holocaust proportions, it's not a big enough tragedy to consider. You're either considered a 'model minority' or not important enough to even bother with."
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