How The Joy Luck Club director Wayne Wang grew as a filmmaker, and why Hong Kong frustrated him
- Long before directing Jennifer Lopez in Maid in Manhattan, Wayne Wong, working both in Hong Kong and the US, made films that showed Asians as ‘real humans’
- While filming in Hong Kong he crossed some of its gangsters. A subsequent film was critical of the city’s social mores. A Post review called it a ‘cheap shot’
The Joy Luck Club’s Wayne Wang is probably the best-known Asian-American film director.
While he made his name making films in the United States, Wang was born in Hong Kong, in 1949. He went to college in the US when he turned 18, and studied painting and photography at California College for Arts and Crafts, and then filmmaking at graduate school.
Wang went back to Hong Kong and started work at public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), where he was assigned to the now classic Below the Lion Rock series.
“After one or two episodes, I was pretty much fired,” he told film critic Roger Garcia. “I think there was too much experimental blood in me still, and I felt that Hong Kong was somewhat restrictive, having been in America.”
Wang left Hong Kong for San Francisco, where he got involved in theatre, working with the politically oriented Sung Fung Se theatre group.
His second film, Chan Is Missing (1982), an independent film that loosely focuses on the search for a missing friend, was the first Asian-American film to garner attention in the US.