Educational Media Reviews Online

A documentary about seven Chinese Americans who experienced or were affected by the McCarthy terror of the 1950s, this film interweaves the interviews of the older, successful Chinese Americans with pictures from their youth, with archival film and still photographs. The web site, http://www.chinatownfiles.org, claims that interviews were done with over one hundred people. The film is narrated by Amy Chen, the Chinese-American interviewees, a former Treasury agent, a former FBI agent, and at times by academics who place the experiences of the Chinese-Americans into their historical context.

Although most often located in San Francisco, the Chinatown of the title is in a sense a pan-Chinese American experience, since the interviewees come from San Francisco, New York, Boston and even Minnesota. The film begins with a shot of the Statue of Liberty. It concludes with the following statement by Mr. Henry Chin, president of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and of the China Daily News:

In 1972, when Nixon came back from China, the FBI stopped following me. The FBI said, “Ah, Mr. Chin. How are you doing?” I said, “Fine, fine.” They said, “Your case is over.” I said, “You followed me for twenty years, what have you got?” He just shrugged his shoulders. After that, I never saw the FBI again. That’s why I always said, “Nixon liberated me.”

Unfortunately, others were not so fortunate. The United States brought charges against the China Daily News and three laundrymen for violations of the Trading with the Enemy Act, that is, for sending money home to China. The U.S. won, despite the efforts of their defense attorney, a black lawyer who later became a New York Supreme Court justice. The fates of those involved included prison, suicide, deportation, and disappearance.

The FBI and the Immigration Service also investigated members of the Mun Ching, the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, a San Francisco based group, for purported ties with Communism. The Mun Ching was accused of representing the People’s Republic of China in the United Sates. However, at the time, supporters of Chiang Kai-shek and the Republic of China realized that the support of the United States was crucial to the survival of the Republic of China on Taiwan. The film implies that the Communist – Republic of China conflict was played out in Chinatown, pitting Chinese Americans against each other. The Mun Ching was perceived as anti-Taiwan. Similarly the newspaper, the China Daily News, was also harassed for its pro-Chinese Communist voice. All 6,500 of its subscribers were investigated.

The film is excellent history. It provides an appropriate background to the McCarthy era attacks on Chinese Americans, and examines the context for racism against the Chinese at that time. There are several clips from racist cartoons, Army training films, and other productions showing, if not the prevailing attitudes toward Chinese Americans, at least what some media portrayed. The theoretical framework of the film, or its explanation of causality, is related to the power-relations between countries, as played out in the individual lives of ethnic peoples. The Korean conflict legitimated McCarthy-like suspicion of Chinese. The power struggle between Chaing Kai-shek and Mao Ze-dong created turmoil in Chinese American communities, and brought the attention of the FBI to those Chinese Americans with purported sympathies for Mao. President Nixon freed Mr. Chin, because the U.S. needed access to South Asia in the Vietnamese conflict.

The Chinese Confession Program was an effort by the Immigration Service to give apparently selective amnesty to those Chinese in America who admitted to immigrating illegally or with forged papers. Although the confessors were granted the status of aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence and eligible for naturalization, the film shows how the confessions were used against others in the Chinese American family who may have had Mun Ching history or agitated for social change.

The pace of the film is slow, the music stately and affecting, and the production quality is excellent. The documentary is professionally filmed and edited. Although there are numerous other films about San Francisco Chinatown, this film is not actually concerned with Chinatown, but with race relations during the 1950s. It may be unique. As the viewer gradually becomes engaged with the film, the sense of history becomes the present. Chinese Americans are questioned and jailed. This reviewer said to himself, “What is new here?” The answer, it is all new, and yet, none of it is new. It is new to the Arab Americans that the United States is presently questioning and jailing. What is being done to them is similar to what was done to Chinese Americans, with similar justifications and outcomes, and with the same inability of well-meaning people to stop it. The film is about the past, and it brings the viewer’s present into the past, while using history to illuminate the present. The injustices are the same, the targets are unique, yet the same, and the history is contemporary.

Highly Recommended