Asian Heritage Issue
May 1, 2017
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 15
Merging memory and history in
preserving heritage, community
Forever, Chinatown
Directed by James Q. Chan
Streaming online
May 9 through June 6
By Maileen Hamto
The Asian Reporter
eek inside one of Frank Wong’s
dioramas of miniature rooms
depicting life in San Francisco’s
Chinatown and one is transported to the
nostalgia of an all-American community
that, until recently, has only existed in
memories of old-timers wishing for the
bygone days.
There’s the living room, with a
decked-out Christmas tree and a table set
up for a game of mahjong. Family dinner
features a bountiful and delectable feast.
Then there’s grandmother’s kitchen in the
midst of preparing mooncakes: mung bean
and eggs on freshly kneaded dough.
Over more than four decades, Wong
devoted countless hours to researching,
designing, and creating every painstaking
detail in three-dimensional dioramas that
are now part of the permanent collection of
the Chinese Historical Society of America
museum in San Francisco. His work
spotlights Chinatown as a place created
and nurtured by people who reflect the
crosswalk of cultures in mid-century
Americana.
Bay Area filmmaker James Q. Chan
immortalizes Wong’s miniatures, method,
and memories in the short film Forever,
Chinatown.
“All my miniatures are composites: It’s
half-wising and half-memory. That’s like
the movies,” artist Wong says in the film.
Wong grew up in San Francisco’s Old
Chinatown in the 1940s and 1950s, as part
of the city’s vibrant Chinese-American
enclave.
With his talent for set design and
prop-making, he moved to Hollywood to
work on television and film sets in Los
P
Angeles, and eventually Hawai‘i. Wong is
most renowned for his work on the 1980s
television series “Magnum P.I.,” which
was set in O’ahu.
Chan’s film opens with scenes of a busy
Chinatown street: a traditional herb shop
next to a hair salon flanked by clothing
retailers. Cranes lift exterior panelling to
towering condos. Across the way, laundry
hangs from rooftop clotheslines.
“I’m getting very forgetful at times. I
want to capture my memories,” says Wong.
“And the only way for me to capture my
memories is to make them in three
dimensions.”
Moving back to Old Chinatown inspired
Wong to create the miniature dioramas to
recapture the vibrant Chinese-American
community of his youth. Each miniature
derives elements from historical photo-
graphs, his memories, and creative
imagination.
While he may lament fading memories,
Wong’s creative imagination and impres-
sive manual dexterity have not diminished
in his golden years. Be prepared to salivate
over a Chinese stir-fry dish that Wong
“made” inside a take-out box that
measures only a couple of centimeters, but
looks like the real thing.
Beyond nostalgia for Old Chinatown,
Forever, Chinatown also confronts —
albeit briefly — the harsh reality of racism
and prejudice that created the nation’s
DELICATE DIORAMAS. Forever, Chinatown
tells the story of unknown, self-taught 81-year-old art-
ist Frank Wong, who has spent the past four decades
re-creating his fading memories by building romantic,
extraordinarily detailed miniature models of the San
Francisco Chinatown rooms of his youth. The short
film is streaming online from May 9 to June 6, 2017.
(Photos courtesy of the Center for Asian American
Media)
Chinatowns in the first place. Anti-immi-
grant — particularly anti-Chinese —
sentiment led to housing and labor
discrimination that prevented Chinese
Americans and immigrants from living
anywhere else.
The sense of community that developed
from the close-knit families and clans that
built ethnic enclaves nurtured pride in
heritage among artists like Wong. Amid
the rapidly changing landscapes of
traditional ethnic enclaves, Wong’s 3-D
memories provide quiet comfort to the
Chinese-American community’s enduring
resilience. There is hope his miniatures
serve to inspire others to carry on the work
of fighting to preserve fast-disappearing
places of heritage and history.
Forever, Chinatown is premiering
nationally May 8, 2017 on World
Channel’s Local, USA. The short film is
also streaming online free of charge
between May 9 and June 6, 2017. To learn
more, visit <www.caamedia.org>.
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