Although the immigrant history of the Chinese in America has often been obscured and misunderstood, this short but effective documentary cobbles together a rich photographic history of that immigrant community going back to the early 1900s in San Francisco’s vibrant Chinatown. Art student Wylie Wong uncovered nearly 700 old photographs of Chinatown life originally taken by May’s Photo Studio, which had been owned by Leo and Isabella May Chan Lee. These extraordinary images featured throughout this half-hour short film show a Chinese immigrant community coming into its own and celebrating its rich culture despite decades of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, most blatantly expressed through laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which for the next 61 years meant that Chinese migrant workers were not allowed to bring their families with them to America. And once China became a Communist country in 1949, Chinese immigrants then had to deal with the stigma of being political subversives: as we learn in the film, every Chinese immigrant in the US had to carry a special identity card (something like a prototype of the “green card”) to work and travel.
Vanishing Chinatown also uses the May stills to usher the viewer into larger, fantastical world of Chinese opera, which first hit US shores in 1852. For San Francisco’s Chinatown, these lavish costume-drama musicals had the feel of escapist pantomime but also functioned as an informative news source: the acting troupe would often re-create, for instance, scenarios onstage that reflected current political events or social upheavals in China as a way of keeping Chinese expats updated on what’s happening in their home country. So it’s in this sense that Vanishing Chinatown is able to pack so much Chinese immigrant history into its short 30-minute framework, carefully choosing evocative images from the May’s Photo Studio collection, photos that serve as an educational visual portal into a long-lost but still-fascinating migrant world. If a photo is worth a thousand words, then surely these striking images from the May collection must be worth even more. Recommended. Aud: C, P.