Arthur Dong’s Films Spotlight Asian American And Queer History
By Jasmine Lee Ehrhardt
When I was an impressionable 14-year-old, my mom’s side of the family went to an independent theater to see Arthur Dong’s Hollywood Chinese (2008). My family always made a point of seeing movies that featured prominent Asian actors — for example, I remember we watched Memoirs of a Geisha together (which was, understandably, a disappointment to all of us). But Dong’s work was different; it was a documentary, one of the first I’d seen.
Arthur Dong’s work as a filmmaker and historiographer has been central to my own understanding of Asian American cinema, labor, and identity. It took me a while to realize that all the great documentaries I’d been recommending to Chinese American friends — who, like me, were disappointed by the lack of Asian American representation in film and the perceived lack of Asian American filmmakers — were created by Arthur Dong. While Hollywood Chinese taught me that the film industry had not and might never truly support Chinese or Asian American artists or care about us as filmgoers, it also showed me that there was progress to be made while keeping an eye on the past. It gave me the historical framework I needed in order to understand what “whitewashing” means and why representation matters.
