Wang keeps dishing up food, family
For nearly 40 years, back to the days of “Chan Is Missing,” Wayne Wang has been cinema’s poet laureate of San Francisco Asian American family, identity and, of course, food.
Who can forget the family dinner scene in “The Joy Luck Club,” his beloved classic from the 1990s? Or his delicate 1980s indie film “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart”? And then there is his 2014 documentary, “Soul of a Banquet,” about legendary Mandarin restaurant owner Cecilia Chiang.
So it’s no surprise that he was moved by Changrae Lee’s 1995 New Yorker essay “Coming Home Again,” about a Korean American son returning home to help care for his mother who is dying of stomach cancer. Through a shared love of food and its rituals, it is a story of family, impermanence and impending loss.
Part of the story concerns the son’s attempt to replicate his mother’s prized dish, kalbi, a Korean barbecued beef. So the opening shots of Wang’s adaptation of “Coming Home Again,” which opens the virtual portion of CAAMFest Forward on Friday, Oct. 16, show the raw meat on the bone delicately being sliced.
“In Chinese there’s a very wellknown saying that the bone and the meat represent the close ties between parents and children,” Wang said in a recent video chat with The Chronicle. “That’s a metaphor for the whole film.”
The minimalist drama, which Wang cowrote with Lee and which was coproduced by the Center for Asian American Media, unfolds over the quiet course of a day within the confines of an old, roomy apartment in San Francisco. It stars Justin Chon (“The Twilight Saga”) as the son and Jackie Chung ( an actress who has appeared in “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Station 19”) as the mother, and was photographed by San Francisco cinematographer and director Rich Wong (“Come as You Are”), a frequent Wang collaborator.
But a vital talent in the film’s production wasn’t a filmmaker at all, but celebrated Bay Area restaurateur Corey Lee, chefowner of the threestar Michelin restaurant Benu and two other restaurants. Wang, a longtime friend ( and customer) of Lee’s, tabbed him to create and supervise the film’s menu and cooking scenes and train the actors in cooking techniques.
“As a chef working in fine dining, I thought this could be a moment where I could put together some kind of food styling that would really be photogenic
and kind of this ode to Korean cuisine,” said Lee on the same video chat. “But I quickly realized after going into the apartment and rereading the essay, it can’t be that look. It needed to be true to Changrae’s story and Wayne’s vision.”
Ah, that apartment. It’s a classic.
In a sense, it’s a character in the film as well. If it feels lived in, that’s because it was. Coproducer Donald Young’s maternal grandmother, Edna Owyeong, had lived there since 1954 until her passing in 2017.
As the family was preparing to sell the property, Young suggested it as a location, and Wang loved it. Not just because it was about two blocks from where he lived, but also because it was much as Owyeong had left it, vintage furniture and all.
Of course, some things needed to be altered, as Owyeong was Chinese American, and Wang, also Chinese American, was telling a distinctly Korean American story. When Lee toured the residence, he had some suggestions.
“The first thing he said was the kitchen was too Chinese,” Wang recalled with a laugh. “Basically, he had to go in and make it more Korean. I kind of assumed that the Chinese kitchen and the Korean kitchen were basically very similar, but a lot of the sauces they use and even the pots and pans are kind of different.”
Lee, a Korean American who grew up with his mother’s home cooking, said there are “different tools” for Korean cooking.
“Basic things, ( from) the soy sauce and even salt to the pantry,” are different, Lee said. “So much of Korean cooking revolves around a stable of ingredients, whether they are perishable or fermented or dry.”
Lee spent 10 days prepping the kitchen and another week with the actors.
By the time the film was in production, Wang was in his element. His directorial style had long been influenced by Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, but thanks partly to the geography of the apartment and attention to detail, “Coming Home Again” might be his most identifiably Ozulike film yet.
“I worked with ( 20th Century) Fox for quite a few Hollywood feature films,” said Wang, who directed such films as “Maid in Manhattan” with Jennifer Lopez and “Last Holiday” with Queen Latifah. “The executives were always coming by to say if there’s a moment in the film where people are not saying anything and it doesn’t mean anything, cut it out. But when you cut those out, the film doesn’t breathe. It just keeps pushing you, pushing you, and you’re not looking at the image trying to understand what it’s all about.
“For example, in this film, when somebody opens a refrigerator door, the things inside the refrigerator are very specific, culturally. That’s something that’s been important through my whole career: understanding what the emptiness and the duration of the shot do to the film.”
Wang cited a Japanese philosophy, mono no aware, which he says is “a view of life, where you accept how everything passes.” Something to think about as this pandemic world eventually crosses into a postpandemic phase.
“The whole thing about accepting cancer, and being sick,” he said, “accepting life and death, accepting changes in the world — that’s what the film is about.”