Editing Chan Is Missing (section)

==Themes and analysis==
'''Chinese America and absence'''

The absence, ambiguity, and lack of definite character in the film are central themes in ''Chan Is Missing'', and reflect how the film takes on the challenge of being an early Chinese/Asian American feature narrative. ''Chan Is Missing'' is able to use the absence of Chan to fill that space with a series of a broad and complicated portrait of San Francisco's Chinese American community. According to Diane Mei Lin Mark, who wrote the framing essay for the movie's published screenplay, "this very presentation of diversity among Chinese American characters in a film is a concept largely untested in American movies."<ref name="Wang, Wayne"/> The diversity is addressed in the film in at least two ways. First, there is Chan himself, who every character seems to have a different impression of. In a voiceover monologue at the end of the film, Jo explains, "Steve thinks that Chan Hung is slow-witted, but sly when it comes to money. Jenny thinks that her father is honest and trustworthy. Mrs. Chan thinks her husband is a failure because he isn't rich. Amy thinks he's a hard-headed political activist...Presco thinks he's an eccentric who likes mariachi music."<ref name="Wang, Wayne"/> Chan, it would seem, is meant to stand in for the Chinese American community as a whole.

Second, there is also an eclectic cast of other Chinese American characters that Steve and Jo encounter while looking for Chan. That includes Henry, the cook, who wears a Samurai Night Fever T-shirt while singing "Fry Me to the Moon" as he stir-fries in the kitchen. Both Chan and the film's characters suggest that Chinese America, is also impossible to easily summarize or characterize.

Film scholar Peter Feng suggests that ''Chan Is Missing'' can be understood via the metaphor of a doughnut: "Each character...holds a doughnut that contains the possibilities of for Chinese American identity in its center. Each of the film's characters only serve to widen that hole, thus widening the space for spectatorial subjectivity and by extension, Asian American subjectivity."<ref name="Feng"/>
[[File:CHANISMISSING1981SF.tif|thumb|Wayne Wang discusses a scene with Wood Moy (Jo), Peter Wang (Henry) and Marc Hayashi (Steve).]]
[[File:Chan is missing t shirt, 1982.jpg|thumb|Cast/Crew t-shirt after making 1982 film.]]
'''Sound and language'''

Sound is strategically deployed throughout the film to enhance the atmosphere. As Jo begins to suspect that Chan might be involved in a murder cover-up, Jo's paranoia is echoed through an explicitly ominous score. There is also a scene where Jo and Steve go to the Manilatown Center, and during their conversation with a Center employee (Presco), the camera moves from the men to focusing on a loudspeaker and loud, ambient noise in the scene obscures their conversation. This un-joining of the speaker and subject leaves the viewer disoriented, which only adds to the general mystery of the film and its plot. A similar scene happens when Jo speaks with Chan's wife and her home and loud music is also used to obscure their conversation.

In the original theatrical version of ''Chan Is Missing'', there are no subtitles provided for scenes where characters are either speaking in Mandarin or Cantonese. This is a common technique in Wang's film. As he told an interviewer regarding his 2008 film, ''[[A Thousand Years of Good Prayers]]'', "I didn’t want subtitles because the audience should experience what those two are experiencing and not have any more information. Yet you could still understand. Sometimes the specifics of a language are not as important as the music of the language and the body language of the language.'<ref>{{cite web|last1=Esther|first1=John|title=EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: WAYNE WANG|url=http://jestherent.blogspot.com/2008/10/interview-wayne-wang.html|website=Jesther Entertainment|access-date=3 October 2015}}</ref>