Women Texas Film Festival reviews: Larissa Lam’s FAR EAST DEEP SOUTH gives an entertainng and unexpected history lesson

I jumped at the chance to review Far East Deep South, which won the Best Feature Film Award at the Women Texas Film Festival, partly because I’ve been sorely missing the cancelled Asian Film Festival of Dallas this summer. The documentary is directed by Chinese-American singer/filmmaker Larissa Lam, and she had brought her short film, Finding Cleveland, to the festival in July 2016. Plus, pandemic binge-watching of Finding Your Roots on PBS has made me curious about genealogy.

Far East Deep South is an enjoyable documentary that follows the journey of two brothers, Baldwin and Edwin Chiu, who seek to know more about their dad’s family history. But their father Charles immigrated from China to California at age 14 with his grandmother and didn’t know much about his father at all. Surprisingly, the place where the family needs to go is a small town in the Mississippi Delta because the grandfather and his father are buried there.

Charles is reluctant to make the trip, but his wife encourages everyone to go together. They first visit Cleveland, Mississippi, where they were invited to visit Delta State University to see a museum exhibit on the history of Chinese immigrants in the area. The curator Emily Jones helpfully recognizes the name K.C. Lou and manages to dig out a priceless personal artifact of his to show the family.

Next the family travels to Pace, Mississippi, the town where Charles’ father K.C. Lou and his father Charles Lou owned a grocery store. They didn’t even know the name of the store, but they were able to visit the grassy lot where it once stood.

The film’s emotional core is Charles Chiu, the father of the brothers. Growing up without a dad affected Charles more deeply than his family realized. But perhaps not surprisingly, word quickly spread in town about the Chinese-American visitors, and longtime residents and local officials flock to the Chius to share fond recollections of K.C. Lou, Charles’ father. The current mayor of Pace comes to meet the Chius and lets them know that the grocery store was a critical lifeline to the community during the Depression because the Lous were willing to extend credit to their struggling customers and neighbors. The family leaves Mississippi with a much deeper understanding of their ancestors’ role in the predominantly black community and how beloved they were.

The film deftly demonstrates the devastating personal consequences of one of the most unjust and discriminatory laws in U.S. history, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Several historians helpfully provide historical context and explain that after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, plantation owners in the deep south recruited men from China to work the fields as laborers.

Within a few years, many of the Chinese laborers opened grocery stores in the rural southern towns where they lived. Chinese men were prohibited from marrying women of other races due to anti-miscegenation laws, so they had few options. And due to the Chinese Exclusion Act,

Chinese women could not immigrate to the United States. So in order to marry, the Chinese men typically had to return to China to marry and start families. This resulted in separated families when the men would return to the U.S. to work to earn money. Charles Chiu grew up in China with his mother while his father worked in Pace, Mississippi.

The documentary is a well-crafted look at the personal impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other shameful laws through the experience of one Chinese-American family. The Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943, and many restrictions stayed in place until 1965. The historical roots of many issues we face in American society presently are discussed in the film, ranging from segregation, race relations, and equity in education. At one moment in the film Baldwin Chiu makes the point that in school he never learned anything about the discriminatory laws that affected Chinese-Americans and other minority groups. That is reason enough to watch Far East Deep South. These are history lessons that all Americans need to know, plus it’s a compelling and entertaining telling of one family’s American story.