ADVERTISEMENT

    Slice of Asian American History Comes to Columbus

    One day after the birth of his daughter, Baldwin Chiu realized he wanted to know more about his family history. The feature film that resulted from Chiu’s realization will screen in Columbus this weekend.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    “It started off with me having a daughter,” Chiu remembers. “My dad was holding her in the hospital, and I was just watching and thinking, ‘Huh, I never had this experience before because I never had a grandfather.’ My father grew up without a father. I grew up, obviously then, without a grandfather.”

    Chiu says his father had always been reluctant to talk about it. He remembered hearing that his grandfather had lived in the Deep South, and he and his brother Edwin decided to gather the whole family and head to Cleveland, Mississippi.

    “At first we thought, well, maybe our family was an anomaly,” Chiu says. “We thought: We’ll just go there and look around town and maybe we’ll find a cemetery and probably find one gravestone with a Chinese name on it and that’s it. Turned out, there was a whole population of Chinese and a large history starting from the late 1800s in that area. We started meeting people. We found a museum.”

    The Chiu family visited the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum in Cleveland, where they learned a great deal.

    “And, you know, if there’s a museum in your city, it must have been some sort of significance to it, right?” he remembers. “But that just sparked more questions.”

    (L-R) Rebecca Chiu and Charles Chiu in Far East Deep South read about surprising new details about Charles’ family inside The National Archives at San Francisco.
    (L-R) Rebecca Chiu and Charles Chiu in Far East Deep South read about surprising new details about Charles’ family inside The National Archives at San Francisco.

    It was about this time that Chiu’s wife, Larissa Lam, decided they needed to document their journey. She turned the original footage into the award-winning short film Finding Cleveland. With its success, the family decided that a feature length discovery was in order. That feature length documentary, Far East Deep South, comes to Columbus on Saturday, April 15 thanks to The Ohio State University.

    “We were very, very happy to see that people were interested in the story. We weren’t sure,” he says. “That’s why we did the short film. We thought maybe people won’t care about Chinese people that show up in Mississippi. Turned out a lot of people were interested in that history. And if we can see that we were a part of history, then we can see that we can be a part of the future of America, too.”

    Chiu was motivated to share that history.

    “Our goal from the beginning was education first, because it was so important to us and we thought that it’d be very important for our daughter and her generation and the generations to come to understand this part of American history,” he says. “This wasn’t just a history of a certain group of people. It was history about an entire community made up of multiethnic groups, white, Black, Asian, even Hispanic and some Middle Eastern Lebanese. This understanding that the Deep South actually had this rich, diverse history was something we never grew up with.

    “Growing up, I’ve always been told that we had no history, or that our history may not even matter. It was only maybe railroads and gold mines and California. So, we always thought our stories were insignificant. I thought I wasn’t even a part of American history. We hope that our film would end up inspiring other people to tell their stories, to look for their stories.”

    (L-R) Edwin Chiu, Charles Chiu, Caliya Chiu and Baldwin Chiu in Far East Deep South pay their respects to Charles’ father, KC Lou, and his grandfather, Chas J. Lou at the New Cleveland Cemetery in Cleveland, MS.
    (L-R) Edwin Chiu, Charles Chiu, Caliya Chiu and Baldwin Chiu in Far East Deep South pay their respects to Charles’ father, KC Lou, and his grandfather, Chas J. Lou at the New Cleveland Cemetery in Cleveland, MS.

    That inspiration is what compels Chiu to tour with the film and to make it available for screenings in schools – not just universities, but high schools and middle schools as well.

    “We know that there are underfunded schools, especially at the junior high and high school level,” he says. “If you go to fareastdeepsouth.com, we have a thing called the First Class Initiative where we’ve received donations from supporters to be able to make a grant so that schools can just apply. We’d love to invite people to check that out, bring the film into their local junior high and high schools.”

    Why does Chiu believe that sharing his family’s history is so important?

    “I think in the Asian community we have this problem where we feel perpetually foreign, yet there’s over 400 years of Asian American history in America,” says Chiu. “And most people don’t know that. Asians have been in this country for over 400 years, yet we feel like we’re still new immigrants. I really didn’t want my daughter growing up in that atmosphere. I don’t want your children or other people’s children to grow up in an atmosphere where they look at each other and say, ‘You’re not from here. You shouldn’t be here. You don’t belong here.’ We really want that to change.”

    Far East Deep South will screen at 7:30 pm on Saturday, April 15, at the Hyatt Regency Columbus. A reception will be held at 6:45 in the hotel’s McKinley room before the screening in the Hayes room. A post-screening Q&A with Chiu will be moderated by Melvis Barnes, Jr., a PhD in East Asian History. The event is free to the public.

    For more information, visit easc.osu.edu.

    All stills provided by the filmmakers

    ADVERTISEMENT

    Subscribe

    More to Explore:

    Cinema Columbus Returns to Venues Across CBUS

    Cinema Columbus returns to local theaters beginning Wednesday, April...

    Loads of Spooky Goodness for March

    So much spookiness to choose from this week: family-friendly,...

    Concert Preview: Sleater-Kinney at Newport Music Hall

    Little Rope is the 11th studio album from veteran...

    Beat Bazaar Creates New Space for Columbus Producers

    On February 23, The Kutt Record shop filled with...

    Good Looking Batch of New Movies

    You will find an excellent crop of new movies...
    Hope Madden
    Hope Maddenhttps://columbusunderground.com
    Hope Madden is a freelance contributor on Columbus Underground who covers the independent film scene, writes film reviews and previews film events.
    ADVERTISEMENT