Bluff City Chinese

I have always contended with the consequences of not sharing my true thoughts. Growing up in Memphis, a populous city in the American South as a queer child of Asian immigrants, I often felt the weight of encroaching erasure—an unspoken void where my story, and the stories of those who came before me, seemed absent from a larger narrative. Bluff City Chinese is more than a film; it's a deeply personal journey to recover the untold stories of Chinese immigrants in Memphis, my hometown. This film is my attempt to fill that void, to provide my inner child much-needed closure: that it is valid and important to use my voice, to share my thoughts and lived experiences. In fact, it is necessary for us as a society to allow this to happen collectively and broadly across identity groups.

In 2020 I returned to Memphis during the pandemic after living abroad for many years, where I met Emerald Dunn, a Delta Chinese elder whose independent research unearthed fragments of a rich but hidden past. Together, we embarked on this collaborative journey, guided by a shared urgency to reclaim and preserve the voices of a community long overlooked. As a young person in Memphis, I yearned to grapple with issues of identity within the Asian community but didn't know how; the anti-queerness, anti-Blackness, xenophobia and other survival techniques we inherited from the trauma of immigration made me feel more alienated from my surroundings. I did not realize that this conversation was possible in my hometown because I did not know that there were generations of Asian diasporic people in Memphis who have been grappling with these questions for over a century. The process of reconstructing this narrative has been layered and challenging, involving everything from oral histories to archival research, but it has also been profoundly transformative.

Bluff City Chinese is ultimately a tribute to community—and all the contradictions and tensions that come with it. Creatively, my goal was to weave a tapestry that bridges generations, reflecting the intergenerational bond that Emerald and I have forged along the way. The film's aesthetic draws on my background in design and storytelling to invite audiences into spaces of memory and into the homes of Memphians who have carried these stories across generations. It's a Memphis-made film that celebrates the power of storytelling to bridge divides, foster understanding, and create a sense of belonging. My hope is that audiences leave inspired to not only preserve their own histories but to consider how their stories intersect with others in the collective pursuit of justice, identity, and unity.