Wong Sinsaang

by
Eddie Wong
Visual Communications
1971
12 mins

Wong Sinsaang s a lyrical portrait of the filmmaker’s father, a proprietor of a dry-cleaning business in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood.

…jump-starts a discussion about the joys and hardships of living in America.
Joshua Glick
Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977

Synopsis

Wong Sinsaang is a lyrical portrait of the filmmaker’s father, a proprietor of a dry cleaning business in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood. The filmmaker’s attempt to understand his father’s life and those who immigrated to America in search of a better life are contrasted with a study of the grinding lifestyle of the dry cleaner’s everyday life. The film juxtaposes stark glimpses of the laundromat as obnoxious white customers subject Mr. Wong to daily humiliation and dehumanization, against serene scenes of Mr. Wong practicing tai-chi outdoors. The director’s own confusion over his own father’s seeming subservience gives way to a realization that his father has much larger dreams for himself and his family.

Wong Sinsaang was written and directed by Eddie Wong while a film student at UCLA’s Ethnocommunications Program, and is one of the first productions to be distributed under the “Visual Communications” banner. Wong, one of the four co-founders of Visual Communications, would later produce such classics as Chinatown 2-Step and Piece of a Dream.

Director Commentary

WONG SINSAANG was my first production. I picked the topic that I felt I needed to do, and that was to try to reconcile my own feelings about my father, who was a Chinese laundryman. At the time, I had just finished reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I began to understand a little bit more about what’s discussed as ‘colonial relations,’ where people who are colonized relate to their parents in a very stilted manner. They see them through the eyes of their oppressors. And in this case, [it was] my father, who I saw as someone who was subservient most of his life, having to deal with White customers who would often be verbally abusive. And so I literally saw [my] film as someone re-examining his relationship with his own father, and trying to explain that this person — beyond the stereotype — had a whole other life that most people would never see.

— Excerpted from an interview conducted by Arthur Dong, August, 1990

Features and Languages

Film Features

  • Closed Captioning

Promotional Material

Promotional Stills

Black-and-white still from the film “Wong Sinsaang” depicts Mr. Wong, a Chinese man in his 50s or 60s. He wears glasses as he leans over a desk, a pen in his hand hovering over a blank page. The desk is cluttered with stacks of paper and books written in Chinese. A piece of paper with handwritten grammatical phrases in English hangs from a lamp in the foreground. One of the phrases reads, “He, she, it was / They were.”
Black-and-white still from the film “Wong Sinsaang” depicts Mr. Wong, a Chinese man in his 50s or 60s. He sits inside his shop at a large table, writing on a piece of paper. Painted letters on the window behind him read, “Frank Wong, Laundry and Dry Cleaners.” Paper-wrapped packages of all sizes sit on shelves along the wall and large bags sit on the floor. Tickets hang from clothespins on a line suspended above the table.
Black-and-white still from the film “Wong Sinsaang” depicts Mr. Wong, a Chinese man in his 50s or 60s. He wears glasses and looks down to the right. Behind him, rows of drycleaned clothes wrapped in plastic hang on racks.
Poster for the film “Wong Sinsaang” depicts a black-and-white photograph of Mr. Wong, a Chinese man in his 50s or 60s. He wears glasses and looks down to the right. The title of the film appears in white letters at the top of the poster. Various credits appear at the bottom, including text reading, “A documentary film by Eddie Wong.”

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