This film began as a personal journey to search for our family roots so that my daughter would know from where she came. Being of Chinese ancestry, my original thought was that this journey would take us to the Far East to some remote village in China. Instead, it took us to the Deep South and the Mississippi Delta.
We thought we were taking a family vacation to simply find my grandfather and great grandfather’s gravesite. Before we knew it, we began to uncover not only the history of our family, but also that of the early Chinese American settlers: an entire community caught between the black and white population. In addition to them dealing with the obvious racism, segregation, loneliness, depression, and financial burdens, they had to do it during a time when Congress enacted the only act in American history that explicitly targeted a specific race; The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
But this story is more than a story of struggle and injustice. We discovered how this community of people found redemption and created new families among strangers; how being caught between Black and white created a bridge for everyone. An important symbiotic relationship developed between the African-American and Chinese-American communities in the South. Both were shut out of white communities and needed one another to sustain themselves. They overcame enormous challenges so that our generation today can experience everything that our ancestors could only dream about.
I hope you will be inspired by our story and that it will cause you to expand how you think about American history and what it means to be an American. I hope that when future generations learn about the American South, they will know that there was more to the story than just black and white.
Baldwin Chiu
Producer
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