Screenplays of “The Cook from Canton” and “The Expulsion” (2021, 2022)
How I came to write two screenplays. For more information, please get in touch with me:
I teach a graduate seminar course at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on the history of Chinese contract laborers and other indentured groups in the United States and other regions of the Americas. (Indentured labor of course reached across the globe, not just the Americas). It is a popular course that draws in students from across many Schools of the University. I developed the course due to the topic’s salience to the history of the United States yet one that is deeply underrepresented and acknowledged.
The pandemic started during the time I taught the course. Soon after, some of my ethnically Asian students experienced anti-Asian abuse and threats, something I also experienced while loading groceries into the trunk of my car in a supermarket parking lot! The content of the seminar resonated in real time and space for many of my students for unfortunate reasons.
As the pandemic progressed, a student asked me whether there exists a feature-length film centered on Chinese contract laborers in constructing 19th-century America. I could only think of the sporadic scenes in Western genre movies where Chinese workers appear in the background such as in Once Upon a Time in the West and McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
As all classes at the University turned to remote teaching, I found that I had to readjust myself to the new sense of time and space. I decided to write a screenplay about 19th-century Chinese immigrants. I had never written a screenplay before. I did not aspire to Hollywood. I was content being a contemporary visual artist. When I started, I had no idea there was such a tool as screenwriting software. My initial draft was written with the aid of a whiteboard with dozens of Post-It Notes. I downloaded two Robert Altman screenplays, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, as well as the screenplays for Godfather 2 and Dr. Strangelove. If I had to name favorite movies, Sunrise by F.W. Murnau, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums by Kenji Mizoguchi, Pather Panchali by Satyatjit Ray, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, All That Heaven Allows by Douglas Sirk, The Rider by Chloe Zhao comes to mind. There are many others, of course.
The Cook was inspired by a visit several decades ago to the Hell’s Gate Canyon section of the Fraser River several hours northeast of Vancouver, Canada. I remember a plaque next to an old iron stove that told of “Johnny,” a popular Chinese chef whose prowess for cooking was so admired by rival mining camps that he was kidnapped to cook for a competitor camp. When I started to teach my seminar class, it was as though a circle was closing between my visit to Hell’s Gate to my teaching in an Ivy League university. I grew up on the edge of Vancouver Chinatown during a time when the Chinese and other ethnic and racial groups by and large stayed ensconced in a confined part of Vancouver. The elementary school I attended was Admiral Seymour Elementary School, named after Edward Hobart Seymour, who was a key figure in the Battle of Canton during the 2nd Opium War. A large minority of the students in the school were Cantonese Chinese. It was not until I grew up that understood the problematic name of the school. The name of the school remains the same today. The Cook has links to this belated realization of the vital yet overlooked role of Chinese and other indentured laborers in the construction of the contemporary world.
Here is a brief synopsis of The Cook from Canton, followed by opening pages. Following this excerpt are pages excerpted from the 2nd script.
THE COOK FROM CANTON:
THREE YEARS AFTER THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR, THE UNION OF THE NATION HAS BEEN PRESERVED AND THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY FORMALLY ABOLISHED. RAILWAY AND MINING COMPANIES ARE IMPORTING INDENTURED CHINESE LABOURERS OR “COOLIES” TO THE UNITED STATES IN THE NEW POST-ABOLITIONIST ERA. JOEL SCOTT, LEADS A WAGON TRAIN HAULING MINING EQUIPMENT AND CHINESE LABORERS FROM ASTORIA, OREGON, TO THE GOLD FIELDS OF IDAHO BY WAY OF THE NASCENT OREGON TRAIL. THE STORY CENTERS AROUND NINE DAYS IN THE LIFE OF CHUNG, A TEENAGE BOY FROM SOUTHERN CHINA, WHO IS HIRED TO COOK FOR JOEL’S UNIT. CHUNG’S REPUTATION AS A COOK SOON PRECEDES HIM AND HE IS KIDNAPPED BY A RIVAL HAULING COMPANY.
Here are the opening pages.
Opening pages of The Expulsion :
