Growing up, Baldwin Chiu read about segregation. He thought it only affected the Black community, but as he and his family followed their Chinese American roots to the Mississippi Delta, they discovered surprising family revelations and uncovered the racially complex history of Chinese immigrants in the segregated South.
Chinese people in Mississippi? We don’t usually associate the two. A new documentary, however, tells the gripping story of Chinese immigrants in the Deep South through one family’s history.
“City Lights” host Lois Reitzes was joined by the filmmakers of “Far East Deep South,‘ Larissa Lam and Baldwin Chiu. The film will premiere on the WORLD Channel documentary series “America ReFramed,” at 8 p.m. May 4.
Interview Highlights
What inspired the creation of the film:
“It wasn’t until the birth of my daughter when I saw how my father would hold her and realized that was the first time I saw in our immediate family a grandchild/grandfather relationship. I really started wondering ‘Hmm, why didn’t I ever have that relationship with my grandfather? Why didn’t I ever know him?’ That really prompted our desire to really find out where our family history and lineage came from,” said Chiu.
WORLD Channel, which shares the best of public media in news, documentaries and programming, will celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a series of featured documentary films in May sharing the culturally significant stories that represent the more than 20 million Asian or Pacific Islander Americans in the United States, according to the U.S. Census. The films will be broadcast on WORLD Channel and stream on WORLDChannel.org.