Oh, man.

It's gorgeous.

"Generally, Chinese would ignore the issue."

Look at that.

"Certificate of identity for Chinese residents."

Again, I always say it's such a gift that people like writers, they are natural observers.

I mean, it definitely wouldn't have been on my radar let's just say that.

Like, I'm always so grateful that people take the time to tell these stories and how important they are.

Interviewer: Arthur, thanks for coming down with us tonight.

Arthur: Yeah, yeah, my pleasure.

It's my second home.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Yeah.

Why is that?

I mean, I see a lot of really cool stuff on the walls.

Arthur: Yeah.

Well, you know, I look around, and back in 2018, 2019, this was a mess.

It was under construction, and I was brought in, and the owner said, "You know, we'd like to honor the Chinese in Hollywood, that story here in this particular room."

I said, "Well, what a challenge this would be for this particular venue, for the Formosa Cafe."

I knew that I could only tell so much of the story before it gets lost.

My name's Arthur Dong.

I'm a filmmaker, curator, educator, writer.

My work focuses mainly on the LGBTQ community and Asian-American community, telling stories about their people and our history.

Paddy: Arthur Dong is an amazing, creative person.

Obviously, he's been a filmmaker for many years.

He also is this incredible historian about a culture that he lived, and so I really listened to him very, very carefully as he talked about the Chinese culture in film, and I realized here is a man who has been studying this since he was a little boy, and that's our perfect author.

Arthur: My career as a filmmaker has always been about social change, and what I've learned is to create social change and to really spur social change, you have to get all the tools you can get to tell the story of the Chinese in Hollywood and create some kind of change in terms of how we are represented and how we work in Hollywood.

With my movies, my exhibitions, and my live presentations, they all happen in real time, but with a book, it's something that you can take with you.

It's a real thing.

I mean, you can hold it, and that's what I love about books is that it's this tangible product that in which the story is being told to you under your control.

So I produced the film "Hollywood Chinese," and it was released in 2007.

With my research and my personal collection, I amassed a lot of stuff, a lot of archival material, ephemera, which all had to do with how the Chinese were constructed in terms of imagery in Hollywood films, so I thought this would just make a terrific book.

Nikki: And you ask why books are important.

Like, this is why, and, I mean--you can't engage in, like, this level of, I don't know, information staring at a computer, to just be able to do this and to look at it and what catches your eye.

Like, there's so many little details.

Aruthur: I think from the very beginning of cinema history in this country the Chinese image was less than positive.

It was definitely not respected and treated as foreign.

For "Hollywood Chinese," I wanted to make a coffee table book.

So much of the images in it says so much about how the Chinese image was constructed, and I wanted to give that luxury to a readership, to people who might be interested in studying these images further and to look at them further and try to understand, OK, what was MGM trying to do when they were marketing Luise Rainer as a Chinese peasant?

What was Fox--20th Century Fox doing when they were marketing and putting out these stills about Charlie Chan and the 40 films that Charlie Chan starred in?

Coffee table books for me means you can sit there at your table, flip through it, spend time with it, take a break, walk away, think about what you just absorbed in the imagery and text, and come back to it.

Nikki: You know, having books that tell stories about all of our experiences and how broad those experiences are, it's going to be more important now than ever because there is a whole subset of people in other states who won't even have access to these books because they can't be in their school library or their public library.

Why do they want to take these books away from us?

Why don't they want these stories to exist?

There must be something there, and what it is is our experience, our lived experiences, our storytelling, our history, our trauma, our joys.

To me, it's an effort to take away our humanity because if we can't tell our stories, you no longer see me as a person.

That's it.

Arthur: When I was introduced to Angel City Press, I found a kindred spirit in terms of telling stories, not being affected by money or the larger industries or the big Hollywood scene, but really looking at culture and story and how it's germane to L.A. and how do we bring out different aspects of neighborhoods and different stratas of culture and explore that in a book.

It's gratifying to know that, although the book was published a couple of years ago, we swept the Oscars with "Everything Everywhere All at Once," and we're a part of that conversation, and it's exciting, and I'm not sure how much the book has to do with anything that's happening today, but I'd like to see it as one of the chapters in this long continuum of a struggle of being a part of what we should be a part of, and that is this very important cultural institution called film.