How fictional 1970s New York Chinatown detective Jack Yu finally made it to the big screen
- Henry Chang’s Detective Yu stories are set in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s and reflect the violence of the times
- 25 years later, they are being made into a short film, A Father’s Son, starring Ronny Chieng
In the 1970s, New York’s Chinatown was beset by immigrant gangs, crime, drugs and prostitution. A community of residents originating from Taishan, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, lived in that small corner of Manhattan, coping with the mayhem, caught up in the violence and trying to keep their heads down.
“The ’70s were the most violent times in Chinatown history,” says author Henry Chang, who portrayed the era in his novels about fictional New York Police Department detective Jack Yu. His books were the inspiration for a short film titled A Father’s Son, which is set to premiere in May.
At the time, he says, media coverage of crime in the neighbourhood was shallow and one-dimensional. “All we were getting were these tabloid headlines.”
There were Chinese-language newspapers that understood Chinatown better than their English-language counterparts, but Chang says they had to be careful. Gangs would not hesitate to hit back at critical journalists.
An English major at the City College of New York, Chang took a different approach. He began writing 10-page vignettes of the goings-on in Chinatown. “I would go to college and come back to the neighbourhood at the end of the day to find out which gangs fought and who shot who,” he says.
