Chinese Couplets: A Documentary on Acculturation anc the Children of Immigrants

From Felicia Lowe:

Follow my quest to unravel the mystery surrounding my mother’s emigration from China, the web of secrecy underlying her acculturation and unflagging pursuit of the American Dream and its repercussions on four generations of women.

It was the surprising revelation of a secret my mother disclosed to my daughter Alana that triggered my years-long search for answers about my mother’s life before she became my mother. My quest would take me to Cuba, China and the National Archives. Mother’s odyssey to America in 1937 illuminates the lengths to which families went to circumvent exclusion laws, the economic privation that drove my grandfather to Latin America, and the repercussions it had on four generations of my Chinese, then Chinese American family.

The phrase, “Chinese couplets” refers to two complementary lines of verse.  Each line reflects and informs the other, like mothers and daughters, the past and the present, the political and the personal – dualities that permeate my Chinese Couplets documentary.

This is not only my story, it is our story, we descendants of “paper sons and daughters,” children of immigrants, an American story.  I’m committed to restoring a history that has been erased, ignored or forgotten from the official record and the nation’s shared memory.

Chinese Couplets reveals the complex and contradictory nature of our national character, an America that embraces and welcomes immigrants, while at the same time being xenophobic and exclusionary to successive waves of ethnic and racial newcomers. Read more about this project and view a video here.

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