Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Mississippi: Finding Far East in the Deep South (with Larrisa Lam) | Episode 99

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Mississippi: Finding Far East in the Deep South (with Larrisa Lam) | Episode 99 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Larissa Lam: I remember when we got married, and if you know anything about Chinese weddings, you like literally have to invite like everybody and your aunt, your uncle, your mother, your you know, your cousin, like you never met.
• 0:10
  Larissa Lam: So when we were coming up with the guest list, I asked him, I said, hey, is there anybody on your father's side that you want to invite to the wedding?
• 0:17
  Larissa Lam: And he said, no.
• 0:18
  Larissa Lam: I was like, what?
• 0:20
  Larissa Lam: Are you serious?
• 0:21
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:29
  Crista Cowan: I'm Krista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:33
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 0:44
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:53
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 0:59
  Crista Cowan: When you think of large populations of Chinese immigrants in the United States, you might think of places like New York or San Francisco with their Chinatowns.
• 1:10
  Crista Cowan: You probably don't think of Mississippi.
• 1:14
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Larissa Lamb.
• 1:17
  Crista Cowan: She is a music executive and a singer and a songwriter, so she's been involved in the entertainment industry for her whole career.
• 1:24
  Crista Cowan: But a family trip with her husband and his father to Mississippi to learn more about their family story and background turned into her first foray into filmmaking.
• 1:39
  Crista Cowan: At the time, she was just filming the family trip for their own family memories, but several subsequent visits turned into a really beautiful documentary called Far East Deep South, all about her Chinese father-in-law's surprising connections to an entire community in Mississippi.
• 2:01
  Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Larissa Lamb.
• 2:04
  Crista Cowan: Larissa, I'm so excited you're here.
• 2:06
  Crista Cowan: I'm excited to have this conversation with you.
• 2:09
  Crista Cowan: I'm loving the movie.
• 2:11
  Crista Cowan: I've made it about two-thirds of the way through, and I was hoping to finish it before we talked, but my producers already told me that there's a zinger at the end, and uh she spoiled it for me so that we could have this conversation.
• 2:23
  Crista Cowan: But um I'm excited to go finish that tonight.
• 2:26
  Crista Cowan: So I would love for you to just tell me a little bit about yourself and and your career and your family, um, and you know, what happened before you got into this project.
• 2:37
  Larissa Lam: Well, um, I actually was in the music industry for many, many years.
• 2:41
  Larissa Lam: Um I started out as uh an executive at a record label and then became a music artist, um songwriter, and I'd written music for film and television.
• 2:50
  Larissa Lam: I even hosted a talk show um at one point.
• 2:53
  Larissa Lam: Uh so I actually was not a documentary filmmaker before this whole journey happened.
• 2:58
  Larissa Lam: But 11 years ago, um, I went on a fateful trip to Mississippi with my husband and his family.
• 3:05
  Larissa Lam: And I had grown up in California all my life.
• 3:08
  Larissa Lam: I'd never been in Mississippi.
• 3:10
  Larissa Lam: And we went to go visit his grand, my husband's grandfather and great-grandfather's grave site.
• 3:15
  Larissa Lam: And I thought we would put some flowers on the grave, go back to California and never go back.
• 3:20
  Larissa Lam: And what ended up happening is what if unfolds in Far East, Deep South, our documentary, because the way things unfolded, one from the family discoveries and the history that my husband and my father-in-law, Charles, never knew about the about their family, um, was kind of amazing.
• 3:37
  Larissa Lam: And then on top of that, the history of the Chinese in Mississippi and even the United States that we don't really learn about in school was something that also struck me.
• 3:47
  Larissa Lam: And that's why I was compelled to make a movie and ended up coming into a whole new career as a documentary filmmaker and genealogist and historic public historian.
• 3:57
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, you all have to kind of put it all together to get something like this created for sure.
• 4:01
  Crista Cowan: Now, Mississippian Chinese, that's not something you usually hear put together, but you grew up in Southern California where there's a lot of diversity, a lot of different cultures in a lot of those communities.
• 4:14
  Crista Cowan: And so that phrase, you know, where are you really from?
• 4:17
  Crista Cowan: Um, was that something you grew up hearing or something that, you know, happened to your husband as well in his experience?
• 4:25
  Larissa Lam: Absolutely.
• 4:26
  Larissa Lam: Um, it's something for many of us who are of Asian descent.
• 4:30
  Larissa Lam: And I would even extend that to being something where a lot of our Latino, you know, Latina brothers and sisters also experience that where someone with an Asian face or someone who is uh maybe brown, if you know your Middle Eastern Arab heritage, people's assumption is, oh, you must be a new immigrant.
• 4:47
  Larissa Lam: You must not be from here.
• 4:49
  Larissa Lam: And so I used to travel extensively with a singing group and even as a as a as a solo touring artist.
• 4:55
  Larissa Lam: And a common question I would get is, where are you from?
• 4:58
  Larissa Lam: And of course I'd say, uh, I'm from LA.
• 5:00
  Larissa Lam: You know, I was born and raised in Southern California.
• 5:03
  Larissa Lam: And then they go, No, no, no, no, you know, where are you really from?
• 5:07
  Larissa Lam: And then I said, Well, I'm from this little town called Diamond Bar.
• 5:09
  Larissa Lam: You may not have heard of it.
• 5:10
  Larissa Lam: It's outside of LA.
• 5:11
  Larissa Lam: No, no, no, where are you really, really from?
• 5:14
  Larissa Lam: And I and what they would mean is, like, well, where's my family from, my parents?
• 5:19
  Larissa Lam: And they made the assumption that my parents were from another country.
• 5:22
  Larissa Lam: In my case, it was actually true.
• 5:24
  Larissa Lam: My parents were immigrants.
• 5:26
  Larissa Lam: They were born in China, they were born in Shanghai, and then went over to Hong Kong and then eventually came over to the United States as graduate students.
• 5:33
  Larissa Lam: But the fact that they assumed that I also was not born here was, you know, in some ways, I wasn't clear at the time that it was kind of a racist remark.
• 5:45
  Larissa Lam: But but I, you know, I think of it more as racial bias, because I think sometimes when we say, like, oh, that's racist, like it, you know, people aren't trying to be harmful.
• 5:55
  Larissa Lam: They're not trying to insult me, but it's just people's biases and subconscious assumptions.
• 6:00
  Larissa Lam: Whereas someone with a European heritage background who's, you know, white presenting may not get that same question.
• 6:06
  Larissa Lam: If somebody gets asked, like, you know, who's white, hey, where are you for really from?
• 6:10
  Larissa Lam: And you say, like, Cleveland, Ohio, like nobody blinks an eye.
• 6:14
  Larissa Lam: You know, what if I say in my in my in my uh husband's family's case, as we discovered in the film, they say Cleveland, not Ohio, but Cleveland, Mississippi, then people go like, no, no, where are you really from?
• 6:24
  Larissa Lam: And it turns out that my husband's heritage actually stretches back not just to China, but to Cleveland, Cleveland, Mississippi.
• 6:32
  Crista Cowan: So amazing.
• 6:32
  Crista Cowan: So uh tell me just a little bit about uh your husband.
• 6:36
  Crista Cowan: Like how did the two of you meet?
• 6:37
  Crista Cowan: How long have you been together?
• 6:38
  Crista Cowan: Um, you know, did you know anything about his family before you started on this journey?
• 6:44
  Larissa Lam: Let's see how much time we have now.
• 6:46
  Larissa Lam: Just kidding.
• 6:46
  Larissa Lam: Yeah.
• 6:47
  Larissa Lam: Uh there's a he said and a she said version.
• 6:50
  Larissa Lam: So you get my version.
• 6:51
  Larissa Lam: I love that.
• 6:52
  Larissa Lam: So my husband Baldwin, um, who is the subject uh and his family of Far East Deep South.
• 6:57
  Larissa Lam: Um, he's from, he was uh born and raised in um San Francisco and then Sacramento, is where he spent a lot of his uh formative years in school.
• 7:06
  Larissa Lam: And so he's a Northern California boy.
• 7:08
  Larissa Lam: I'm a Southern California girl.
• 7:10
  Larissa Lam: Uh, we are both of Chinese heritage.
• 7:12
  Larissa Lam: And uh long story short, we have some friends who kind of sort of introduced us.
• 7:18
  Larissa Lam: He's a rapper, actually.
• 7:19
  Larissa Lam: Before he went into producing films about it, this uh Asian American history, um, he was a mechanical engineer who also rapped about dim sum and thermodynamics.
• 7:29
  Larissa Lam: So he's he uh goes by the moniker only one, uh only W-O-N.
• 7:34
  Larissa Lam: And so you can find some of his music videos that are very clever and funny on on YouTube.
• 7:39
  Larissa Lam: And I was a singer, a singer songwriter.
• 7:41
  Larissa Lam: And so, you know, sometimes people go like, hey, here's a Chinese American rapper.
• 7:45
  Larissa Lam: You're a Chinese American singer.
• 7:47
  Larissa Lam: Maybe you guys should get together.
• 7:48
  Larissa Lam: And a lot of times, like it just it like doesn't always work just because it sounds good.
• 7:53
  Larissa Lam: But in our case, it actually ended up d working out.
• 7:56
  Larissa Lam: And uh people jokingly call us the Asian Jay-Z and Beyonce.
• 8:00
  Larissa Lam: That's amazing.
• 8:02
  Larissa Lam: And how long have you been together?
• 8:04
  Larissa Lam: Uh, we've been married 17 years, and we have a 12-year-old daughter uh who is getting to grow up and learning about her family history that she never knew.
• 8:15
  Larissa Lam: Uh, because my husband, I, you know, back to you one of your original questions.
• 8:20
  Larissa Lam: So my husband really only knew a little bit about his mom side of the family.
• 8:24
  Larissa Lam: His mom was born and raised in Hong Kong and came over to marry her his father.
• 8:30
  Larissa Lam: Um, all he really knew is that his father came over from China when he was 14, and he didn't really know anything much more um about it, except for later on in his life, he heard rumblings about grandfather being a Mississippi.
• 8:44
  Larissa Lam: But I I remember when we got married.
• 8:47
  Larissa Lam: And if you know anything about Chinese weddings, you like literally have to invite like everybody and your aunt, your uncle, your mother, your, you know, your cousin, like you've never met.
• 8:56
  Larissa Lam: So when we were coming up with the guest list, I asked him, I said, Hey, is there anybody on your father's side that you want to invite to the wedding?
• 9:03
  Larissa Lam: And he said, No.
• 9:04
  Larissa Lam: I was like, What?
• 9:06
  Larissa Lam: Are you serious?
• 9:07
  Larissa Lam: Like, I was like, really?
• 9:09
  Larissa Lam: There's no one on your father's side.
• 9:11
  Larissa Lam: And it's like, no, you know, my dad doesn't really talk about it.
• 9:13
  Larissa Lam: And I don't I've not really met anybody on my dad's side of the family or remember them.
• 9:20
  Larissa Lam: So he's like, I, you know, I don't want to push the issue.
• 9:23
  Larissa Lam: I'm like, okay.
• 9:24
  Larissa Lam: So I was like, great, that's less people to pay for, all right.
• 9:28
  Larissa Lam: Um, but I did think it was odd, and it wasn't until um several years later, um, in 2004 2014, when we went to Mississippi for the first time, as I mentioned, to go visit the graveside of his grandfather and great-grandfather, that I realized why we didn't invite anybody from my father-in-law's side, is because he really didn't know a lot of the history and there was a lot of pain attached to it because he had come over to the United States with only his grandmother and pretty much hadn't seen, had had never met his father, um, except when he was uh one year old.
• 10:02
  Larissa Lam: And that was kind of the story that we ended up uncovering.
• 10:06
  Crista Cowan: So, what was the like the catalyst, the moment that you guys decided to take this trip to Mississippi?
• 10:13
  Crista Cowan: Like, where did that desire come from?
• 10:16
  Larissa Lam: Part of it is my daughter was born.
• 10:18
  Larissa Lam: Um, so my daughter was born in 2013, and we took a trip on 2014.
• 10:23
  Larissa Lam: The year my daughter was born was actually my my my mother and father-in-law's uh 40th anniversary.
• 10:31
  Larissa Lam: So they thought, oh, we should do something special.
• 10:33
  Larissa Lam: Uh, we had to delay the trip a year because I was pregnant, but they thought, like, you know what?
• 10:37
  Larissa Lam: We kind of knew grandpa was like buried in great, you know, in Mississippi.
• 10:42
  Larissa Lam: Maybe it'd be great for all of us as a family to go because nobody in the family had been there before.
• 10:47
  Larissa Lam: And so um we thought, okay, this is a great, maybe a great opportunity.
• 10:52
  Larissa Lam: Um, my husband was thinking, you know, it'd be great to learn a little bit more about our daughter's heritage, you know, now that you're born.
• 10:58
  Larissa Lam: I mean, I think when you become parents, you start to be more aware of things like that.
• 11:02
  Larissa Lam: Whereas maybe growing up and when you're in your youth, like you don't really think about where your family came from and why it's important.
• 11:09
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's so, so true.
• 11:11
  Crista Cowan: Here at Ancestry, we call those life moments of truth, right?
• 11:14
  Crista Cowan: There's these moments that people just naturally turn to the past and start to look at, you know, what they don't know and where their gaps are and what stories they do know and want to make sure they pass on.
• 11:23
  Crista Cowan: And things like the birth of a child or when a parent is diagnosed with, you know, dementia or Alzheimer's, or you know, when a sibling passes away.
• 11:31
  Crista Cowan: Those are these moments where you're like, oh, wait, there are things I don't know or I need to hold on to.
• 11:37
  Crista Cowan: So, so making kind of a pilgrimage like that is a really beautiful way to honor that moment, both of their anniversary and your daughter's birth.
• 11:46
  Crista Cowan: I'm gonna absolutely encourage everybody to watch this film, but um I would love to have you just give us all a little synopsis of it, um, and then we'll dive into a few of the few of the details.
• 12:00
  Larissa Lam: Yeah.
• 12:00
  Larissa Lam: Um, a Chinese family walks into Mississippi and no, uh, it kind of was like that.
• 12:07
  Larissa Lam: I I mean, I think what the film is, is about our Chinese-American family taking this pilgrimage to Mississippi and uncovering the family history that they never knew and really the American history that they also didn't know about the Chinese in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow.
• 12:27
  Larissa Lam: Uh, and you see the the discoveries as it's happening with our family.
• 12:34
  Larissa Lam: Um, so we we kind of go into it very blind, like not knowing like we'd ever been to Mississippi.
• 12:39
  Larissa Lam: And so it's that fish out of water in some ways.
• 12:42
  Larissa Lam: We have a family from California uh that happens to be Chinese American going to Mississippi.
• 12:47
  Larissa Lam: And really, my father-in-law ends up learning about the father he never knew because his father had passed away when he was very, very young.
• 12:56
  Larissa Lam: And because this is a slight spoiler, but eventually we find out that the Chinese Exclusion Act also played a part in why their family wasn't able to be reunited either here or in China, uh, because things got very, very complicated.
• 13:10
  Larissa Lam: Um and you'll have to watch to learn a little bit more about those complications, but um, it's so it's not just the it's not just a story about Mississippi and the Chinese there, but also kind of larger implications of policy and and how we see immigrants and really how those forces have kind of shaped our, not just our country, but even the individual units of families.
• 13:35
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and how families are able or not able to stay connected and to know their own history and stories.
• 13:41
  Crista Cowan: Absolutely.
• 13:42
  Crista Cowan: Now, you uh you know, you you didn't come into this as a filmmaker with any training in that.
• 13:47
  Crista Cowan: So, like this is your first film.
• 13:50
  Crista Cowan: Uh what were some of the like challenges that you faced or things you had to learn fast in order to make this happen?
• 14:00
  Larissa Lam: Well, one of the challenges, because um we were kind of trying to piece together uh the past or even finding as many people that knew um Baldwin's family, my husband Baldwin's family, was people were getting old, uh, you know, and so the clock was kind of ticking to get people while they were still alive.
• 14:18
  Larissa Lam: And it's been 11 years now since we went to that first trip.
• 14:21
  Larissa Lam: And sadly, uh, I'd say like half the people we interviewed have already passed on.
• 14:26
  Larissa Lam: So we were really grateful that we were able to find as many people as we did.
• 14:30
  Larissa Lam: But there were, there was one person we were supposed to interview.
• 14:33
  Larissa Lam: And, you know, sadly, he passed away before we were able to interview him, um, who had known Baldwin's grandfather, Casey Lou.
• 14:40
  Larissa Lam: And so that was certainly a challenge.
• 14:42
  Larissa Lam: Um, I think one of the other challenges was there's so much information that we ended up uncovering and so many wonderful stories and interviews that we did that we couldn't include all of them.
• 14:53
  Larissa Lam: And so trying to whittle it down to a cohesive story that was engaging, um, that didn't kind of bludgeon people over the head with information, uh, that was also a big challenge.
• 15:06
  Larissa Lam: And so there was definitely a lot of a lot of things left on the the cutting room floor.
• 15:11
  Larissa Lam: Um, and uh, you know, we we slowly or surely putting together deleted scenes and hopefully more more clips that we can just share on social media.
• 15:20
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 15:22
  Crista Cowan: We we struggle with that with the stories that we uh you know hear here on the podcast as well, like how you edit it to to tell a story that's interesting, but there's always little snippets or nuggets or things that you're just like, oh, but I love that piece so much.
• 15:36
  Crista Cowan: Um, it it does make it a little bit of a challenge.
• 15:40
  Crista Cowan: Um, so you know, we mentioned, you know, earlier Chin, you know, Chinese and Mississippi aren't something that are usually said in the same sense.
• 15:47
  Crista Cowan: Can you give us just an idea of why uh your husband's family was in the Deep South?
• 15:54
  Larissa Lam: Yeah, what we ended up learning was that um after the emancipation proclamation, when um people were freed from slavery, um, there was now kind of a void left in the plantations, right?
• 16:08
  Larissa Lam: A lot of the labor force left uh Mississippi.
• 16:12
  Larissa Lam: And so they needed to replenish that.
• 16:15
  Larissa Lam: So after the Transcontinental Railroad was built in the 1860s, you know, word got around, hey, the Chinese was a cheap form of labor that we could import to maybe replace some of the labor that we lost on the plantations from the enslaved, the formerly enslaved um African Americans.
• 16:33
  Larissa Lam: And so uh there were Chinese that were recruited, the initial group of Chinese were recruited uh from other parts of the country and also directly from China to come in and uh be sharecroppers to work on the on the farms.
• 16:46
  Larissa Lam: Um, eventually they had to move uh out of that realm for a couple of reasons, because uh one, some of them were like, hey, this is a raw deal.
• 16:55
  Larissa Lam: This was not the riches that we were promised, and the the labor was difficult.
• 16:59
  Larissa Lam: But also the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted in 1882, which prevented Chinese labor uh from coming into the country to work these labor jobs.
• 17:08
  Larissa Lam: So um the loophole was that Chinese could be merchants, and so a lot of them ended up becoming grocery store owners.
• 17:14
  Larissa Lam: In fact, in the Mississippi Delta, um, the majority of the Chinese um, you know, uh in the early 1900s to mid-uh 1900s were running and operating grocery stores.
• 17:26
  Larissa Lam: Um, and uh in some sense, grocery stores is a little bit misleading because many of them were turned out to be general stores.
• 17:32
  Larissa Lam: They sold more than just groceries.
• 17:34
  Larissa Lam: Uh, because of the segregation and the the intense discrimination, a lot of white merchants didn't want to serve the black population.
• 17:42
  Larissa Lam: And so the Chinese kind of served a purpose in in terms of being able to cater to um the the black clientele when a lot of white uh stores refused to serve them.
• 17:53
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 17:54
  Crista Cowan: And and that brings up an interesting point, which is you've got these people living in close proximity to each other, but really kind of isolated because of because of the you know prejudicial segregation.
• 18:04
  Crista Cowan: And so, you know, as this uh Chinese population is brought in, you've got still some of the black population there.
• 18:14
  Crista Cowan: What were the relationships between those two communities?
• 18:17
  Crista Cowan: How did they interact?
• 18:18
  Crista Cowan: Were there tensions in the middle of the Jim Crow South?
• 18:22
  Larissa Lam: Yeah.
• 18:23
  Larissa Lam: Yeah, in the in the in the earlier decades, there, the early 1900s, mid-1900s, um, it was actually a surprisingly um symbiotic relationship.
• 18:34
  Larissa Lam: You know, um they all kind of knew the rules of the South, right?
• 18:38
  Larissa Lam: The segregated South.
• 18:39
  Larissa Lam: Like a lot of the Chinese, uh, most of the Chinese at that time um couldn't live in the white neighborhoods just like the African Americans couldn't live in the white neighborhoods.
• 18:47
  Larissa Lam: Um, and so they they were in community together.
• 18:50
  Larissa Lam: There was a mutual respect between the communities because um, you know, uh an African American can walk through the front door of a Chinese establishment and hang out as long as they were welcome to hang out as long as they can without feeling like they were being treated like a second-class citizen.
• 19:06
  Larissa Lam: And we interviewed many um people from the black community who shared about the fact that the Chinese establishments and and the people in their neighborhoods were in many places, in many senses, a safe place for them to be and gave them a sense of dignity when the white community really didn't give them um dignity.
• 19:29
  Larissa Lam: Uh, and there was a lot of bartering going on.
• 19:31
  Larissa Lam: There was also um credit that was um extended.
• 19:35
  Larissa Lam: I mean, sharecropping, uh sharecroppers would only be paid once or twice a year.
• 19:39
  Larissa Lam: And so um, if they did, you know, if they weren't able to get credit from the stores, and these are interest-free credit, there it was very much an honor system.
• 19:47
  Larissa Lam: You know, we heard from many of the Chinese grocery store owners, especially, and especially with a lot of the black community members, they're like, yeah, our family wouldn't have survived if it wasn't for the fact that, you know, we could just walk into a Chinese store and and they let us just take stuff on credit and just pay you back later, or just return or borrow stuff and return it later.
• 20:06
  Larissa Lam: And so there was this kind of the system that, you know, we don't really hear about in our history classes uh of this uh very much like mutual exchange.
• 20:15
  Larissa Lam: And they they all just kind of did what they could to kind of survive together under these very oppressive conditions.
• 20:22
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 20:22
  Crista Cowan: And and I think people are a lot more familiar when we talk about the Jim Crow South, a lot more familiar with the laws and restrictions, both on the books and culturally, as far as what the the black community was and was not allowed to do.
• 20:36
  Crista Cowan: Did did a lot of those laws also apply to the Chinese community?
• 20:41
  Crista Cowan: Like you mentioned, they didn't get to live in certain neighborhoods, they couldn't do certain jobs, was there more?
• 20:46
  Larissa Lam: Yeah, um absolutely.
• 20:47
  Larissa Lam: And you know, it depended on the time period.
• 20:49
  Larissa Lam: You know, it was it was interesting because, you know, there's certain there were certain time periods where um Chinese were allowed to go to schools uh in in integrated white schools.
• 20:59
  Larissa Lam: And then, you know, there's a very famous Supreme Court case called Lum versus Rice, where, you know, somebody in the neighborhood said, Hey, I don't want these Chinese kids in my school and had them kicked out because it was legal under separate but equal and under the segregated laws, right?
• 21:15
  Larissa Lam: And so then all of a sudden there becomes this this uh domino effect where a lot of other schools, like, oh, we can kick the Chinese out, we're gonna do that.
• 21:23
  Larissa Lam: And but it depended, you know, if some people like the Chinese, they would allow them in the schools.
• 21:27
  Larissa Lam: And so it really depended on people's attitudes and towards the Chinese.
• 21:32
  Larissa Lam: But um I've heard from many Chinese too, like they were denied medical services.
• 21:36
  Larissa Lam: Um, they were not allowed to swim in the public pools.
• 21:39
  Larissa Lam: In fact, I was talking to a gentleman just, you know, a few weeks ago where, you know, he was saying, like, yeah, we had to take the bus from one town to go all the way to another town so that we could use the pool, because in the town that they lived in, they were not allowed to the to use the public pool.
• 21:55
  Larissa Lam: So they had to take a bus like 40 minutes outside of their city just to go.
• 21:59
  Larissa Lam: To a swimming pool.
• 22:01
  Larissa Lam: And so those were very real struggles that segregation imposed.
• 22:07
  Larissa Lam: And the one that I actually, you know, included in my film that I thought was just, again, remarkable is cemeteries.
• 22:14
  Larissa Lam: Like you would just think in death.
• 22:16
  Larissa Lam: Why should it matter?
• 22:17
  Larissa Lam: But in a Jim Crow society and a very segregated mentality, even the association in death was not allowed.
• 22:26
  Larissa Lam: And so you had Chinese who couldn't be buried in a white or a black cemetery.
• 22:31
  Larissa Lam: They had to have their own cemetery.
• 22:34
  Larissa Lam: And in fact, the Jewish community was not always considered equal to white.
• 22:38
  Larissa Lam: And so they had a separate cemetery for the Jewish community too.
• 22:41
  Larissa Lam: So that's how heinous segregation was, that even in death, um, it was it was a way of life.
• 22:49
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 22:50
  Crista Cowan: Well, the the weight of that, I think, for so many of us, especially those of us who are white, like we just don't, it's so invisible to us, um, which I think is the definition of privilege, right?
• 23:04
  Crista Cowan: That we don't have to confront that or face that.
• 23:07
  Crista Cowan: And so, you know, I'm sure there were prejudices and biases and racism that you faced, even growing up in Southern California, but to walk into Mississippi and to be so blatantly faced with it right down to the burial grounds is remarkable, is probably painful to confront that.
• 23:27
  Crista Cowan: Um, as you shared that experience with your husband, with his family, like how have they processed the emotions of that?
• 23:34
  Crista Cowan: Because for them, this connection is super personal.
• 23:38
  Larissa Lam: Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that um was very interesting is my father-in-law Charles, um, he served in the Air Force.
• 23:46
  Larissa Lam: So he was very, very patriotic.
• 23:48
  Larissa Lam: And he was also very grateful, I think, to be in this country, uh, especially given um some of the political conditions in China, um, where he was born and and where he left.
• 23:59
  Larissa Lam: Um, and so when he, I think, discovered specifically that the Chinese Exclusion Act, a act of Congress that was passed into law in 1882 and then renewed uh a couple of times um and then became made permanent until um it was repealed in 1943.
• 24:17
  Larissa Lam: Um, you know, I think it it kind of it was a kind of a bittersweet realization that there were these forces bigger than him that separated his family.
• 24:29
  Larissa Lam: On the one hand, he kind of had more empathy for his father because part of what I think makes our story so compelling is that my father-in-law really thought his father had abandoned him when he came back to the US to work.
• 24:41
  Larissa Lam: I mean, he would work and send money over, but he kept questioning why did he have to leave me?
• 24:46
  Larissa Lam: He grew, you know, basically felt abandoned.
• 24:49
  Larissa Lam: And then when he realized that it was things like the Chinese Exclusion Act that made it very difficult for his family to come over.
• 24:56
  Larissa Lam: Um, and, you know, that there was this need to work in the you know the United States.
• 25:03
  Larissa Lam: Um I think it allowed him to feel a little bit more solace knowing that his father, and we also discovered, slight spoiler alert, some other things that pointed to the fact that, you know, his father did love him.
• 25:17
  Larissa Lam: Um, but I think it was bittersweet knowing that our country could do that.
• 25:21
  Larissa Lam: Um, at the same time, um he also understood the responsibility.
• 25:28
  Larissa Lam: Uh, you know, at first he's a very, very humble man, my my father-in-law.
• 25:32
  Larissa Lam: Um sadly, my father-in-law passed away last year.
• 25:34
  Larissa Lam: Um, but prior to that, you know, he was very, very vocal to me about like, you need people people need to learn about what happened with the segregation in in the South.
• 25:44
  Larissa Lam: And they also need to know what happened with the Chinese Exclusion Act so that it doesn't happen again.
• 25:49
  Larissa Lam: Um, and I think there was a sense, maybe growing up or, you know, spending more time in the United States, initially of being like, oh, this is really hard history.
• 25:58
  Larissa Lam: We don't really want to talk about that.
• 26:00
  Larissa Lam: It's a very common sentiment from immigrant communities of not wanting to rehash the painful trauma of being an immigrant and the and the racism and discrimination that maybe we experience as a community.
• 26:11
  Larissa Lam: But for him, uh he understands like the education is important.
• 26:15
  Larissa Lam: But but for us, it's also education through empathy.
• 26:17
  Larissa Lam: You know, it's it's my job isn't to make necessarily somebody who is non-Asian or or somebody specifically who was white feel guilty.
• 26:27
  Larissa Lam: What I hope it does, it it creates empathy to say, like, you know what, we are human and there are mistakes that we've made in, you know, as a as a country, you know, as individuals.
• 26:37
  Larissa Lam: Um, and yet hopefully moving forward, we can be better and that we could hopefully identify um how we can make future generations feel like they belong.
• 26:47
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and stories to me are one of the most powerful ways to look somebody in the face, to hear their story, to see their humanity, to connect and to feel that empathy.
• 26:59
  Crista Cowan: And so the fact that you've chosen this story to share in this way, um, I just think it's so, so powerful.
• 27:06
  Crista Cowan: You know, the there's also power and experience in going to the place, in walking the ground, in listening to the stories of the people in the community as well that surround the story, that make it more real, that make it more tangible.
• 27:22
  Crista Cowan: Um, but for genealogists, it's not just about walking in the place or hearing the stories, it's also about the archives and about the records that prove the facts of the stories.
• 27:33
  Crista Cowan: Um and so you had the opportunity to visit the National Archives in San Bruno.
• 27:37
  Crista Cowan: I've been there a couple of times.
• 27:39
  Crista Cowan: I've worked with some of the people who work there.
• 27:42
  Crista Cowan: Um I'm a total archive nerd.
• 27:45
  Crista Cowan: Um, but that maybe is something that was not part of your life experience until you started diving into this story a little bit more.
• 27:53
  Crista Cowan: So tell me about your first visit to that National Archives branch in San Bruno.
• 27:58
  Larissa Lam: Yeah, I have to admit, I didn't know that archives could be such a valuable source of information.
• 28:05
  Larissa Lam: Um, so I'll I'll get I'll back up and tell you the story behind how we ended up in San Bruno.
• 28:10
  Larissa Lam: So um if people see Far East Deep South, they'll kind of see us visiting Mississippi uh for the first time.
• 28:17
  Larissa Lam: And chronologically that's what happened.
• 28:19
  Larissa Lam: Uh, we actually made a short film prior to Far Steep South called Finding Cleveland about Finding Cleveland, Mississippi, the first time.
• 28:26
  Larissa Lam: And we actually um, you know, did some film festivals, did some screenings and discussions around that film.
• 28:32
  Larissa Lam: And I remember we were in New York one time and somebody in during our QA session stood up and said, Hey, have you seen your exclusion files for your family?
• 28:41
  Larissa Lam: And uh Balda, my husband was like, What?
• 28:44
  Larissa Lam: And he's like, No.
• 28:46
  Larissa Lam: He's like, Oh yeah, like you could probably find them in San Francisco.
• 28:51
  Larissa Lam: And I had mentioned my husband was born and raised in San Francisco, grew up in Sacramento.
• 28:56
  Larissa Lam: And so he's like, What?
• 28:57
  Larissa Lam: So of course, then we went and contacted San Bruno, which is right outside of San Francisco.
• 29:02
  Larissa Lam: They they call it, you know, the National Archives of San Francisco, but it's technically in San Bruno, California.
• 29:08
  Larissa Lam: Um, and lo and behold, they found the records for my husband's family.
• 29:14
  Larissa Lam: And here we are going to Mississippi, uh, you know, journeying around the whole country, only to land back where we started.
• 29:22
  Larissa Lam: So, in in many ways, that journey became full circle.
• 29:25
  Larissa Lam: And in our film, you'll see us going to the National Archives and discovering those exclusion files for my husband's grandfather, Casey Liu, and his great-grandparents.
• 29:35
  Larissa Lam: And I had no idea that um there was this many documentation.
• 29:41
  Larissa Lam: I guess our government does keep very good records, you know, in the end.
• 29:44
  Larissa Lam: Um, and not just nationally.
• 29:46
  Larissa Lam: I mean, even when we went to Mississippi, it was amazing to find, you know, what other records we could find on a local, you know, level.
• 29:54
  Larissa Lam: Um, but in many ways, the discriminatory act of Chinese exclusion was a horrible thing.
• 30:01
  Larissa Lam: But the one silver lining is that it ended up giving us a paper trail of my husband's genealogy and family history in a lot of ways.
• 30:10
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and that's that can be a gift that's yes, doesn't compensate, but but for sure it has value in and of itself.
• 30:17
  Crista Cowan: Um, I want to read this because you were quoted saying that your daughter and future generations would learn more about the vast struggles and contributions of Asians in America.
• 30:29
  Crista Cowan: I hope that we can broaden the way American history is taught and discussed so that it includes the Asian American experience, especially as it pertains to learning about the American South.
• 30:40
  Crista Cowan: Um, you made this film four years ago.
• 30:43
  Crista Cowan: Um, how do you feel about that hope now?
• 30:47
  Larissa Lam: Well, you know, I actually finished the film um 2020 right before the pandemic.
• 30:54
  Larissa Lam: Um but we, you know, it was released, it didn't release onto on PBS until 2021.
• 30:59
  Larissa Lam: Um it had a bit of a journey because, you know, the world was shut down and everybody was trying to figure out what was going on.
• 31:06
  Larissa Lam: Um, but I think what what ended up happening is uh through that anti-Asian sentiment that unfortunately and anti-Chinese specifically that crept up during um COVID, um, it made me realize how important our film was, even more so.
• 31:24
  Larissa Lam: Um, because going back to what we were talking about, that question of where you where are you from, where you really from, that question still gets asked.
• 31:31
  Larissa Lam: I mean, I probably have been asked that question a couple a couple of times this past year.
• 31:36
  Larissa Lam: Um, and it it goes to the sense that because we don't learn about the history of Asians in America that stretches back several generations, um, we have the sense that most Asians must be new immigrants and that they don't belong here.
• 31:55
  Larissa Lam: I myself, having been born and raised in the United States, didn't learn my own history of, you know, like the Chinese in the South, had no idea of that Mississippi history, which is why I made the film.
• 32:04
  Larissa Lam: I was like, more people need to know about this.
• 32:07
  Larissa Lam: Because in my mind, growing up, learning about the Civil War, learning about segregation, learning about the American South, like that was so American.
• 32:15
  Larissa Lam: It was such a pivotal part of American history.
• 32:17
  Larissa Lam: And I had no idea that people that uh had the same heritage as me were part of that history because we never saw it.
• 32:25
  Larissa Lam: You know, the way American history is taught is maybe we learn a little bit about the Chinese coming in for the gold mines, building the railroads, and then it kind of disappears from the history books.
• 32:35
  Larissa Lam: We'll fast forward to World War II and the Japanese internment camps.
• 32:39
  Larissa Lam: Um, and then we kind of disappear again, and maybe we'll talk about Vietnamese refugees immigrating.
• 32:44
  Larissa Lam: Um, but we've been here the whole time.
• 32:46
  Larissa Lam: It, you know, we didn't just come and leave.
• 32:48
  Larissa Lam: Um, some people did, but a lot of families came and settled and contributed to the United States.
• 32:54
  Larissa Lam: We just don't hear about the stories.
• 32:56
  Larissa Lam: And it's not just relegated to California or the major metropolitan cities where you think of Chinatowns, but it's in the rural South, it's in the Midwest, it's all over the country.
• 33:06
  Larissa Lam: And yet those stories haven't been told.
• 33:08
  Larissa Lam: And so I think it's so important for us to learn more about those contributions to American history because it it really gives not just the Asian American community a sense of belonging, but I think for people who view us from the outside, hopefully they'll see that there's a much larger contribution from our community than they realize.
• 33:28
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, so, so, so well said.
• 33:30
  Crista Cowan: And I love that you've put this movie out into the world to tell that story.
• 33:35
  Crista Cowan: Um, I think it's an important story that should be told, it should be heard, it should be retold.
• 33:40
  Crista Cowan: Um, uh a lot of my listeners are concerned about their own family stories.
• 33:46
  Crista Cowan: And so now as a filmmaker, um, as you think about your experiences capturing, you know, those discoveries on camera, um, you know, what did you learn through that that maybe if you had to do it over again you might do differently?
• 34:01
  Larissa Lam: You know, I think there's, you know, I I wish I had a bigger budget to make the film.
• 34:05
  Larissa Lam: And uh, you know, there's always there's always that um when when it comes to having more time um to be able to sit down with people um and talk.
• 34:17
  Larissa Lam: Uh I think, you know, one of the things that I think is really, you know, important that uh looking back is um just getting, this is a filmmaker thing, getting more B-roll, just capturing not just the interviews, but um the the surroundings, the because that tells a story too, whether it's the artifacts, and we did we did film a lot of artifacts whether we went to when we went to the the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum.
• 34:45
  Larissa Lam: Um and in in some cases, I wish I had filmed more in people's homes of their photo albums, of those types of things, because that tells a story too.
• 34:53
  Larissa Lam: It's not just the oral histories, but it's the artifacts in in your in their home that that really uh is important.
• 35:01
  Larissa Lam: And and I think also just through this whole journey, um, and I'm doing this as I continue on with different storytelling um and different projects, is you know, understanding that one person's trash is another person's archive.
• 35:15
  Larissa Lam: And it and just the photos um and the documents.
• 35:20
  Larissa Lam: I mean, I mentioned my father-in-law passed away last year and my mother-in-law is like cleaning out everything, and there's certain documents, like, no, no, don't throw that away.
• 35:28
  Larissa Lam: At least take a picture of it first, because it's like, oh, it's his first like paycheck stuff.
• 35:33
  Larissa Lam: Like, I know it doesn't mean anything now, but it tells a story or like a certain letterhead or things like you just get documents and applications of like, no, no, no, wait, let's take a picture of it before we toss it.
• 35:44
  Larissa Lam: Because that document may not exist anymore.
• 35:47
  Larissa Lam: And it it again, it tells a story of what that person did, who they were, and the and the sign of the times too.
• 35:53
  Crista Cowan: Yes, yes.
• 35:54
  Crista Cowan: As we think about, you know, most of us aren't going to be putting our stories out into the world in the way that you did, but but that advice I think certainly applies.
• 36:02
  Crista Cowan: Take more pictures of people and places and things and record the stories, you know, before they're too late.
• 36:09
  Crista Cowan: Talk to the people.
• 36:10
  Crista Cowan: Like all of the things that you've learned through this experience can be applied, I think, to any of us who are even just trying to document the stories of our own families.
• 36:18
  Crista Cowan: Um, maybe not for public consumption, but but for the next generation.
• 36:23
  Crista Cowan: Um uh as you think about the film, do you have a favorite moment that we see on camera?
• 36:29
  Larissa Lam: Yes, um, and I will have to go with the spoiler alert.
• 36:32
  Larissa Lam: Uh I think it still has its power, even if we spoil it for your audience, but um, there is a pivotal moment where we find a very important book um in the museum.
• 36:42
  Larissa Lam: Um, it is a Bible.
• 36:44
  Larissa Lam: It is my um my father-in-law's father's, so you know, Bible.
• 36:50
  Larissa Lam: Um, and it it was such an emotional moment uh because uh, you know, I always say we could have found his dictionary and it wouldn't have held the same power.
• 37:03
  Larissa Lam: Um, and also because my father-in-law um had become a Christian and was a very faithful um churchgoer, it it had more weight because it was a Bible.
• 37:15
  Larissa Lam: Uh and and so that was a flood of emotions.
• 37:19
  Larissa Lam: Um, I don't even know if I honestly would have made a film if we had found a different book.
• 37:25
  Larissa Lam: Uh I know the history still would have been important, but because there was, it was almost like a sign from God for me.
• 37:31
  Larissa Lam: Like of all the books we could have found, that was the one we found that day in the museum.
• 37:37
  Larissa Lam: Um, and that's what unlocked us to go on this journey to discover so much more.
• 37:42
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 37:42
  Crista Cowan: Larissa, I didn't think I was gonna cry.
• 37:44
  Crista Cowan: The emotion of that, like it's so moving.
• 37:51
  Crista Cowan: And to know that that's what ultimately maybe spurred you to do this project, I think is really, really beautiful.
• 37:58
  Crista Cowan: Is there a favorite moment that we don't see on camera?
• 38:01
  Larissa Lam: You know, it's related to that moment.
• 38:03
  Larissa Lam: Um, my father-in-law actually was sobbing for probably five minutes, like in the corner, kind of think just overwhelmed with emotion after we found the Bible.
• 38:15
  Larissa Lam: And my little daughter, who was like 15 months at that time, she was, you know, just a little over one year old, ran out up and hugged grandpa's leg.
• 38:25
  Larissa Lam: For some reason, we had some malfunction with her camera.
• 38:29
  Larissa Lam: Um, we didn't have we weren't actually making a, we didn't know we were making a film at that time.
• 38:33
  Larissa Lam: You know, we were just a family on vacation and we were, so we were capturing this moment.
• 38:36
  Larissa Lam: But in many ways, for whatever reason, there was an error on the camera.
• 38:41
  Larissa Lam: So that moment is only etched in my memory.
• 38:44
  Larissa Lam: But in and I'm kind of glad that maybe we don't have it because it was, it was that moment.
• 38:50
  Larissa Lam: I'm gonna get emotional thinking about it too.
• 38:52
  Larissa Lam: I it allowed my father-in-law Charles to have that moment to himself because it was, it was just, I think, the first time he had let out so many emotions.
• 39:04
  Larissa Lam: It wasn't just about the discovery of the Bible.
• 39:07
  Larissa Lam: I mentioned he felt like he had been abandoned by his father.
• 39:10
  Larissa Lam: It was in that moment, too, that he was probably in contact with one of the few items he'd ever seen of his father's.
• 39:17
  Larissa Lam: You know, he had he was left with a few photos that his, you know, great grand his grandmother had left behind.
• 39:22
  Larissa Lam: But like that was his father's possession.
• 39:25
  Larissa Lam: But also as we kind of went through this journey, it was just like all those years locking that up inside, locking all those complicated feelings of of you know, not knowing his father, not having his father around, really just was just this flood, flood, flood of emotions.
• 39:43
  Larissa Lam: And so um that's the part that we don't have on camera.
• 39:47
  Larissa Lam: Um, that I'm in many ways um glad that I could have we were able to inadvertently keep that for a private moment for my my father-in-law.
• 39:56
  Crista Cowan: That is so beautiful.
• 39:57
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for sharing that with us.
• 39:59
  Crista Cowan: Um, I think that's something that will resonate with the listeners uh of this particular podcast quite a lot because those are the moments that we hope for, that intergenerational connection and also the healing that just comes through discovering our own stories and the, you know, sometimes we have blinders on because of our own perspective on things.
• 40:22
  Crista Cowan: And when we start to see the truth of what really happened and those blinders start to fall off, I think there's some really beautiful healing that happens through that experience.
• 40:31
  Crista Cowan: So I'm so grateful that you were able to facilitate that for your father-in-law and and that he was able to have that experience.
• 40:38
  Crista Cowan: Um, what do you think is next, like in your in your family storytelling, in your family story discovery, now that your daughter's getting a little bit older, is she getting involved?
• 40:48
  Crista Cowan: What does that look like in your family?
• 40:51
  Larissa Lam: You know, what's interesting is um we were really focused on my father-in-law's side of the family.
• 40:59
  Larissa Lam: And after we finished Var East Deep South, my husband Baldwin found some old an old email from his uncle with a photo of his maternal grandfather.
• 41:08
  Larissa Lam: And it turns out, I'm sorry, his maternal great-grandfather, so it's my mother-in-law's grandfather.
• 41:15
  Larissa Lam: And it turns out he was in Colorado at one point.
• 41:19
  Larissa Lam: In fact, he was in Denver, Colorado.
• 41:21
  Larissa Lam: Um, he was born in China and he had returned to China.
• 41:26
  Larissa Lam: And so the doc and we found a photo and a document where he was talking with a lawyer trying to get back into the United States.
• 41:32
  Larissa Lam: This was in the like in 1903, 1904.
• 41:35
  Larissa Lam: So this was during the Chinese Exclusion Act.
• 41:37
  Larissa Lam: So we have a second uh instance on his mother's side of the family of the personal impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
• 41:43
  Larissa Lam: And we found out that he worked on the railroad.
• 41:46
  Larissa Lam: And then after working on the railroad, he ended up in Denver, Colorado.
• 41:50
  Larissa Lam: And I think he ran uh, I want to say he ran a dry cleaning store.
• 41:54
  Larissa Lam: And so we joke like one of our next projects might be Far East Rocky Mountains, because there's a whole like side of that story that we started to dig into.
• 42:05
  Larissa Lam: Um, we haven't still made it uh out to the Denver, Colorado.
• 42:09
  Larissa Lam: Uh, but that's been kind of this fascinating side to this family history where uh wait, there's more.
• 42:16
  Larissa Lam: It wasn't just one side of the family, it was actually both sides of the family, that his history and contributions to the United States.
• 42:23
  Larissa Lam: And then my next project that I'm working on is called Um Who's Afraid of Virginia Wing?
• 42:28
  Larissa Lam: And it expands on, uh, as I joke, the MCU, the Mississippi Chinese universe, where um we're learning, we're leaning into um her lineage.
• 42:39
  Larissa Lam: Um, she was born and raised in Marks, Mississippi, and um she's a Chinese American actress and singer uh still alive.
• 42:46
  Larissa Lam: She's 88 years young and uh became the first woman of color to be in the Miss Mississippi pageant, and uh was on a lot of the variety shows in the 1960s on like the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, the Today Show, um, and amazing performance theater.
• 43:02
  Larissa Lam: And so we're looking at a very different lens of, again, kind of this this extending this history of um Chinese in America and kind of showing the contributions and the and the arts in this case, and even with Virginia's own family, I've been helping her through her journey.
• 43:17
  Larissa Lam: Um, you know, her mother was born in Chicago, and um there's a whole history there of Chinese in in in Chicago that has also not been largely told.
• 43:26
  Larissa Lam: And so I'm kind of excited to not just tell stories about my family and my husband's family, but um others that we've encountered because I I think it's really important that we see like the depth.
• 43:38
  Larissa Lam: I mean, you know, think about all the stories of people, you know, how many stories have been told about the Civil War or the Revolutionary War or about World War II or people, descendants of, you know, soldiers from those eras.
• 43:48
  Larissa Lam: And so there's so many more stories to be told from um those of Chinese descent or of other Asian descent in this country, even stretching back to the 1500s, where we know Filipinos had had come, or even the First Filipino settlement in Louisiana in the 1700s, there's so many stories to explore that I think it's really important for people to realize that our family stories make up American history and world history.
• 44:13
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, absolutely.
• 44:14
  Crista Cowan: Um, the story of the Chinese Americans is part of the story of America.
• 44:19
  Crista Cowan: And so as we are marching through this America 250 series here on this podcast, um, your story clearly and beautifully represents the American story and this connection to the state of Mississippi.
• 44:35
  Crista Cowan: And as you think about the connection to Mississippi and the Chinese, um, you know, how does that how do you feel about Mississippi?
• 44:44
  Larissa Lam: You know, it's interesting because I'd always kind of thought of Mississippi and whatever was painted in film and TV and some of those stereotypes of it being uh, you know, like somebody's gonna crucify you on a cross with lynchings and you know, I mean that, and and that definit definitely did happen back in those days.
• 45:01
  Larissa Lam: Uh, but at the same time, I think um we have this kind of perception that, like, oh, there was only black and white.
• 45:10
  Larissa Lam: And so for me, that changed that perspective going there, knowing not just the Chinese.
• 45:14
  Larissa Lam: I mean, the next most populous group next to the African Americans were the Chinese, but there were also uh Mexicans that came in because the next wave of labor, once the Chinese left the plantations, you still need people to work on the farm.
• 45:27
  Larissa Lam: So where would you go?
• 45:28
  Larissa Lam: You went to Mexico to start to recruit migrant workers, and some of them also settled in the Mississippi Delta.
• 45:35
  Larissa Lam: You had people that were Lebanese that came over into the South that became small merchants.
• 45:42
  Larissa Lam: Um, and you had all sorts of different groups of people that ended up in Mississippi aside from just the black, white, the blacks and white and the Chinese.
• 45:51
  Larissa Lam: And so I start to realize that there was a little bit more diversity to Mississippi, which is really the story of America, right?
• 45:58
  Larissa Lam: The diversity of we are a nation, um, with the exception of the indigenous people.
• 46:02
  Larissa Lam: Like we are a nation of whether it's through um, you know, uh volunteer immigration or forced immigration, um, whether you were enslaved or you're a refugee, like that's the story of our nation.
• 46:15
  Larissa Lam: And and even those who seemingly, you know, chose to come to this country, a lot of times their forces, um, you know, in a lot of the Chinese case, there was economic strife and and civil war back in China that forced a lot of the Chinese to come over in the 1800s to find better opportunity and to find work when there was um a darth of opportunity in in China, especially the southern part of China.
• 46:37
  Larissa Lam: And so understanding, I think, that history, you know, makes it all the greater to understand that the United States was that land of opportunity for people.
• 46:47
  Larissa Lam: And so um we hope that it can stay that land of opportunity, um, even despite some of the darker sides and sadly um with the history of slavery and some of the discriminatory laws that we discussed.
• 47:00
  Larissa Lam: Um, hopefully we can grow from that.
• 47:02
  Larissa Lam: Um, and that the 250 anniversary can remind us of some of that and can include a lot of more of the history than has been told.
• 47:09
  Larissa Lam: Because I think to really understand America, you really need the full picture and not just part of the picture.
• 47:14
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, beautifully said, Larissa.
• 47:16
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much.
• 47:17
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for sharing your story with us.
• 47:19
  Crista Cowan: If people want to see the film and follow your work and more of what you have to come, what's the best way for them to do that?
• 47:27
  Larissa Lam: Um, if you want to learn more about Far East Deep South um and where it's playing, it's streaming on a lot of different platforms.
• 47:32
  Larissa Lam: Um, you could go to Far East DeepSouth.com.
• 47:35
  Larissa Lam: Um, you could watch it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, um to uh Tubi, just to name a few PBS.
• 47:42
  Larissa Lam: Uh and of course, um, you know, if you also uh we a big part of our uh push with our film isn't just for the individual, but also for schools and education to be learning a lot of this history that we're discussing.
• 47:54
  Larissa Lam: You know, we have an education distribution deal through New Day Films.
• 47:58
  Larissa Lam: Um, and it's of our film is available on Canopy, but you can also go to New Day.com to find out how you can license and bring our film into your schools.
• 48:05
  Larissa Lam: And if you want to learn more about who's afraid of Virginia Wing, our next project about our Southern Belle, uh Chinese American actress, um, and her history, um you can go to VirginiaWingfilm.com to learn more about that um or any of our projects at giantflashlight.com.
• 48:24
  Larissa Lam: Um, our production company is called Giant Flashlight Media, and we hope to continue to shine a giant flashlight, a big spotlight on a lot of these hidden stories.
• 48:34
  Crista Cowan: Fantastic.
• 48:34
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much.
• 48:35
  Crista Cowan: We'll be sure to put all of those URLs in the show notes.
• 48:38
  Crista Cowan: Larissa, thank you for joining me.
• 48:39
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for sharing your story and all the best in the stories you still have to tell.
• 48:45
  Larissa Lam: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.