Where the River Still Flows: Eddie Wong on “Pieces of a Dream” and the Power of Preservation
May 22, 2024 - The Sacramento River and Historic Truss Bridge
The river was the most beautiful and striking part of the Sacramento Delta. Locals told us that steamboats would carry pears, asparagus, and other produce from the fields down the river. We also learned that Walnut Grove is the only Delta town to occupy both sides of the river. The migrant workers lived on one side, and the families of wealthy, white landowners lived on the other.
Photographed by Dani Nalangan
Time had taken its toll on Walnut Grove and Locke, California from 1974 up until 2024. The exterior paint peeled off the facades of Main Street’s gold rush-style architecture. The Chinese script on the signs of long-gone markets, general stores, and restaurants had faded. Sure, “FOR SALE” adorned dusty window after window of storefronts facing the mighty Sacramento River which steamboats didn’t cruise on anymore. It wasn’t the same Walnut Grove and Locke I saw in Pieces of a Dream—the one that Eddie Wong and the original cowboys of Visual Communications had captured fifty years ago. Sure, it was a bit dusty, but more importantly the lively Asian American community portrayed in the documentary—Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino descendants of immigrant migrant workers, many the first of their kind—were gone. As a Filipino American, I’m no stranger to how loud my people can be. The streets were silent.
Of course, a lot can change in fifty years.
I tried my hardest to remember what this experience of walking through the rural, river-side town four months prior was like, during my visit in May. It was September now, and I had been working as an intern in the VC Archives for a little over two months. This was pretty important, because I was about to hop on Zoom with Eddie in the (digital) flesh to hash out what I considered our fated, shared fascination with the Asian American history of Walnut Grove and Locke.
I kicked off my slippers and got comfortable in the VC office’s Renewal Room for my call. Eddie was “the cool one,” Jason Tiangco, my supervisor and caretaker of the VC Archives, described to me. Even through my laptop screen, I knew Jason’s vibe check was pretty accurate: Relaxed face, loose hair, and a cadence of voice that betrayed his smart glasses and his “Founding Father" status within the VC canon with the “no worry, beef curry” chill-ness of the Angeleno he was. (My uncle, I would half-jokingly declare afterwards. Also, shout-out to Francis Cullado for one of many VC-isms I would pick up during my time there. No worry, beef curry.)
Anyways, despite our gap of thirty-some years in age, I considered our encounter having taken place on converging paths that documentarians, archivists, and other artists or cultural workers (or VCers) might find themselves. One of seeking answers to the questions:
How do we preserve the stories and memories of a place, a time, and a people that are now long gone, especially if they’re ones that are often marginalized and overlooked? Or, what can we do in the present to ensure that for the future?
For Eddie, it was through film.
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“Dani’s Commentary”: The river’s beauty is unbounded by time! It was very heartwarming to see an excited Bob Nakamura look out into the water himself. When your hometown river’s the L.A. river, this is the appropriate response.
First of all, can you just talk about how the documentary came to be—who pitched it and how’d you come to direct that film? How did the project get off the [ground] in the first place?
Eddie: I was in the EthnoCommunications program at the UCLA film school, it was that third world program. We had a class called Location Production. For a week, the entire class goes on the road. I chose going to Locke because I had read about it and I thought it was a fascinating place. I'd never been there. When we went there and shot for, like, a day, I was just fascinated. We shot in Locke, Walnut Grove, and it was mainly just scenes of the town itself, but it really piqued my curiosity.
Years later, when VC formed and we were pitching ideas for grants, I said, Hey, let's do a history of Asian immigration in the Delta. That would be a good educational film. It was accepted by our funder, which was the U.S. Office of Education. So we had grant money from the U.S. government to do multicultural films that would get into the curriculum in secondary schools— high schools basically. That's how it started.
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“Dani’s Commentary”: I love this photo because it shows a little behind-the-scenes of the documentary’s filmmaking process. The DIY sentimentality of the time—this shot being taken from a driving car, no seatbelts and all—is inspiring to me.
The result was Pieces of a Dream. It was released in 1974, and even had a screening at the Buddhist Church in Walnut Grove where the last scene of the film takes place. When I asked Eddie how the townsfolk reacted to it, he said they mainly pointed and laughed seeing the faces of friends and family members on screen. Cameras weren’t very accessible to many at the time, after all, so this seemed like a natural reaction to me.
May 1, 2024 - Pieces of a Dream 4K Restoration Screening and Q&A at Opening Night of VC Film Fest
From L-R: Duane Kubo, Eddie Wong, Evelyn Hang Yin
Photographed by Steven Lam
Fifty years later, its 4k restoration was screened to an auditorium of attendees during the VC Film Fest in May this year. Among audiences today, its re-emergence brings to light the stories of the Sacramento Delta Asian Americans to a whole new generation. I mean, I had never even heard of Asians in the Sacramento Delta until this year. Hell, I didn’t even know what the Sacramento Delta even was. (Hearing Eddie’s casual discovery of the place made me feel better about my ignorance.)
I was on-site in Locke, California, the first time I watched Pieces of a Dream in its entirety. It was my first night staying for one of my own classes as a then-UCLA fourth year undergrad. There, I was finding my own answer to the question posed before: How do we preserve the stories and memories of a place, a time, and a people that are now long gone?
For me, this was, instead, an interest in the power of music.
My work in the Musicology major had brought me to the Sacramento Delta hot on the tail of an Asian American Movement-era folk song that I had discovered in my research—“Manongs of Walnut Grove.” According to songwriter Robert Kikuchi-Yngojo, the “town by the river”—a town that had held the hopes and dreams of manongs who had sacrificed their lives in the Philippines to come to America—was on the verge of being forgotten. His song ends with a wish for future generations: “Though time may change a people, hopefully we will grow so we will not forget our people of Walnut Grove.” Coincidentally, this song was released in 1977, only four years after Eddie’s film.
May 22, 2024 - Main Street, Locke
Again, because of its historical designations, the original Locke buildings have been preserved. I stayed at an Airbnb that in the 70’s used to be Foon Hop & Co Meat Market. Because they’re all wood though, a couple were burnt or almost burnt to the ground, so our rooms were equipped with fire extinguishers. Eddie actually told me a funny story about how he almost set one of the buildings on fire himself during his stay.
Photographed by Dani Nalangan
“Dani’s Commentary”: For the most part, Main Street looks almost identical to how it did back then. Al’s Place is still open too, and they really do cook a mean steak that apparently attracts a handful of tourists to the place.
Media arts like documentary film or performing arts like songwriting… I encountered many different artforms that Asian Americans engaged with to explore and preserve their own histories, stories, memories—specifically in this case, the Walnut Grove and Locke of the 1970’s. There’s something special about the arts in particular as a means of participating in this.
I had done my research on both Locke and Walnut Grove beforehand—census statistics, articles, and one-off chapters in history books from the UCLA Library. They told me lots of things: dates, names, numbers. In Locke, physical preservation work done by the Locke Foundation, as well as two federal designations—added to the National Register for Historic Places in 1971 and designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1990—kept its architecture frozen in time as the U.S.’s oldest, rural Chinatown and provided a backdrop to the facts. But they couldn’t tell me what the Southern Chinese residents felt, as they farmed the Sacramento Delta, so reminiscent of the Pearl River Delta in the Guangdong Province—their home, oceans away.
While the academic works that had supplemented my research told me the facts, works of art such as Robert’s song and Eddie’s documentary added color and feeling to the portrait of a place and time and people I was attempting to reconstruct in the present day. Not only could I learn, I could empathize. Through different creative mediums, artists are free to feel, interpret, and convey a world that’s nuanced and paradoxical sometimes.
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Can I ask why the name of the documentary is Pieces of a Dream?
Eddie: I was kind of going for a more poetic approach to documentary film, and I had really been influenced by watching Japanese cinema. Like Kurosawa, Ozu.
And, you know, it's striking that the natural beauty of the area is in such contrast to the hardship of the people. So you have the beautiful river sunsets, you're in nature, you're hearing the birds, all this stuff—and then people are just working their butts off for nothing and living in pretty oppressive conditions.
“Dani’s Commentary”: The inside of Hayashi Co. Its footage in Pieces allowed me to really imagine what it might’ve been like fifty years ago, bustling with working folk buying food for their families or making a living themselves. Eddie told me that a nearby tomato cannery was a big employer for the area, which again brings to light the irony of being essential in the production of food, yet unable to afford much of it yourself.
I think one of the commonalities I found in talking with people—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos—was that the dream was always to be able to settle there. To own land. And to find a home. For the Chinese especially, the weather, the land itself, the water—that's very reminiscent of southern China. That's the irony of it. You can never have a home here, even though it is your home. You've made it your home. People were living there for decades as workers, and then other people were able to have families there, like the Japanese. Mainly the Japanese. Filipinos really didn't have that many families there that I know of.
That's why it's called Pieces of a Dream. It's like—from different generations, different ethnicities—holding on to a dream.
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I used the phrase “portrait of a place” in this essay earlier. It’s something I learned from VC during my internship, as part of our Learning Community events that we hosted for interns from arts organizations across Los Angeles, as part of the Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship program. “Portrait of a place” was the theme of one of the events, which Jason spearheaded. One of the presentation slides introduced a bit of an untraditional definition of portraiture:
Portraitures can show us different ways to see subjects and spaces, and places audiences in the perspective of an artist. Artists can use their works to influence their others and shape perspectives based on their artistic decisions.
To me, Pieces reads almost like an impressionist painting. As a portrait of a place, I found that it imparts not just the history and economics necessary in understanding the trapped conditions of the farm workers, but also waxes poetic in its washes of imagery and music illustrating their resilience, despite the sad irony of their experience. It’s almost haunting.
Eddie is deliberate in using his specific choices and artistic liberties to convey this portrayal of the Delta, of course. In recounting his own memories of his time filming there he noted some distinct qualities: That time stretched out forever. A dark, untouchable side of the past. A natural wonder. Folks that were a bit cautious about opening up to strangers, but wanted to tell their stories. Days filled with backbreaking manual labor. Nights filled with joy and community. On one side of the river—ramshackled, tin-roof houses belonging to the farmworkers. On the other—mansions belonging to the white landowners. With somber flute and guitar tracks written by Hiroshima’s Dan Kuramoto; long pastoral shots of fields and sparkling bodies of water; disembodied, anonymous narration from residents lamenting the economic injustices; and an “essay-type” film style inspired by cinema novo—Pieces is a portrait of Walnut Grove and Locke in all its contradictions. Places of beauty and adversity where its diverse populations of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos have survived and risen above.
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“Dani’s Commentary”: While not many residents show up in the photographic collections, my visit was even more desolate. So I’m glad these two-fedora wearing gentlemen could give me a glimpse into the Delta’s slow way of life that Eddie described.
May 24, 2024 - Clarence in the Lock Chinese Cultural Shop
Like any tourist destination, Locke has its own gift shop. It was one of the many buildings operated by Clarence—one of Locke’s few cultural caretakers since the ‘70s, right after the filming of Pieces. While many have moved on, Clarence is still there, single-handedly running all the museums. We were lucky we got to interview and befriend him!
Photographed by Dani Nalangan
I’m interested in what your impression of [the residents’] stories were as someone who was an outsider basically, and had never been to a place like that before.
Eddie: I think my main impression was that these people worked really hard. They made a lot of sacrifices. They were also very tough people, very resilient people. When you’re a farmer, for example, nature is not always kind to you. Your harvest can be lost in a storm. You have to deal with the vagaries of the marketplace. How much is this crop going to sell this year? What happens if you have to go bankrupt and where will you get the next loan to restart next season? So these people are very hardworking, resilient people. Even for the farm workers who didn't make very much money or anything, they still had to find a way to make themselves enjoy life. That meant gambling or, you know, hanging out with other guys…
Whatever it was, they found a way to make a life for themselves. To me, that's the most important thing. It sort of captures the essence of the Asian American experience in this country. You have to struggle to survive. But you can survive, and you can make something beautiful out of it.
That's why in the whole film, the undercurrent is all about nature and beauty. The music is lyrical and also sad in parts, because it's not always a happy story. But it's also a beautiful story. I think when you make a film, you aim for 70%. You never get 100% of what you want. There's so much involved in it. Time, money, how the crew is feeling that day. It all comes together in the editing and in how much of a mood you're able to set through the editing, the music, the choosing of scene, and so on and so forth…
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One of the last slides in our “Portrait of a Place” presentation asked interns to consider the following question, posed originally by Linda Mabalot: How can we utilize media as a form to uplift community?
“Dani’s Commentary”: I’m sure Eddie and the VC crew learned a lot during their time in the Delta. This photo of them eating and hanging out felt so intimate and personal to me, and reminded me of my visit there with my own friend and lessons learned.
I’ve found that the arts are not only a means of preservation, but a navigation of the struggle, survival, beauty, and joy throughout our histories. It also builds community through collective remembrance and dissemination of knowledge, and constructs bridges across generations that have passed on. A screening or performance brings people together and allows the community to participate in the act of art itself. In musicology, it’s part of a concept called “musicking.”
Many people even learn more about themselves and their own identities through the act of art-making. During the Q&A portion of the film’s screening during VC Film Fest, Eddie even admitted that it was not until he was working on Pieces that his dad admitted that he had been imprisoned as an illegal immigrant on Angel Island—a place featured in the film where many Asians had landed on to be processed at the Immigration Station.
My call with Eddie was not even an hour long. He had another meeting to catch after mine. But being able to connect over a place over 300 miles away from Los Angeles and over a time half a century ago was very important to a 22-year-old suburban first-gen still figuring out what being Filipino American even means. But now, I know I’m far from alone.
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Working in archives, one of the things you learn is that eventually, no matter how well you can preserve something, formats and data can become obsolete. Within the field of cultural heritage—whether that be archival material like film or entire places like Little Tokyo, which was named one of America’s Most Endangered Places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation this year—obsolescence or disappearance altogether looms right around the corner in the wake of technological advancement or the turbulence of governing bodies/powers that be on every level.
Yes, I witnessed that time had taken its toll on Walnut Grove and Locke. You can still visit today, but, since the 70s, the upkeep of the entire historical town of Locke in particular falls on the shoulders of but a few passionate individuals that will not be around forever. But, if the online release of the 4k restoration of Pieces of a Dream is evidence of anything, it’s that even over a century of history, the stories of the first Asian Delta workers have still lived on and will continue to. Those stories matter to people, even if just a handful each year. But we’re here. And through preserving, participating in, and even creating new works of art—like the essay I eventually wrote after my visit to the Delta or even here, in an article on the VC website—we won’t let them be forgotten.
This article includes excerpts from an interview with Eddie Wong, edited for content and clarity.
