"In a courtroom, an Asian teenager sits respectfully, head down. Midway through his remarks, the judge stops and says, 'Look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you.' Afterwards, his distraught mother asks me, in Cantonese, to explain how the rules she had taught her son could be used against him," recounts Arthur Chan (SFS'07), who was inspired by the incident to adopt “Look Me in the Eyes” as the title of a cultural competency training program that he created for probation officers.
As the child of immigrant parents, Chan has seen how immigrants to the United States live a unique set of challenges, with feet in two different cultures, often caught between looking forward to opportunities and looking back toward cultural and family heritage. He works to tell the stories of the individuals facing these challenges, and to make them accessible to a larger public.
"My parents came from Hong Kong to study, but found themselves delivering packages for Federal Express and bussing tables to survive," he says. "Today I live a privileged life because they overcame these obstacles. But others are not so fortunate."
In high school outside of San Francisco, Chan taught civics and statistical research techniques to low-income immigrant youths as part of a program called Crossroads. During this time, he also began using film to help students tell their stories.
"At Crossroads, my video production students believed they had no story to tell," he says. "Shock, disbelief, and delight greeted the news that together we were making a documentary about them. For once, they were central, not an afterthought, to their story."
Later, as a social work volunteer in the San Francisco public defenders office, Chan became intrigued by the identity issues and personal stories he encountered working with juvenile detainees at San Quentin prison, many of whom were, or were the children of, immigrants.
"Immigrants are the most vulnerable people in the criminal justice system because their ability to tell their own story is so limited," says Chan. "But theirs is an extreme example of a problem all immigrants face."
That problem is the inability to get one’s story across in a new country and a new society.
"We can’t have a truly just America until we acknowledge and respect the cultural complexity that constitutes America," says Chan. "Immigrants must be proud of their identity, and the system must learn how to treat them not only justly but with respect."
These experiences motivated Chan to further develop his interests in the immigrant experience, film and intercultural dialogue at Georgetown. He co-founded a group called Empowering Young Asian Americans, which integrates leadership training with Asian-American studies. He joined the governing board of the Black House, a center for students of color at Georgetown. And he has performed for four years with Ritmo Y Sabor, a Latin dance group on campus. By placing himself in the midst of different groups, he found spaces in which to listen to the narratives written by the life experiences of others.
In the classroom, Chan worked to develop a deeper understanding of the immigrant experience. Courses with Georgetown faculty experts have enabled him to study about the big-picture policy and international relations implications of migration, and the personal aspects of the immigrant experience through Asian-American literature. He worked as a teaching assistant for Associate Professor of Demography Elizabeth Stephen, in a class on "immigrant ethnographies," and he credits Stephen with opening his eyes to the wide spectrum of issues facing immigrants.
Associate Professor of English and Vice President for Public Affairs and Strategic Development Daniel Porterfield taught Chan in a course on human rights, and he notes Chan’s sustained personal commitment to telling the story of immigrant identity.
"Art has reflected very deeply on his experience as the child of immigrants from Hong Kong and the first in his family to go away to college," says Porterfield. "At the level of social policy, he has strongly informed views about immigration policy and the best ways to promote empowering acculturation. At the personal level, he is fueled by his parents’ example but not predetermined by it."
As he did initially in the high school Crossroads program, Chan aims to help tell these stories through the medium of film. He has worked in the classes of professor of English John Glavin on the techniques and craft of scriptwriting and screenwriting. He is currently working on a short film about two basketball players in Chinatown, both of whom have been in trouble with the law and are wrestling with questions of identity and belonging.
"Choosing a path in film may seem, and my parents would vehemently agree, risky," says Chan. "However, I am the product of the enormous risk they took thirty years ago in choosing to come to America. I want to embrace that risk on behalf of others of immigrant legacy to tell our stories, stories that immigrants need to tell and America desperately needs to hear."
Before embarking on a career in film, Chan will travel to Ireland, pursuing a master's degree in contemporary migration and diaspora studies at University College Cork, on a Mitchell Scholarship, named for former Sen. George Mitchell (LAW'61). He was one of twelve recipients nationwide to earn the scholarship. Chan is eager to study in Ireland because of its long history as a source of migrants and its new identity as a nation that is attracting immigrants from around the world.
"I like the idea of coming to a new place and earning your place among everybody else," says Chan. "I think of immigrants as being some of the biggest risk-takers that we have in the world."
