Plague at the Golden Gate

Location: Osher Theater, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)

Li-Shin Yu, Director, Plague at the Golden Gate 

James Q. Chan, Producer, Plague at the Golden Gate

Director Li-Shin Yu and producer James Q. Chan will discuss their American Experience PBS documentary about an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown. More than 100 years before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world and set off a wave of fear and anti-Asian sentiment, an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1900 unleashed a similar furor. It was the first time in history that civilization’s most feared disease — the infamous Black Death — made it to North America. Fueling the resistance to addressing the threat would be a potent blend of political expediency, ignorance, greed, racism, and deep-rooted distrust of not only federal authority but science itself. Scapegoated as the source of the disease early on, the Chinese community fought back against unjust, discriminatory treatment. Plague at the Golden Gate can be streamed on PBS.

This talk is part of a year-long program of performances, exhibitions, and talks that use Angel Island as an observatory from which to view landscapes of migration, incarceration and resistance. The Angel Island Immigration Station has sometimes been called “the Ellis Island of the West.”  But Angel Island was an ambivalent gateway, a place of incarceration and exclusion for migrants as well as an entry for half a million newcomers from 80 countries, mostly from Asia. A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts and Design. 

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Li-Shin Yu, is a New York-based filmmaker, editor and director of Plague at the Golden Gate
for PBS’s acclaimed series American Experience.  Yu co-directed The Chinese Exclusion Act also for American Experience. A long-time collaborator of Ric Burns, their recent film Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is a critic’s choice on the festival and theatrical circuit.  Their epic series NEW YORK: a documentary film is an eight-part production chronicling the city’s rise from a remote Dutch outpost to the cultural and economic center of the world, for which Yu received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Editing.  Their other titles have garnered multiple awards including numerous Emmys, Peabodys, Writer’s Guild of America, Dupont-Columbia awards amongst others. Yu began her career collaborating with New York independent filmmakers including Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Sara Driver and Peter Wang and more recently with documentarians Christine Choy, Bill Moyers, Thomas Lennon and Stanley Nelson.

James Q. Chan is an Emmy-nominated producer and director based in San Francisco. Recent producing credits include PLAGUE AT THE GOLDEN GATE (American Experience); CHINATOWN RISING (America ReFramed). Recent directing projects include BLOODLINE (Emmy®Nominee, 2022); large-format 360° CIRCLE VISION films for Disney; and launching the doc series CHINATOWN SHORTS. His film FOREVER, CHINATOWN (Emmy® Nominee, 2018) received multiple festival awards, screened globally with American Film Showcase where James serves as a filmmaker envoy. He received a Certificate of Honor from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for his work highlighting stories from the AAPI community. His sensibilities throughout his projects are shaped by his refugee and working class background, love for nature shows, and memories of his mother’s cooking. He is currently adapting Laurence Yep’s acclaimed CHILD OF THE OWL book into a narrative series set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. James is a 2021 YBCA100 Honoree and a member of the Directors Guild of America.

Free and in-person; see COVID safety protocols here.

The event will also be live-streamed via Zoom webinar. To attend online, register for the webinar here.

Video of this talk will be posted about one week after the event.