Actor and director Chi Muoi Lo can trace his fearlessness to his mother. As a seven-year-old in southern China, Lo says, she was sold by peasant parents to a childless couple, and she learned early to fend for herself and to be resourceful–skills that would come in handy later. In the mid-50s she and Lo’s father fled China’s communist regime by boat and headed for an enclave of ethnic Chinese merchants in Phan Rang, near the southeast coast of Vietnam. There the couple used their extensive connections (and the gold Lo’s mother had stowed away with her) to open a store that sold watches, sunglasses, and other Western goods. The business expanded, as did the family–Lo is the 10th of 11 children–until the eve of the American pullout at the end of the Vietnam war.
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In 1975, when Lo was six, his mother sensed the inevitable and prodded her husband to arrange the family’s departure. To make sure her family wouldn’t starve, she hid gold jewelry and coins in her children’s clothes. En route, their rickety freight ship, crammed with over 500 passengers, was intercepted by a U.S. navy cruiser. “We told them we wanted to go to America,” recalls Lo. “At that time the U.S government felt guilty about political refugees, so we were flown to Guam.” Months later, sponsored by a Jewish charity, the Lo family–parents, eight sons, and three daughters–landed in west Philadelphia, a heavily African-American neighborhood.
In 1988 Lo transferred to the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco after being offered a full scholarship. “I was 19, rather young for its master’s program, but they really wanted me,” he says. He was the only Asian in the class. “The teachers, mostly frustrated actors who looked down on anything other than theater, were there to teach you how to be a professional white actor. I had to learn the Irish brogue. Why? When would I ever use it?” Even worse, he believes he was the victim of “subtle racism”: he kept getting cast in supporting roles, “as if Asians couldn’t be convincing as leads.” He dropped out of ACT after two years–“I don’t have any academic degrees; unusual for an Asian, hey?”–and headed to Los Angeles.
Lo hopes Catfish will attract a wide audience. “I think the ethnic communities will turn out for my film, as they did for Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker’s Rush Hour,” he says. “Certainly Asians and blacks, two communities I grew up with, should find it true to life.” His mother, on whom the shrewd, judgmental Vietnamese mother is loosely based, has already weighed in. “She thought the movie was too close to home, but she’d give me money for the next project,” he says.
