Asian Studies Series | Steny H. Hoyer Center for the Study of Democracy

Love Letters from Home: Traversing Time and Space in Asian Diaspora Cinema by Dr. Eileen Cheng-yin Chow

“Where can we meet but in stories?” In this presentation, Dr. Chow will look at the fiction-making imperative in the Asian family story: whether it be in film and other visual media, literary texts, or, through the history of the State as ‘Family,’ in queer romances and queer futurities, as well as current scientific discourses of bio-politics, reproduction, genetics, and AI-enabled family mimicry. In this talk, Dr. Chow will focus on several contemporary Chinese and Asian diasporic films, including the box-office hits Dear You (2026) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), as well as the Taiwanese film Marry My Dead Body (2022). These films center on fraught families in transition, on traversing time and space to forge unlikely friendships, and on the need to tell stories as foundational to community in diaspora.

About the Speaker

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is Associate Professor of the Practice in Chinese and Japanese Cultural Studies at Duke University, and one of the founding directors of Story Lab at Duke. She is Director of Graduate Studies for the Duke Asian Pacific Studies Institute, as well as its interim director of APSI for 2025-26. She is also a founding/core faculty member of Duke Asian American and Diaspora Studies.

Elsewhere, Dr. Chow is Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan, and she co-directs the Biographical Literature Press and its longstanding Chinese-language history journal, Biographical Literature. She serves on the executive board of the LA Review of Books and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, Sinotheory.