Queer Detours and Ghostly Matters: Transpacific Archiving of Esther Eng’s Life and Work

In 2009, a box containing photographs related to Esther Eng arrived at scholar and filmmaker Louisa S. Wei’s office in Hong Kong out of the blue from Los Angeles. This box of photographs brought Wei to the United States in search of additional materials for a documentary on Esther Eng. The documentary, Golden Gate Girls, completed and released in 2013, was named after one of Eng’s films Golden Gate Girl. Wei’s documentary is one of the beginning attempts to locate and excavate archival materials surrounding the first woman director whose relatively short career as a filmmaker spans across a transpacific network between San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Malaya. Because most of Esther Eng’s work are either lost or never officially documented, the very gesture of writing about Eng and her work becomes an act of labor surrounding the creation of an archive with Eng as the object of study. But what kind of object are we creating by drafting narratives surrounding the very limited materials we have in hand of an iconic individual? Are these narratives anything more than our own desire to locate and situate politically charged and ideologically shaped meanings onto an absent archive of which we continue to assume its meanings and significance. This presentation will focus on Eng’s marginal status as a gendered and ethnic other, caught in the liminal space of her diasporic and professional identity as a filmmaker and restaurateur, to map out a non-linear narrative of queer detours and ghostly matters. I am especially interested in how AI could facilitate the creation of an archive surround Esther Eng’s life and work where primary materials and resources surrounding them no longer exist.