Yen Ching

In 2013, I came to Milwaukee to study film. To support myself, I took a job as a delivery driver at Yen Ching, a Chinese restaurant. At first, I was simply a temporary employee waiting for orders. Over time, I began distributing menus, photographing dishes, and helping the restaurant join online ordering platforms. Gradually, I became part of the Chen family’s daily life. The restaurant was not only their livelihood, but also the center of this immigrant family’s life together—a place where they worked, depended on one another, and tried to remain connected.Chen carried nearly every responsibility in the restaurant. As debt mounted and business continued to decline, he struggled to keep the restaurant afloat while hoping that his younger son would return after college to help the family. At the same time, he genuinely wanted his son to have a better future and avoid repeating the same exhausting cycle of labor. This contradiction became the emotional center of the film for me: parents sacrifice everything so their children can go farther, yet when those children begin to build independent lives, the family must confront how that independence may transform their relationships and way of life.Yen Ching is an observational documentary rooted in the repetitive rhythms of restaurant labor: washing dishes, answering phones, cooking meals, and waiting for customers. Within these seemingly ordinary moments, the tensions among family obligation, economic survival, and personal ambition gradually emerge. I did not want to reduce the Chen family to a familiar story of immigrants pursuing the American Dream. Instead, I wanted to preserve their complexity—a life in which perseverance and exhaustion, sacrifice and expectation, intimacy and silence are constantly intertwined.For me, making this film was also a process of self-recognition. As a Chinese immigrant newly arrived in the United States, I saw aspects of my own experience in the family’s struggles with language, work, and belonging. Filming them taught me that understanding the lives of others can also become a way of understanding oneself. Yen Ching was eventually sold, and the footage now stands as a record of a family, an immigrant restaurant, and a way of life that is gradually disappearing.