Anna Chi, 'Dim Sum Funeral'

The story behind how "Dim Sum Funeral" director Anna Chi ended up becoming a filmmaker is, alone, the stuff of great screenplays. After all, how many successful, L.A.-based filmmakers can say that, in effect, Chairman Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party got them into the movie business? Chi can, and, though it was a long, often difficult journey, she still looks back at her early life as a child of China's Cultural Revolution with a mix of wonder and resignation.

"If you asked me today, I don't know that I'd say I hate or love [the Communist Party] because all my experience is from that very manipulated and in a sense innocent kind of child's point of view," said Chi, who at 9 became immersed in the start of the Cultural Revolution after a letter she wrote to her party-resistant father praising Chairman Mao inadvertently turned into a touchstone for communist ideology.

Over the next nine years, Chi became a member of the Communist Youth League and then a member of the Communist Party. As one of the privileged "Red Guards," Chi led a traveling propaganda team that spread the word of Chairman Mao and later worked and lived in the countryside as a "peasant."

"I didn't think it was crazy at the time," recalled Chi, 51, by phone from her Mar Vista home, where she was recuperating from hip surgery. "I thought these were great activities. You got to sing, you got to go to meetings and rallies and dances. It was very fun in a way since I was an only child and I guess always very lonely. I never got that much attention from anybody."

Mao's death in 1976 ended the Cultural Revolution, and Chi's focus on party politics waned along with it. Still, as one of 10,000 students originally selected by Mao to attend college, Chi went on to study literature -- the party's choice for her -- in Guangzhou (formerly Canton).

Though Chi expected to ultimately work as a journalist or a book editor, the party randomly decreed she would become a film editor. Despite zero background in cinema, Chi began working at a Beijing movie studio. "I started my film career by accident, by force," she noted.

By the late 1980s, after her party-arranged marriage that ended in divorce, a growing independent streak and an ever-widening departure from communist philosophy, Chi realized "they [the party] will win and I will have to give in" and that it was time to leave China. On the advice of friends who had moved to the U.S., Chi immigrated to Los Angeles with her 3-year-old son, even though she was wary about her destination. "To me, America was the No. 1 enemy to China," she said.