My Life in China

America ReFramed Season 4
  • Feature Film
  • 2016
  • 70 Mins

An unvarnished portrait of the life and memories of a stoic and reticent man committed to his family, My Life in China retraces the perilous steps filmmaker Kenneth Eng's father chanced in search of a better life. Exploring themes of home, exile, and belonging, the film is a story about promise, purpose, and living life without regrets.

More from this film

My Life in China

  • Feature Film
  • 2016

Trailer

An unvarnished portrait of the life and memories of a stoic and reticent man committed to his family, My Life in China retraces the perilous steps filmmaker Kenneth Eng's father chanced in search of a better life. Exploring themes of ...

Based on similar topics

Survivors

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Clip

Through the eyes of Sierra Leonean filmmaker Arthur Pratt, Survivors presents an intimate portrait of his country during the Ebola outbreak, exposing the complexity of the epidemic and the sociopolitical turmoil that lies in its wake. During one of the ...

Voices of the Sea

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Interview

Revealing stark realities for the poorest of rural Cubans with unique access and empathy, this is the story of a 30-something mother of four longing for a better life. The tension between wife and aging husband—one desperate to leave ...

Still Tomorrow

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Interview

A village woman with no high school diploma becomes China's most famous poet, and her book of poetry the best-selling such volume in China in the past 20 years. Still Tomorrow follows Yu Xiuhua, a 39-year-old woman living with cerebral ...

Whose Streets?

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Clip

When unarmed teenager Michael Brown is killed by police and left lying in the street for hours, it marks a breaking point for the residents of the St. Louis area and beyond. Whose Streets? is an unflinching look at the ...

Lindy Lou, Juror Number 2

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Trailer

For 20 years, Lindy has lived with an unbearable feeling of guilt. Committed to fulfilling her civic duty, Lindy sat with 11 other people on a jury that handed down the death penalty to a Mississippi man convicted of a ...

StoryCorps Shorts: The Temple of Knowledge

  • Short Film
  • 2018

Short Film

Ronald Clark's father was a custodian of a branch of the New York Public Library at a time when caretakers, along with their families, lived in the buildings. With his daughter, Jamilah, Ronald remembers literally growing up in a library ...

A Conversation with My Black Son

  • Short Film
  • 2018

Short Film

For generations, parents of black boys across the U.S. have rehearsed, dreaded and postponed œThe Conversation. But when their boys become teenagers, parents must decide how to handle discussions about race. In this short film originally published by The ...

Mother's Day

  • Short Film
  • 2018

Short Film

Once a year on Mother's Day, a charity bus service takes children to visit their mothers in prison across California. Nearly one in ten of the state's children have a parent in prison. Many are unable to regularly visit their ...

StoryCorps Shorts: Driven

  • Short Film
  • 2016

Short Film

Wendell Scott was the first African American inducted in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. His son, Frank, remembers what it took for his father to cross the finish line at racetracks throughout the South in the '60s and '70s.

From Damascus to Chicago

  • Short Film
  • 2017

Short Film

In the documentary short From Damascus to Chicago, two young Syrian siblings recently resettled in Chicago enroll in a dance class, while the film follows their family's experiences in navigating a new city and country.

Graven Image

  • Short Film
  • 2018

Short Film

Using over 100 years of archival footage, director Sierra Pettengill explores the history of the largest Confederate monument: Georgia’s Stone Mountain.

The Changing Same

  • Short Film
  • 2019

Short Film

In the Florida Panhandle lies the provincial town of Marianna, Florida, where resident and poet L. Lamar Wilson runs a particular marathon in hopes of lifting the veil of racial terror caused by the town’s buried history. A co-presentation ...

Stay Close

  • Short Film
  • 2019

Short Film

Stay Close blends home videos and animation in an expressionistic montage to tell the underdog story of Keeth Smart, an African American fencer from Brooklyn who overcomes a gauntlet of hardships on his road to the Olympics.

Crisanto Street

  • Short Film
  • 2020

Short Film

In the shadow of Silicon Valley, a hidden community thrives despite difficult circumstances. For one resident, eight-year-old Geovany Cesario, impending change is bittersweet.

Edgecombe

  • Short Film
  • 2020

Short Film

Through the deeply personal truths of three local residents, Edgecombe examines the ways trauma repeats and reinvents itself in rural black communities.

Gentlemen of Vision

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Trailer

Gentlemen of Vision follows a year in the life of coach, counselor and founder Marlon Wharton, and his 2015-2016 class of young Black males as he strives to rewrite future prospects for his students. While striving for excellence in school ...

For Ahkeem

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Trailer

Expelled from high school, Daje Shelton is only 17 years old when she is sentenced by a judge – not to prison, but to an alternative school, the Innovative Concept Academy. It offers Daje one last chance to earn a high ...

Agents of Change

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Trailer

Agents of Change examines the racial conditions on college campuses across the U.S. in the late 1960’s, focusing on student demands at two seminal protests: San Francisco State in 1968 and Cornell University in 1969. Many of the ...

100 Years

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Trailer

100 Years: One Woman's Fight for Justice​ is the compelling story of Elouise Cobell, a petite Blackfeet warrior from Montana, the great granddaughter of the legendary, Mountain Chief. As an advocate for Native American financial self-determination and independence, she conducted ...

The Invisible Patients

  • Feature Film
  • 2018

Trailer

Through the story of Jessica Macleod, Ph.D., a dedicated nurse practitioner in Evansville, Indiana, and her four homebound and marginalized patients, The Invisible Patients​ sheds light on some of the most urgent healthcare issues facing our nation today: from ...
SVG/POVCreated with Sketch.

Race/Related

  • Interactive
  • 2016

Clip

In 2016 POV partnered with The New York Times on the "embedded mediamaker" project, in which three filmmakers fluent in digital media spent several months working at the Times, creating interactive video projects about race and ethnicity. The work was ...
SVG/POVCreated with Sketch.

Snapchat Films

  • Interactive
  • 2016
In 2016, POV produced the first independent films ever for Snapchat Discover, distributed in partnership with the short-form digital content creator NowThis. In Lizzie Jacobs' We'll Still Be Here, dominoes players keep their beloved game alive while a neighborhood changes ...
SVG/POVCreated with Sketch.

Whiteness Project

  • Interactive
  • 2014
Whiteness Project is an interactive investigation into how Americans who identify as white, or partially white, understand and experience their race. Whiteness Project conducts interviews with people from all walks of life and localities in which they are asked about ...
SVG/POVCreated with Sketch.

89 Steps

  • Interactive
  • 2014
In the late 1950s, Marta's mother found refuge for her family in Williamsburg after leaving her village in Puerto Rico and enduring homelessness and hunger elsewhere in New York. When Marta became a single mother, she fought hard to stay ...
SVG/POVCreated with Sketch.

Empire

  • Interactive
  • 2014
The Dutch East and West India Companies once controlled vast trading networks that stretched from the Cape of Good Hope to the Indonesian archipelago, and from New York to South America's Wild Coast. Although they came in pursuit of short-term ...

Film Credits

  • Ehren Parks Writer, Producer
  • Kenneth Eng Directorkokoyakyu-kenneth-eng-85x85.jpg

Critical Acclaim

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unsealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.

Edward Said, Reflections in Exile

Press Room

America ReFramed Acquires the Compelling Documentary A Woman on the Outside to Open WORLD’s Newest Content Theme “Liberated Lives” Beginning March 28, 2024 POV Acquires Who I am Not, a Thoughtful Documentary About What it Means to be Intersex in a Binary World, Will Debut as Part of POV’s 37th Season Launching Summer 2024 POV Acquires Danish Director Lin Alluna’s Twice Colonized, About Inuit Lawyer Aaju Peter’s Life-long Fight for Indigenous Rights; Will Debut as Part of POV’s 37th Season Launching Summer 2024
More from The Press Room

Broadcast schedule

Check your local PBS station
for upcoming airings of America ReFramed

More from this series

Learn more about America ReFramed