By Beatrice Farb

Westside artist Marc Hayashi has been a storyteller all his life. He was a founding member of the Asian American Theater Company, a pioneering local theater performance company. He went on to star in the cult classic film “Chan is Missing” (1982) set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and he had roles in various other Hollywood films including “The Karate Kid Part II” (1986).

Born in 1955 in Chicago, Hayashi moved with his family to San Francisco when he was 3 years old. He grew up in various homes on the west side, attending Sunnyside Elementary School in the Sunset.

As a child, he was surrounded by arts and activism. His aunt, Ruby Yoshino Schaar, a Bay Area native, was a nationally acclaimed opera singer. She was a trailblazer in the genre as a Japanese American and later served as president of a civil rights organization called the Japanese American Citizens League. Hayashi’s uncle, Henry Yoshino, was a larger-than-life jazz musician and tap dancer who would do routines for Hayashi and his brother as kids.

“Having this family history of aunts and uncles who were in the entertainment business, or performers, (made me) start to aspire,” Hayashi said. “Like, ‘Hey, you know, Uncle Henry is really flashy, and I want to be like that.’ Or my Aunt Ruby, she would come out in these grand visits, and she was quite a character.”

Years before this period, Hayashi’s parents and extended family were forced into internment camps, along with thousands of other Japanese Americans, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in 1942. In order to be freed from internment, his parents had to sign declarations of their loyalty to the U.S. government.

“It behooves people like me, who have the inclination and the memory, not to erase history from our memories, even though society wants us to,” Hayashi said.

His parents emerged from this time as further radicalized in their anti-war and anti-fascist beliefs, and they passed these beliefs on to their children.

“We were encouraged at dinner to speak up, speak very cogently, finish your arguments,” Hayashi said.

His parents became involved in the activist subculture that was developing in San Francisco in the ’60s and ’70s. They were organizers at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley, each organization deeply connected to counter-cultural movements in the area.

“We came of age alongside the left movement, the cultural movement,” he said. “The first 10 to 12 years of our lives were filled with the movement, being right there.”

Asian American Theater Company

Hayashi’s proximity to art and activism brought him to the fledgling Asian American Theater Company (AATC) as a teenager.

“(My brother) got involved with this street theater, or agitprop theater, political theater, that was Asian American based,” Hayashi said. “I remember going to watch them being a part of some street demonstration. That group of people was the germination of the Asian American Theater.”

Founded by playwright Frank Chin in 1973, AATC was a theater company dedicated to staging productions created and performed by Asian American artists. The company was based for many years at the corner of Arguello Boulevard and Clement Street in the Inner Richmond. It was the second-ever Asian American theater in the U.S., and was the first to exclusively stage plays written by Asian Americans.

“Our mission statement at Asian American Theater was to write very positive and proactive stories about Asian American culture,” Hayashi said. “Because Frank Chin was a playwright, we weren’t known as a theater that did the Western canon.”

According to Hayashi, the collective gained a reputation as a hub for young Asian American creatives to develop their craft.

“The word got out to other Asian American writers that the Asian American Theater in San Francisco is a place where you want to come because they’ll develop your work, and they have an ensemble that will help you develop it, which we did,” he said. “We were very activist-based, and we had a national reputation of being kind of like a vanguard theater, a cutting-edge theater. We were developing playwrights that would go on to some levels of success.”

The theater allowed young people to collaborate on work that spoke to the nuances of being an Asian American living in San Francisco in the ’70s. Hayashi was personally involved in many levels of production at the theater, from lighting, staging, directing and dramaturgy, to what became his main pursuit – acting.

“Chan is Missing”

During this period, Hayashi, then in his mid 20s, met a recent graduate of the California College of the Arts, Wayne Wang. Hayashi and Wang began developing a project that later became the feature length film, the 1982 movie “Chan is Missing.”

The film tells the story of Jo (Wood Moy), a taxi driver in San Francisco who is looking to buy a cab license, along with his nephew, Steve (Hayashi). Jo’s friend, Chan Hung, is meant to be the middleman for the transaction, but it is discovered that Chan has disappeared, along with Jo’s money. Steve and Jo set off looking for Chan, interviewing people throughout Chinatown.

Wang, Hayashi explained, knew how to market the film, and entered it in a slew of festivals.

“The New York Independent Festival was the big one at that time. The prestigious one. And it got in there and then it blew up,” Hayashi said.

The film got a distribution deal with New Yorker Films, and it was reviewed favorably by large publications including The New York Times. Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times called it a “whimsical treasure of a film that gives us a real feeling for the people of San Francisco’s Chinatown.”

With the project, Hayashi went from local prominence at the AATC to stardom in a nationally acclaimed film.

Los Angeles

Hayashi followed the success of “Chan is Missing” with a more than 10-year stint in Hollywood, his most significant role being in “The Karate Kid Part II” (1986), one of the highest grossing films of that year. Hayashi plays Taro in the film, a henchman to the film’s main antagonist.

Working on the movie exposed Hayashi to the complexity of the Hollywood machine, and he was struck by a visit by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush to the film’s set.

“To see the scale of things was impressive to me just as a human being,” Hayashi said. “Hollywood – it really is connected to the image-shaping of America, pure and simple. You know, the connection between all these higher systems, cultures of power.”

The role was significant for Hayashi, providing him with the financial stability necessary to continue working in Hollywood. However, he struggled to find meaningful roles as a Japanese American actor.

“Asian Americans were yellow minstrels. We were doing roles written about us from another culture’s perspective,” he said. “The better we did it – and the more self-effacing and self-deprecating we were – the more an actor would get hired for doing that.”

Hayashi recalled being one of the final actors up for the role of Long Duk Dong in the John Hughes film “Sixteen Candles” (1984). According to reporting from the National Public Radio, the character “represents one of the most offensive Asian stereotypes Hollywood ever gave America.”

Ultimately, Hayashi pulled out of consideration for the role.

“I told my agent, ‘this role will set Asian Americans back generations,’ and it did. It canonized and reinforced the new Asian stereotype, and I knew it was going to do that,” he said. “I had the creative maturity to go, ‘I don’t want to play this game. This is not what I’m about at all.’ But I honor the Asian Americans who continue to soldier on in that because that isn’t easy to do.”

Hayashi found himself at a crossroads. He had started his career at a theater made up of Asian American artists and found himself working in an industry mired in racism.

“People don’t realize that all the things that you see (in Hollywood) are very curated by audience participation over time. And you either fit that, or you don’t. I was naive to that because the Bay Area, where I came from, was pioneering a lot of multicultural casting,” he said. “Hollywood does what it does, and it does. It fails a lot of Americans, but Americans like what they see. The myth that Hollywood has created comes from the hopes and dreams of the country.”

Returning to San Francisco

Hayashi returned to San Francisco in 2000 to help his mother in caring for his ailing father. He initially did some work at the AATC and eventually retired from acting. Today, Hayashi is a staff member at Ocean Beach Cafe in the Outer Richmond, and he recently started doing freelance work as a director on small projects. Although he no longer considers himself a filmmaker, Hayashi is still a storyteller.

“What I enjoy doing is crafting stories,” he said. “I have really good instincts about shaping stories. I’m also great, as you can tell, at self-mythologizing, because I’ve had to, being Asian American. If you don’t tell people who you are, you’ll just disappear.”

To connect with Hayashi and find out more about his work, email hayashimarc55@yahoo.com.