As he told an interviewer regarding his 2008 film, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, "I didn’t want subtitles because the audience should experience what those two are experiencing and not have any more information. Yet you could still understand. Sometimes the specifics of a language are not as important as the music of the language and the body language of the language.' Release Wayne Wang's primary distribution goal was to have the film, "play at festivals and college campuses", and as one of the first Asian American feature films, audience reactions to it spanned a spectrum of responses, sometimes dependent on the ethnicity of the viewer. One Chinese American viewer claimed the movie was written for a white audience because "…there being so much explaining, so many footnotes..." says Lem. Also according to Sterrit we see that "…its initial audience has not been an ethnic one, Chinese viewers are being wooed through newspaper ads…" Furthermore, the Asians were ‘wooed’ to watch the film by the white reviewers who reviewed the movie in the Asian press, therefore raising questions about whom the film catered to. Peter X Feng believes the success of this movie was through "the art-house audiences and brought the Asian Americans into the theaters." He also states that "reviews in the Asian American press often simply advertise the screenings; but the lengthier reviews usually refer to how white reviewers see Chinese Americans and how Asian American texts are received by non-Asian audiences." Wang arranged for the film to be screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) where it premiered as part of the New Directors/New Films series on April 24, 1982. Critical reception Chan is Missing is highly acclaimed. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 96% based on 49 reviews with the consensus: "An entertaining mystery that's also rich in setting and character detail, Chan is Missing suggests thrilling potential from director/co-writer Wayne Wang." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film 3 out of 4 stars and wrote that the film is "whimsical treasure of a film that gives us a real feeling for the people of San Francisco's Chinatown" and it "has already become something of a legend because of the way it was filmed" that it demonstrates a "warm, low-key, affectionate and funny look at some real Chinese-Americans" and went to say "almost without realizing it, we are