Rae Dawn Chong & Billy Dee Williams

An IMDiversity Interview

Regardless of race, nearly all families seem to do that dysfunctional dance. In a new Urbanworld film release, The Visit, a young African American, Alex Waters (Hill Harper), imprisoned for rape discovers he's dying of AIDS. After five years of shunning him, his family finally comes around for a visit. Leading the parade is his unforgiving father, played by veteran actor Billy Dee Williams, and his older brother and mentor, Tony (Obba Babtunde). Before long, Alex's childhood friend, Felicia (Rae Dawn Chong), herself an incest survivor and a recovering crack addict, also stops by to lend support and share the most poignant exchange of dialogue with Waters in the entire film. The film was directed, written, and produced by Jordan Walker-Pearlman.

In anticipation of the film's early March release, IMDiversity contributing editor Yayoi Lena Winfrey spoke with Mysterious Ways star Chong and Wheels of Justice star Billy Dee Williams. Not surprisingly, the conversations about the film and their careers turned to their own Afro-Asian families.

Rae Dawn Chong

Most of us boomers remember Rae Dawn Chong as the daughter of comedian/actor Tommy Chong, one half of Cheech and Chong, the zany marijuana-smoking duo who gave us many funny albeit forgettable flicks. But while Tommy Chong tickled us silly, his corkscrew-haired, dimply daughter dazzled us with her dramatic onscreen debut in Quest for Fire at the tender of age 18. Since then, she has appeared in over 20 films including The Color Purple, Soul Man, Beat Street, Commando and Choose Me.

In The Visit, Chong portrays a woman who "comes from the depth of depravity."

"It's an incredible role," exclaims Chong. "She's a survivor...She's been in prison. She kills her father. She's been sexually molested by him and has a child from him. He molests the child. She falls into a heavy-duty crack cycle and she pulls herself up."

Breathlessly, Chong continues, "She comes to visit Hill's character...a childhood friend who always sort of cherished her...(to let him know) that he can choose another way...(The Visit is) about forgiveness...of the self, a universal theme that's not just indicative of our community."

Forgiveness is something Chong has dealt with gracefully in her tumultuous life. Born to an African Canadian mother, she was nearly given up for adoption before her father's Irish mother and Chinese father begged for the chance to raise her.

"We were very close," says Chong about her grandfather. "Pop Chong, we called him," she giggles.

Raised partly in Vancouver with him, Chong observed that her grandfather "was ashamed of being Chinese as he didn't have the support of family around him. He was basically an orphan. He didn't have that strong cultural pressure to keep things Chinese--or Cantonese, in our case...I feel that my grandfather never had an opportunity to enjoy and be proud of his Chinese heritage."

As a child, Chong "just thought it was normal, that everyone...had a Chinese grandfather...(that) eats with chopsticks."

She laments that "Pop Chong" was unable to "share with us. It's a big pain for me. I know there was lot of persecution in Vancouver at the time. Chinese were quarantined...in a small area for a very long time. My grandfather was a victim. It makes me sad...I can feel...certain things in me. Isn't that funny? I love all the Chinese movies. I feel that's a part of my heritage that I didn't get to explore."

"In the Otherness of Life"

According to Chong, her Irish grandmother, "a really wonderful Chinese chef," taught her to cook Chinese food. And, thanks to her dad, she was endowed with a multicultural attitude.

"My Chinese-Irish father hung out only with Black people when he grew up," she says. "He was Afrocentric...all of his friends were Black musicians."

About being multiracial she says, "We're sort of in the otherness of life. It's a fascinating challenge...It's wonderful the way that (mixed) people click and break off into subgroups from the super Afrocentric to the Anglo. The confusion when you're multiethnic or multiracial is that you have a tendency not to have a place to call your own. When I see other mixed kids, I say we're in the same tribe."

Chong has felt the sting of racism often.

"As a Black woman, you have to be careful if you're driving late night," she says referring to the practice by some police of routinely stopping cars with Black drivers. "In my opinion...it has to do a lot with training."

"As far as the Chinese scientist (Wen Ho Lee)," she continues, "if the ethnic press is saying 'you guys are racist', then listen to them. I go to Washington State and Vancouver, Canada and at Customs I have been pulled over more times. If I was a white woman I know for a fact I wouldn't get hassled with."

Currently, Chong can be seen playing Peggy Fowler on NBC's Mysterious Ways.

"She's a skeptic about miraculous phenomenon," laughs Chong who is, ironically, "a complete believer."

"My advice to anybody (aspiring to act) is to just passionately, beyond all and everything, love acting. If you want to be actress, you better love it.... (Feel like) you would die if you don't do it. The truth is they don't pay me to act. I would do that for free. They pay me to sit in the trailer."

Billy Dee Williams

Like the many smooth-talking ladies' men he's portrayed over the decades, Billy Dee Williams speaks soft and slowly so that I'm able to type while listening.

"It's a wonderful movie," he tells me immediately about The Visit. "It's one of the best experiences in all the years I've been doing this."

The Emmy-nominated (Brian's Song) thespian brushes off his Independent Spirit Award nomination for best supporting actor for The Visit with a humble mumble.

"There's nothing like winning," he admits. "I think it's a nice compliment."

Williams' character, a demanding father who can't come to grips with his younger son's troubling attitude, has a hard time expressing himself.

"It's a beautiful...highly charged emotional journey and it won't let you go," says Williams about the film. "When you get into that room, you start watching the whole thing...The story, the relationship, the interaction, the music, the visual stuff...it just envelops you. I see people come out of the theater and...it just grabs you."

The Visit is based on Kosmond Russell's play of the same name. Williams, who has enjoyed success with films like Lady Sings the Blues, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Batman got his start in theater.

"I felt like I was being reintroduced to ensemble acting," he says. "It was nice, too...where the chemistry works for everybody."

"[The Visit is] entirely theatrical, no question about that," says Williams. "Devoid of all the violence and sexual nudity. There's none of those things to grab your emotions. It's about...the redemption of love that revolves around a boy who finds himself in an absolute total dilemma."

"One of the things I really love about this," he adds, "it transcends the whole question of ethnicity and I've never seen that with Black people in film before. Not on this level. This is about decent people who are not in trouble, a father that cares about his family. A man who has worked hard all his life devoted to his clan, his people, his family. He's from the old school. When something goes wrong he can't understand why...because he feels he did everything right as a parent. He's not a person who is given to expressing his love although he loves. He's tough-minded, he's hard times. I understand it very well because of my own life in terms of my life with my father."

Williams hails from New York City, where his mother, an aspiring actress, studied opera for many years.

"My father was...not well-educated," he says. "He worked all his life to take care of his family."

"An Advocate of Mixture"

Like the Chongs, the Williamses are a multiethnic family.

"My daughter is part-Japanese. My wife is Japanese...All my children were raised around a whole eclectic point of view," says Williams. "I'm a great advocate of mixture...My life was that and that's how I raised my children...we had all kinds of people in our home..."

Williams' son and stepdaughter, who are both monoracial, were "raised in the same way."

His wife was born in an interment camp during the war.

"She didn't know anything," says Williams. "She was a baby. We were talking about it last night at dinner. The parents and grandparents understood the imposition. As children, they didn't know."

Asked about reparations, he laughs.

"She accepted the check they gave her," he chuckles.

"I think that's what life is going to be," says Williams, commenting about race mixing. "Historically, we don't want to acknowledge it. That's where it's going to, no matter...our disposition we have about diversity. It's inevitable."

When it comes to the state of Black films today, Williams thinks, "The sooner we get off this issue, this question of the Black experience, then you really start having an experience."

As for race relations in America, he says, "It's all bad. We're still fighting the old battles, the old wars and, you know, one would think we're past that. But we're not...but I guess it's about getting to people's insecurities, the people who are afraid are to deal with other cultures..."

"Don't!" he jokes when asked what he'd tell young people aspiring to be a Billy Dee Williams. "If I serve as an example, as somebody who is reaching into the future, then I think that I know I've contributed. I made a good contribution."

With an incredible musical score, The Visit also features topnotch acting by Marla Gibbs as the heartbroken mother and Phylicia Rashad as the frosty prison psychiatrist. Be forewarned though. Like any dysfunctional family, the protagonists in this film serve as a painful reminder of how much alike we all are beneath our skins.

Stills from The Visit, copyright Urbanworld Films, 2000, and used here with permission. Top: Rae Dawn Chong, Hill Harper, Terell Mitchell, Billy Dee Williams, Obba Babatunde, and Charmin Lee White. Bottom: Billy Dee Williams stars as Henry Waters.