Moviegoers haven’t had an easy time keeping up with Wayne Wang. For more than 25 years, directing works based on original material, adaptations, and collaborations, the San Francisco– and New York–based filmmaker has seemed to sashay back and forth from the art house to the multiplex (and to some points unknown) entirely at his own pace. He’s kind of an oddball that way, lucky for us. But it’s kept him from having a signature style, from making pictures that someone might categorize as “classic Wayne Wang.” The movies that probably make Wang the most money are the ones we identify least with him: If you’re thinking, “That J-Lo flick Maid in Manhattan—that was him?” you’re not alone.

Happily, in his two new films, Wang has swung back to doing what many of us think he does best: small-scale, closely observed personal tales more calmly quotidian than indulgently movie-ish. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska may never make it above the mainstream radar, but they’re right in line with the films that made us first cherish Wang’s work.

It’s no surprise to learn that both movies were adapted from short stories by Oakland writer and fellow Chinese immigrant Yiyun Li. Wang’s world often seems constitutionally congruent with the Bay Area: It’s full of characters who are somehow displaced, and whose relations with their families—or, more broadly, with their communities—become strained. We watch and often relate as they endure crises, or at least puzzling ambiguities, of identity.

A Hong Kong native, Wang came to the Bay Area in the late ’60s to study film at Oakland’s California College of the Arts (formerly California College of Arts and Crafts). Perhaps because he was an outsider making his way in, he saw the self-righteousness in the era’s heady atmosphere of politically charged self-awareness. Wang preferred making fictional documentaries, feeling that the conventional docs of the day seemed too piously certain they’d cornered the market on truth.

His feature debut was Chan Is Missing (1982), a moody, open-ended voyage into San Francisco’s Chinatown that blurred the boundary between fiction and documentary. In Chan’s skeletal plot, two Chinatown cab drivers try to track down the fresh-off-the-boat Chinese friend who’s vanished with thousands

of their dollars. In their search, they discover a maze of neighborhood nooks abuzz with overlapping chitchat in various languages, with the ultimately unsolvable mystery of their missing thief at the center. It still holds up as a beautifully realized little film that plays by its own rules.

Some critics, including me, have long felt that Wang should eschew mass-audience contrivance and stick with the singular, scrappy intimacy that made Chan Is Missing and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), his strong sophomore effort—about the domestic tension between a widow and her unmarried daughter—so memorable. He followed Dim Sum with the now largely forgotten Slam Dance (1987), about a reluctantly divorced cartoonist (Tom Hulce, still hot after Amadeus) framed for murdering his mistress (Virginia Madsen). Then Wang went utterly mainstream with his adaptation of Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club (1993), a look at cultural and generational strife between several Chinese mothers and Chinese American daughters that seems, in retrospect, a shade too melodramatic, overly rosy, and predictable.

Critics like me figure that if Wang must insist on avoiding the pigeonhole of the immigrant-experience drama (fair enough), he should at least continue in the vein of Smoke (1995), a charming and inventive art-house favorite he cocreated with New York author Paul Auster from Auster’s short story “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story.” It too was about fractured families, but in this case, they shared their stories in a Brooklyn cigar shop run by Harvey Keitel.

Instead, Wang came out with the more coldly arty Chinese Box (1997), putting Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, and Maggie Cheung in a forlorn cross-cultural love story set against the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. Then came Anywhere but Here (1999), a forgettable coming-of-age dramedy with Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. A few years later, Wayne went from the experimental erotic psychodrama The Center of the World (2001) straight to the center of the road: the Cinderella rom-com confection Maid in Manhattan (2002), in which, yes, Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes look for love in the space between their social strata; Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), about a girl and her dog; and a remake of 1950’s Last Holiday (2006), in which Queen Latifah makes the most of her few remaining weeks to live. All three movies were better than expected, but easy for film snobs

to pick on. Where were the social-movement bravura, the wily blurring of fact and fiction, the unapologetically eccentric and still-new-to-movies subcultures of San Francisco’s Chinatown?

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska, taken together, should make everybody happy. The former concerns the multilayered failures of communication between an elderly Beijing widower and his daughter, whom he visits in Spokane to console and interrogate about her recent divorce. The latter follows a young Chinese woman who comes to San Francisco to have an abortion—and to confront the older male lover of the young man who got her pregnant.

Both films involve characters taking journeys with conflicting intentions. Each reflects the perceptive, epigrammatically concise style of the stories from which they originate, even as their own styles differ. A Thousand Years, starring Chinese-born actors Henry O and Faye Yu, is the showpiece. It’s a quiet, glassy med­itation whose formal rigor is palpable. Princess reads (on purpose) as an offhand companion piece, a nearly guerilla-style, shoestring-budget production with nonprofessional actors. Wang has worked this sort of one-two punch before, releasing both Eat a Bowl of Tea (a light comedy about the mayhem of arranged Chinese marriages) and Life Is Cheap…but Toilet Paper Is Expensive (a surreal gangster thriller set in Hong Kong) in 1989, and pairing Smoke with Blue in the Face (a largely improvised and surprisingly agreeable hodgepodge of Smoke’s leftover story lines) six years later. It’s hard to know how to interpret this quirk of Wang’s moviemaking technique, but the movies themselves have intriguing family dynamics, with common aspects but independent wills.

Both of the new films play to Wang’s passions and strengths. You get the Chinese American culture-conflict stuff, but without the Joy Luck Club gloss; and the experimental indie-film stuff, sans the Center of the World head trip. Instead, he gives us stories of Chinese people trying on American lives, which they find compromised not just by standard

cultural differences, but also by personal baggage and heavy regrets. Stories, in other words, that seem authentic. That’s thanks partly to the fine source material from Yiyun Li. But it’s also because Wang has made it his professional priority to understand how language and culture can create and destroy and confuse identity. That’s what makes a classic Wayne Wang film.

So, if next year he wants to cast Adam Sandler as a trailer-park slacker who lives with his mother and sends away for a mail-order bride who turns out to be a musical prodigy (wait for it, in Good Cook, Likes Music)—well, don’t you at least want to see what he’ll do after that?

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Jonathan Kiefer, a San Francisco contributing writer, has a book about Bay Area cinema forthcoming from City Lights Books.