Hong Kong-born, San Francisco-bred director Wayne Wang was an influential part of the American independent film movement of the 1980s and ’90s, with movies like the groundbreaking Chan Is Missing, 1993’s unlikely hit The Joy Luck Club and Smoke. This fall, after a six-year, three-film detour into studio filmmaking, he returns with not one but two intimately scaled movies adapted from author Yiyun Li’s work: The Princess of Nebraska (premiering on YouTube on October 17), about a young Chinese college student (Li Ling) in the United States who leaves school to contend with an unwanted pregnancy, and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, in which a retired Chinese widower (Henry O) comes to Los Angeles to visit his only daughter, Yilan (Faye Yu). In advance of their release, I sat down with Wang not long ago at a Beverly Hills hotel; for an excerpt from the Q&A chat, from H Magazine, click here. More to follow from the interview in the coming days.