Audiences close to the real-life incident, in particular those living in Iowa City at the time, may have trouble suspending their disbelief. In a New York Times article, director Chen said his film’s treatment deliberately steers away from a direct replication of Lu’s story.

One significant change Chen made was how the film’s protagonist, Liu Xing, was portrayed. The character has a much sunnier disposition and is connected to the people around him, unlike Lu, who isolated himself from all of his surrounding communities. Moreover, the film focuses on the tension between Liu and his adviser (Quinn), painting him as the bad guy who takes advantage of his student and then betrays him, thus sparking the violent ending.

“The movie’s favorable portrayal of Gang Lu as a victim is a distortion of what really happened,” the Rev. Jason Chen told the Iowa Independent. He played an integral role in the healing process for both the UI and Chinese communities. At the time of the incident, he was serving with the UI Campus Ministry and was involved with the Chinese community after helping to get a small Chinese church off the ground in Iowa City. He was called upon to work with the Chinese students and ended up serving as a mediator between the Chinese and university communities. Chen, who still resides in Iowa City, has since retired from his position at UI Campus Ministry but remembers the incident as if it happened yesterday.

“While some people tried reaching out to Gang Lu, he alienated himself from all the other members of the Chinese community, so there was nobody he could talk to, unfortunately,” the Rev. Chen said. “When the Chinese students first formed a panel, their first inclination was to tell the public that they don’t really know Gang Lu and that he’s a strange person.” The pastor interjected and reminded the students that Lu is still a member of the Chinese community and not to disown him only after what he had done. “Personally, I regret not having gotten to know him better.”

He also pointed to Lu’s inability to get a job as a determinant factor in his psychological unraveling. “The fact that he couldn’t find a job, which is perceived as failure in Chinese culture and when Chinese fail in any way, they have to think of away to save face,” he said. “Unfortunately, he chose a tragic way to do so. Even though cultural reasons and bad psychology distorted his perception, I hold Lu more personally responsible for his actions.”

Another significant difference is that the film focuses on the tension between Liu and his adviser (Quinn). The film’s director, Chen, was a graduate student at New York University at the time and told The New York Times that he recalled being puzzled by the shootings and the response. Fearing a backlash against Chinese immigrants, one Chinese newspaper ran a front-page apology for the shootings, in language its intended recipients couldn’t read. At the same time he saw a screen saver from a Chinese student association that read “Long live Gang Lu.”

“They held him as a hero. That really shocked me,” Chen told The New York Times.

Chen felt the story resonated with his own experiences and that of friends who came to the United States with huge expectations and found themselves lost or on the wrong end of a power struggle with their mentors. “A lot of people came in late ’80s. They never found a balance between the idea of America and the America they experienced,” Chen said.

Although this may ring true for some Chinese students, Rev. Chen said this was not the case for Lu. “He had an overblown estimation of himself. In letters he sent to his sister in China, Lu depicted himself as someone who knew more than his professors,” Rev. Chen said. “He certainly is very bright. He was handpicked by a Nobel prize-winning Chinese physicist to come to this country, not to mention he attended Peking University first, which is the Harvard of China.”

Rev. Chen said it may be true that some professors may, in the weakest moments, think of themselves and advancement. However, he said, from what he knew, this did not hold true for the UI physics professors at the time. “They bent over backwards to befriend the Chinese students, took them to places, and helped introduce them to the culture here,” Rev. Chen said. “In fact, Robert Smith, one of the professors who was killed, had a number of the physics students, including Gang Lu, over for dinner the week prior to the shooting. After the tragic event, when Mrs. Smith was asked what she thought of Gang Lu, she said `he is my friend.’ “

Dr. Gerald Payne, a professor in the UI Physics Department then and now, shared the same concern with the New York Times, and said he was worried Iowans would take the movie as literal truth, leaving the impression that UI professors had taken advantage of their students. “I don’t see that perception in my graduate students,” he told the New York Times. “When these things happen, people always look for a reason,” he said, noting that the UI had always treated its graduate students well, as colleagues and not indentured servants.

Nevertheless, Payne said, the university has tried to have more frequent and more regular get-togethers, like pizza parties and meetings. “Some of those things you should be doing anyway; it’s just part of a good education,” Payne said. “Some of that is a result of the shootings. We didn’t ignore the shootings. You get past those things, but you don’t forget them.”

‘Dark Matter’ Coming to Iowa City?

Despite the differences between what did happen and how “Dark Matter” dramatizes the tragic events that unfolded on Nov. 1, 1991, the film will start hitting the theaters April 11, followed by a gradual roll out. Whether it comes to Iowa City remains to be seen. Nonetheless, Rev. Chen’s successor at UI Campus Ministries has already contacted him to see if he’ll serve on a panel following a showing of “Dark Matter.”

“I’m sure people will go see the film out of curiosity,” Rev. Chen said. “But I don’t think the majority of the Chinese and international students will be sympathetic to how Gang Lu is portrayed. The majority of international students in Iowa City have very positive experiences here.” To help illustrate this, Rev. Chen described an event he attended after the shootings at the International Center, where then-Provost Peter Nathan reassured students that it was an act of an individual and that international students would continue to be welcomed to the community.

Moreover, Rev, Chen said he hopes the film helps create a heightened sense of awareness in that people will take more responsibility about people who isolate themselves. “Even if the person seems strange, they are still a member of our community,” he said.

He also called upon professors to take more personal interest in their students, other than adhering to the policy that students’ personal lives are private and they should not intrude.

“This is one of the big differences between Western and Eastern cultures. In a Western university culture, the professors’ responsibility ends when the lecture or research ends, rather than thinking of students as part of the community, a more holistic approach if you will,” Rev. Chen said. “If anything, this hands-off approach is the opposite with Asian culture, which is more controlling and sometimes over controlling when parents get too involved.”