Commentary | "AKA Don Bonus" (1995)

When we are talking about Asian American representations, especially male ones, Don Bonus is both a positive and complicated figure. He was a representation of Asian American men that I have never encountered before until this film. His face is familiar, but his story is not—he is a Cambodian refugee living and dealing with poverty, robbery and vandalism in a ghetto in San Francisco. While he is trying to find comfort in his family, he has no father, his mother is often gone with her boyfriend, his older brother/father figure has moved away and “assimilated,” and his other brother has recently been sent to jail due in part to the inefficiency of the government and law enforcement to protect kids like him in schools and on the street.

His situation reminded me of some classmates I had in high school, who I’d once heard described as “parachute kids”—those who had been brought or sent to America by their parents but were essentially left without guidance. Needless to say, Don Bonus experiences heavy feelings of loss. I felt that this was the first film we’ve watched so far that had a startling grip on the present instead of trying to revive or understand the past. I was especially moved by his relative Touch and his discussion of “reality”—how the political and military actions of the U.S. brought immigrants here, and the subsequent bitterness of escaping civil war only “to be treated like shit” in America. Even though this argument is an explicit criticism of structural racism, it remains staggering because it isn’t a point of view that gets to be expressed often.

Yet despite the number of heavy issues it deals with as a film, AKA Don Bonus is still so appealing because it doesn’t ask for your sympathy or come across as a “social justice” piece. For the most part, it feels like Don Bonus made the movie more for himself and his family than to persuade anyone else for their sympathy. Don Bonus is not someone we decide we should feel sorry for; instead, he is a real person who experiences the day to day highs and lows of immigrant life in America. In the follow up, he describes his experience making the film as a form of self-counseling, something that created a space for him to talk about his problems and his environment, and to express his emotions. In all honesty, I appreciated that analogy so much because I feel like this blog on Asian American film serves as that kind of space for me.

Company Credits (via ExEAS.org):
Production Company / Independent (Dir. Spencer Nakasako), Center for Asian American Media
Distributors / Center for Asian American Media, National Asian American Telecommunications Association

Commentary | "History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige" (1991)

Filmmaker Rea Tajiri is well-known for her avant-garde style -- so when I watched this film I was prepared me to examine her work within an avant-garde framework, meaning I was prepared to search for abstract meaning in “germinal” images and conceptual film techniques. Though her scrolling script and zooms and pans on still images were certainly powerful, what I found most compelling about History and Memory was simply Tajiri’s narration. There was a haunting quality to her voice, something in her tone that made it clear that she needed to find justice and resolution for this piece of her life that she somehow had always known was missing. Because her family did not have photographs or belongings that could serve as memoirs, she drew from her memory an image of her mother filling a canteen in the desert.

Along with this image, Tajima explores a number of seemingly unrelated fragments and weaves them together, allowing them to draw from and enrich one another until they become a tangible and personal story about the internment camps. She creatively inserted her memories and their spin-offs alongside a history that was told through Hollywood images of Japanese Americans and World War II propaganda. For Tajiri, combining history and memory was an attempt to reconstruct her own version of history—her decided choice to identify a story to tell among a history that was incredibly multi-layered and even confusing.

Despite it being somewhat fictionalized, her film nevertheless comes across and feels truthful because she reconciles that she’s still struggling to fill in the gaps. I felt that the disjointed nature of the film really spoke to how difficult it is to represent the past. And when she said, “I began searching because I felt lost, ungrounded,” her words expressed an inherent sadness that I felt we could all relate to; sadness about a past that is not necessarily ours but that we empathize with because it relates to what we could image our own family’s experience to be, and for more reasons that are hard to articulate.

Company Credits (via wmm.com):
Production Company / Unknown
Distributor / Women Make Movies (wmm.com)

Commentary | "American Sons" (1995)

“Racism made me—the way I look, the way I walk, the way I talk.”

The varying experiences of the Asian American men interviewed in American Sons allowed the filmmaker, Steven Okazaki, to show that despite our experiences as Asian American individuals, who we are as Asian Americans is in fact a response to racism. This idea takes inspiration from cultural nationalist thought which privileges race above other issues (such as feminism in Deborah Gee's Slaying the Dragon), and positions that being Asian American means existing in a constant state of fluidity that is in dialogue with and reacting to different cultural contexts.

This film exemplifies how Asian American men’s lives are often grounded in multiple sets of conflicting culture-specific meanings and practices; competing identities which only make it more difficult to construct individual subjectivity. These performances powerfully presented how this struggle can dangerously lead to anger, but the film does a good job to show how anger can be both justified and rectifiable as well. In the end, the filmmaker suggests that the only way to mediate between those competing identities is to pursue an individual path; one that defies others’ expectations not just for the sake of it, but to the end that it satisfies the individual as well.

Company Credits (via ExEAS.org):
Production Company / Farallon Films
Distributor / Center for Asian American Media

Commentary | "Slaying the Dragon" (1988)

Slaying the Dragon explores the notion that in American society the perception of Asian women has bled onto Asian-American women, allowing mythical stereotypes of Asian ancestry create illusions of who we are culturally. The women interviewed argue that being an Asian woman means that people have already formed an opinion about who you are and should be based on their subconscious expectations of what Asian women ought to be, brought about by the fantasy images put forth by Suzie Wong-like characters in film and media. They introduce films like Flower Drum Song to show Asian American women disparately characterized as either sexual beings or women of integrity, which in turn endorsed a certain kind of misogyny from white men who felt it their duty to either ravage or rescue.

Though I agree with this assertion, I felt that the issue of white male misogyny was only one part of several other difficulties involving both gender and culture. One of the main reasons it is so difficult to construct an Asian American female identity that goes against what is imposed by the mainstream is our own co-optation of those stereotypes when they benefit us. The pressure to “sell out” and play up the role of the “safe” Asian American woman who is coy and pleasing comes not only from the expectations of white men, but men in general and in many cases women as well. I am often reminded (by my mother no less) that an attractive woman is independent and strong, but also docile and complementary to a man in order to assuage his ego. So if Asian women deviate from the characters and cultural norms prescribed to them, they are outcast not only by men but by their culture as well. Doesn't this pressure to be everything to everyone, and have that identity be enough for oneself, seem incredibly isolating?


Company Credits (via asianamericanmedia.org):
Production Company / Asian Women United
Distributors / Asian Women United, Center for Asian American Media

Commentary | "Chan is Missing" (1982)

Chan is Missing asks a central question concerning Asian American identity—whether there is one, and to what extent assimilation plays a part in constructing it. This film was very accessible to me in its discussion of race because it portrayed the tension between wanting to retain Chinese culture exclusively or assimilate completely.

For instance, while a film like Flower Drum Song (1961) extols becoming fully American, Chan is Missing presents a more complicated picture; one that certainly relates to my own experience about wanting to retain the “good things” from my Chinese culture and using American culture to enhance my individual life. Director Wayne Wang’s solution to this mystery is precisely that everything is so contradictory despite what most of the film’s characters consider as fact. When Jo sets out to better understand who Chan Hung is, he is met with a myriad of perspectives about Chan and about Asian American identity—and throughout the film it seems that Jo is struggling to figure out if and where these perspectives intersect, both for Chan and his own sake.

Personally my opinion was swayed as each new perspective was introduced because I related to them in different ways. Perhaps most salient to me was the generational conflict between the “Chinatown politics” argument (“If they don’t want to recognize us, they will not recognize us”) versus Steve’s insistence that trying to find an Asian American identity was old news. It made me question whether identity was a group or individual finding, and whether it is fair to choose between the two in forming an Asian American identity that is profoundly shaped by both of its components.



Company Credits (via IMDb.com):
Production Company & Distributor / New Yorker Films

Commentary | "Flower Drum Song" (1961)

My initial reaction to Flower Drum Song was one of indifference. Though I had heard of the movie, I was unfamiliar with its subject matter and therefore viewed it as simply another generic old Hollywood musical. Certainly upon closer inspection, Flower Drum Song is not simply a standard American musical set in San Francisco’s Chinatown; the mere fact that the movie concerns generations of Chinese American characters is in itself a stark departure from anything typically Hollywood.

One of the numbers I found most aggravating was “Chop Suey,” because the notion of “chop suey” that the song seems to be trying to suggest would entail an actual blend of cultures. What I saw and heard instead were only stigmatized images of Chinese traditions (American dance styles that ended with “Asian” bows) and a glorification of American culture (“Hula hoops and nuclear war/ Doctor Salk and Zsa Zsa Gabor…”).

To give the film some historical context, its release date was in step with the Civil Rights Movement -- information which only furthered my critical perception of the film. Considering the contemporaneous threat of “blackness” and the need for different racial groups to align as either closer to “black” or closer to “white” allowed me to understand why Flower Drum Song has been criticized for its implication that the “good Asian” is one who assimilates and maintains the model minority image that continues to persist in the mainstream.




Company Credits (via IMDb.com):
Production Companies / Hunter-Fields, Universal International Pictures
Distributors / Universal Pictures (1961) (USA) (theatrical), National Broadcasting Company (NBC) (1968) (USA) (TV) (original airing)

Mission Statement

What is Asian America?

During my first Asian American Studies class, this was the first question my professor posed. And even after weeks of study and a lifetime of firsthand experience, it remains a question that I have too many and too few answers for all at once.

What I can say about being Asian American is that one’s cultural attributes are constantly being redefined. In a sense, being Asian American means to exist in a constant state of being yet at the same time, a constant state of fluidity. For this reason, Asian American produced media and the genre of film in particular possesses so much potential for empowering Asian Americans as a community.

I’m fascinated by how the process of filmmaking is also an ongoing project of unlearning the images and messages Asian Americans are told on a daily basis about our identity. Asian American filmmakers explore the tensions between different aspects of representation, gender, history, and memory.

It is this exploration which allows us to realize that these ideas are in conversation with each other, both competing and complementing, and doing all of these things at once.

This website is my attempt to keep this conversation going. I want this to be a space where anyone concerned with the reconstruction and reifying of fictionalized histories in film can discuss how Asian American media can be subversive in the mainstream. And perhaps, for the prejudices of the past, this can be a space in which to find justice and resolution.

-- JL