FEATURE: ASIAN AMERICAN CINEMA'S "NEW" GLOBAL SCOPE

Preface: This feature was written for the Asian Cinevision 2008 Cinevue catalog and I tackled what I saw as two growing, parallel trends in Asian American cinema, namely 1) the emergence of what you might call "new immigrant" stories that have a markedly different relationship to ethnic identity compared to previous generations and 2) more and more Asian American filmmakers traveling to Asia to make their films. I tackle this with a historical awareness that both trends have important antecedents but also try to discuss what's different now and where this all may be headed.

THE FEATURE (originally appeared in Asian Cinevision's Cinevue).

From Far to Near: Asian American Cinema Expands

In Ron Morales’ new feature, SANTA MESA (2008), Hector, a 12-year old from New Jersey, is tragically orphaned and sent to live with his grandmother in a shantytown on the outskirts of Manila. She speaks little English; he speaks no Tagalog. Not surprisingly, for Hector, his first days in the Philippines are marked by displacement, bewilderment and uncertainty.

For much of the history of Asian American filmmaking, those sensations of alienation were typically reserved for immigrants coming from Asia, not to it. Dozens of features have dealt with the identity struggles of immigrants navigating American society. In recent years, two different—but linked—counter-trends have emerged however. One is what we see in SANTA MESA—Asian American filmmakers like New York-based Morales, exploring stories set in Asia. The other are new Asian immigrant narratives, captured poignantly in both Wayne Wang’s new THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA (2008) and So-Yong Kim’s IN BETWEEN DAYS (2006), where young migrants seem more at home, even away from home, than previous generations who struggled with dual-identities and confused loyalties.

What links these two trends is the shrinking distance between nations and societies. Call it globalism, transnationalism or whatever else but the forces of information age economics, expanding electronic media and travel infrastructure have made borders more porous, relocations more temporary. Especially for upwardly mobile Asians and Asian Americans alike, the line between migrancy and tourism has blurred considerably and filmmakers are exploring these changing perspectives and realities with new narratives. As Dennis Lim wrote in the New York Times in 2006, these films “test the basic assumptions of what constitutes an American film,” while at the same time, laying claim to, “the utopian notion that all of world cinema is up for grabs.”

Whether this trend is “new” is all relative. Even in the 1980s, filmmakers were already playing with prescient ideas around dislocation and transnationalism. Peter Wang’s celebrated A GREAT WALL (1986) followed a Chinese American family’s visit to Beijing with a subtle, humorous eye towards the similarities and differences in cultural sensibilities. Likewise, Wayne Wang’s oft-spoken about, rarely seen LIFE IS CHEAP...BUT TOILET PAPER IS EXPENSIVE (1989) followed a San Francisco native trying to navigate Hong Kong’s back alleys while toting a mob boss’ MacGuffin.

These early exceptions aside though, throughout the 1980s and 90s, the predominant themes leaned more towards immigrants adjusting to America as a “new home,” and all the drama (and hilarity) that ensues. These stories elided well with “generation gap” melodramas where older, immigrant parents clashed with their Americanized children. That core conflict became resonant for practically every Asian American ethnic community, including Chinese American (JOY LUCK CLUB,1993), Filipino American (THE DEBUT, 2000), Vietnamese American (CATFISH IN BLACK BEAN SAUCE, 1999) and South Asian American (ABCD, 1999).

Particularly in the post-1965 era of Asian American immigration, these stories made good sense: coming to America often became a permanent condition. As such, learning to “become Asian American” often meant negotiating different identities and practices, especially between generations. Certainly, those challenges continue to be true for thousands of families, especially among refugee populations whose decisions to relocate to America are driven less by choice and more by necessity.

At the same time, much has also changed in recent decades. Even for those settled in the U.S., the modern mediascape has transformed people’s ability to stay in touch with “home.” News and entertainment can be readily accessed by something as basic as a cell phone, music and film cross continents at satellite speed and the growth of diasporic ethnic communities around the world maintain “local” ties even thousands of miles away. Moreover, whereas the older model confronting Asian Americans was often cast between total assimilation and cultural nationalism, the more contemporary view accepts far greater amalgamation as different cultural and political influences shade over into one another. As well, an increasing number of Asians live transnationally transient lifestyles, shuttling between Asian and American cities because of school, family, or work.

Some of these differences are brilliantly embodied in two young female characters from recent films—Jiseon Kim’s Aimie from IN BETWEEN DAYS’ and THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA’s Sasha, played by Ling Li. Both teens are relatively new immigrants to America and both deal with familiar feelings of alienation...but not by their surroundings. For example, the titular “princess,”, Sasha floats around Bay Area, seeking support for her unexpected pregnancy, yet she’s also manages to stay in contact with friends around the world via her incessant text messaging and cell phone videos.

Notably, Sasha switches between Mandarin and English easily, almost unconsciously, as if multilingualism was the social norm (and in some American enclaves, it may as well be). She may have a host of personal problems—beyond just her unwanted pregnancy - but figuring out “what it means to be Asian American” is not a question that haunts her. Sasha’s existential battles have little to do with nationality or even geography; one could just as easily imagine her in Singapore or Stuttgart, Cebu or Sao Paolo, dealing with the same dilemmas.

Taking a different tack, is Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker’s TAKE OUT (2004, AAIFF04), an almost verité-like chronicling of the day-in-the-life of a working class Chinese delivery person. On a grander scale, a spate of recent films such as Ham Tran’s powerful epic, JOURNEY FROM THE FALL (2006) and Tim Bui’s GREEN DRAGON (2002) chronicle the immense upheaval visited upon Southeast Asian survivors from the Vietnam conflict. They remind us that globalism’s hand has not just created free market movement but also millions of unwitting migrants too.

These crossings have gone in the other direction as well. Just as more Asian American films are paying attention to the changing face of immigration, it is Asian American directors who are entering migrant channels as well, taking themselves over to Asia. Tran and Tim’s brother Tony Bui have been part of this wave as well as American-born or raised filmmakers making films in Asia. Again, this is not a wholly “new” phenomenon but it has gathered steam over the last decade. Bui’s award-winning THREE SEASONS (1999) was an early example, as was Joan Chen’s impressive directorial debut, XIU XIU (1998).

In more recent years, there’s been a flurry of cross-national productions, including Stephane Gauger’s OWL AND THE SPARROW (2007), shot in Vietnam; Kern Konwiser and David Ren’s romantic melodrama SHANGHAI KISS (2007), shot in L.A. and Shanghai; Fatimah Tobing’s vignette about AIDS and motherhood in Jakarta in CHANTS OF LOTUS (2007); and Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon’s psychological thriller, CAVITE (2005), which, like Morales’ SANTA MESA, largely takes place in the back streets and slums of Manila. On a practical level, the lower cost of production overseas is a compelling factor but more importantly, filmmakers have taken the opportunity to explore new storylines specific to their location, whether it’s the intertwining of religion and terrorism in CAVITE or the folkloric ghost stories circulating in Romeo Candido’s ANG PANAMA (2006).

One of the most interesting films along these lines has been first-time filmmaker Johnny Kwok’s b-boy drama, ALWAYS BE BOYZ (2008). Drawing on dozens of stories lived within the volatile b-boy community in South Korea, the film highlights tensions that go beyond just the dance competitions these young men find themselves in. Compulsory military service, mainstream cultural ignorance of their art, and socio-racial relations weave their way through the film; those used to American urban dance/b-boy films would not necessarily immediately recognize any of these themes (read: this is not “Step It Up 3: Seoul 4 Real”). There’s also a rich serendipity at play—Kwok traveling to South Korea to make a film about youth who follow an art form that itself was transplanted from America.

There is every sign that more and more Asian American directors are following suit: Alice Wu (SAVING FACE) is prepping production to go to China to shoot an adaptation of Rachel DeWoskin’s book Foreign Babes in Beijing, Karen Lin (PERFECTION) is working on Love Tour, to be set and shot in Taiwan, and Wayne Wang has plans to produce half a dozen films set in various Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul.

None of this blindly celebrates some brave new world of unfettered transnationalism. Even if the lines between Asian and Asian American cinema continue to blur, it is rarely lost upon the filmmakers that this is happening within complex flows of money, power and politics that often force human movement rather than merely facilitating it.

Either way, Asian American features have crossed a threshold towards global stories that will undoubtedly become a deeper part of our community filmmaking. It seems richly appropriate that, as the world becomes perceptibly closer, it is helping the landscape of Asian American cinema to expand.

Oliver Wang is an assistant professor of sociology at California State Univ, Long Beach and writes on popular culture and society for NPR, the LA Times, LA Weekly and Vibe. His writing on Asian American cinema is available at chasingchan.com.

--O.W.

INTERVIEW: WAYNE WANG

Preface: I was asked by Asian Cinvevision to interview Wayne Wang for this year's catalog and naturally, I jumped at the opportunity. This was my first time speaking with him and while most of our conversation revolved around his two new films, Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Princess of Nebraska, I also asked him about the state of Asian American cinema, its transnational implications and his own aspirations to make a gangster flick.

THE INTERVIEW (originally appeared in Asian Cinevision's Cinevue).

Interview with Wayne Wang

For the last fifteen years, fans of filmmaker Wayne Wang have wondered when he would “return” to Asian American film. The most influential Asian American filmmaker of the 1980s, with movies such CHAN IS MISSING (1982) and DIM SUM (1985), Wang successfully adapted Amy Tan’s JOY LUCK CLUB in 1993. After that, he took a serendipitous route through Hollywood, directing everything from his celebrated, indie film SMOKE (1995), to the edgy digital video flick, THE CENTER OF THE WORLD (2001), to the Jennifer Lopez-lead romantic comedy, MAID IN MANHATTAN (2002).

With this year’s pairing of A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS and THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA, Wang returns with not one, but two films centered on a new generation of Asian American immigrants. Both are adapted from Oakland author Yiyun Li’s short stories and Wang began his interview with CineVue describing their shared affinity for the “new” Chinese immigrant.

Oliver Wang: How did you first discover Yiyun Li’s writing?

Wayne Wang: [Center for Asian American Media director] Stephen Gong came up to me and said, “There’s this Chinese woman writer who teaches at Mills, and you should look into her short stories.” That same afternoon, Michael Ray, the All-Story magazine editor, also said, “Hey, there’s a really good Chinese writer that’s in the Bay Area, and we’re going to publish some of her stuff.” So I went out and got the book, read through everything, and really liked “Thousand Years.”

OW: What about her stories spoke to you?

WW: I’d been off that Asian American theme for a while. When I was thinking about coming back, I kept thinking, “What has changed?” In both coasts, the biggest change has been the new immigrants from China. And you also begin to see literature from writers in China, like Ha Jin and Yiyun Li and they’re many others. So that’s one.

Two, I really like Yiyun’s writing because everything is in the periphery. Nothing is directly hitting you in the face. Yiyun’s stuff is about human nature, how they cope with it, the residual effect. They’re not sentimental...which is what my kind of aesthetic is, too. I was particularly interested in “Thousand Years” because it also dealt with a whole immigration population, a whole other language. And I was also very intrigued with the father, who was involved and hurt by the Cultural Revolution, and the daughter who was on the fringe of it but also affected.

OW: What struck me about both films is that these are stories about Asians living in America, but their struggles and challenges are not around “Asian American identity”, or where do they “fit in” in the social fabric.

WW: It’s not that the Chinese American material doesn’t exist. I think part of it for me is that I’m an immigrant myself, even though I’m very American. But still there’s something about my own roots growing up in Hong Kong, being Chinese—“What is my relationship to China?”—that really intrigues me about that particular area. The world has flattened out, and it’s very global now.

OW: And that changes their relationship to this idea of American and how they’re meant to negotiate it.

WW: Absolutely. That also has to do more with that newer generation like PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA because the way they grew up, with the internet and the computer and being able to travel more, they’re really into that mind set.

OW: You reflect on technology’s role in PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA the use of the cell phone and its camera. How deliberate was that, building that into the movie?

WW: It’s very deliberate, particularly since I met Ling, who plays Sasha. She has three phones; they’re all decorated differently. And one of the phones got shut off by her mother because she racked up, like, $750 of texting. And she’s constantly doing phone texting, talking to her friends, and also shooting little things—like her own hand. When we saw that it was working well as we started shooting that stuff, we just kept building into it more.

OW: Whose idea was it to bring in Yiyun Li to help with the adaptation for THOUSAND YEARS?

WW: I felt that it was a very specific voice. And I felt that she was really smart and really interested in writing a screenplay. So I just gave her final draft. And I didn’t say very much to her, and I said the things that I liked about the story, and she just wrote the draft. And then we worked on it together. I like working with novelists and making them into screenplays.

OW: PRINCESS, on other hand, was adapted by Michael Ray from Li’s story and he seemed to have a free hand to roam with it.

WW: I told Yiyun, with PRINCESS, “I’m going to get Michael to work on it, and we’re going to improvise a lot.” So a lot of it was on the spot. We made things up...like play jazz music, which I really enjoy. She personally ended up liking PRINCESS better than THOUSAND YEARS. That’s very interesting. She felt that I brought more into PRINCESS than was in the short story, whereas THOUSAND YEARS was pretty much a very faithful rendition. But when she saw PRINCESS, I could see that she was really surprised by it all the time.

OW: I should backpedal—you began with the intention of making THOUSAND YEARS but ended up making two different films. How did that happen?

WW: First of all, PRAYERS is so classic. I wanted to do something that breaks away from that, something that’s freer, more like a jazz riff in my mind. And I felt like I was dealing with two generations, and there’s a new generation that I was seeing and meeting...that was so different. I went to CAAM and said, “Hey, what if just do something really fast, really down and dirty, no permissions, no professional actors, we just find interesting people, find the girl, and just go and do something?” But the main thing was that I really felt like following the three generations, and doing the two films about two different women. One is still caught up in the Old China, so to speak, even though she’s been in America for ten years. And this one that has no baggage, no burdens, no history, no morality, so to speak, that I find really interesting also.

OW: With both of these stories, and this goes to your career as a whole, you often times seem to center really interesting, complex women at the center of your narratives. I’m wondering where that comes from and what’s your interest in doing that.

WW: I don’t know. [Laughs] I think I fell into it in the beginning only because I started doing DIM SUM, because Laureen Chew was a good friend of mine was very intrigued by the relationship with her mother. I fell into it. Then JOY LUCK CLUB came along, and it’s just a wonderful book. And then after that, I was basically stereotyped...as much as I ran away from it, I some how kept being drawn back into it. So women is still very much part of my subject matter. People have criticized me for being anti-Asian men. I said I’d love to do a male book….

OW: I find that accusation ridiculous if you consider the body of work. CHAN IS MISSING and EAT A BOWL OF TEA are very much male-centered films. But go back a moment—are you suggesting that you’ve done so many women-centered films because you have an easier time getting green-lit to do them?

WW: Probably. Because of the success of JOY LUCK CLUB, for me to say, “Well, I’m doing something about a Chinese woman,” tends to be a little easier for them to understand what it is. If I said I was going to do a gangster film with guys, they would say, “Why don’t we get John Woo?” So no matter what I do, I’m boxed in a little bit. But the other part is that...you know, I like women. I feel very close to them. I just find them, in a way, more interesting. My wife says I may have been a woman in my last lifetime. So who knows?

OW: What was it like coming to a film of this size/scope after your string of more commercially-targeted films—MAID IN MANHATTAN, BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE, LAST HOLIDAY.

WW: I learned a lot with all those films. Let me give you one example, something like WINN DIXIE. When we previewed the film, we cut and re-cut...the last thing the studio wants is what they call a pacing pass. They cut out anything that has a moment where the character takes a breath or is thinking. Just to keep the movie moving along. And I really missed those things. I felt like with THOUSAND YEARS I wanted to have a very different language, especially in terms of timing. I wanted characters to breathe.

OW: In other words, a very different kind of film from what a commercial studio would expect.

WW: Today, to make a movie about an old man is almost impossible, especially if you don’t have a star. Let alone that it’s Chinese, and that it’s subtitled. So you’ve got to understand these problems. Originally there was also half the money coming from China. China dropped out in the last minute because of the couple of lines. For example, the line that he says, “Communism is not bad, but it fell into the wrong hands.” So half of our financing went away. This movie is really difficult to get made. It will probably never get made again, especially in the context of America. But I consciously made those choices to say, “Work really down and dirty, work cheaply, work with a lot of integrity, and try to make these movies.” And that’s what they are.

OW: With you, with other American directors like Steven Soderberg, or even a younger filmmaker like Justin Lin, there seems to be a back-and-forth pattern with your more commercial films being used as springboards to make more independent films. Is that deliberate?

WW: I realize through my career that if I just did the independent films, I probably wouldn’t be able to support my career and keep doing the independent films. I needed the bigger films. I needed—as much as I hated doing it in a way, but MAID IN MANHATTAN was a huge hit and gave me a lot of leeway to do a lot of other things. I don’t know. It’s tricky, that process.

OW: As a filmmaker, does this come as burden that you’re forced to bear that “Why aren’t you making more Asian American films?”

WW: Well, it is a burden. In the beginning, I felt like I couldn’t get off of that track because of that burden. But after JOY LUCK CLUB, I just felt that I had to get away because everything I was getting was related to Chinese or China or whatever. I had to get off. I exhausted, so to speak, my stories and my interest. Now it’s still kind of a burden, but I don’t mind it. I feel like I know this material. I know it really well, both about, let’s say, Chinese American versus new immigrants in America. I think that it’s so much more complex now, too. For example, Ha Jin’s new book, A Free Life, I was very fascinated by. So I’m trying to do an adaptation of that. The focus I tend to be on right now is immigrants, and particularly immigrants from China. I just feel like that’s where the world is at these days, too.

OW: Not just that but there’s also a spate of reverse migration, you could say, where Asian American filmmakers are going to Asia to make feature films. You did this back in the ‘80s with LIFE IS CHEAP...BUT TOILET PAPER IS EXPENSIVE—you see this as a possible new trend?

WW: I think so. I’m very much in support of that, too. I’m very interested in maybe putting a package together, let’s say six films, where I may do one and produce the other ones with different varying budgets from different parts of Asia—whether it’s Filipino, Malay, Singapore, Thai, Hong Kong, obviously—and make really interesting movies that will also hopefully be more accessible to a world market, not just a limited market. I’m really intrigued by that and challenged by that.

OW: You mentioned earlier, an interest in doing a gangster film. Have you considered doing a straight up genre film?

WW: Yes. I’ve always been talking about that and still trying to find a way to do it. I keep telling my agent, “Just get me a genre film of some kind.” I could do it. But it’s hard. Right now, I was talking to [PRINCESS’ cinematographer] Rich Wong, who was very much working with me creatively as a co-director credit, who [directed] COLMA: THE MUSICAL. I said, “We should do a gangster musical that’s really violent with Chinese guys.” I’m serious.