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My America, (...or honk if you like Buddha)
Filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña Hits The Road And Discovers Asian America
A rollicking ride across the changing terrain of American culture, Renee Tajima-Peña's new documentary odyssey MY AMERICA (... or honk if you love Buddha) recaptures the spirit of Jack Kerouac's novel, On The Road, Asian American style. An intoxicating and irreverent look at America's fastest growing ethnic group, the film will have its national broadcast debut on PBS Friday, May 1 at 9:00 p.m. (check local listings) to launch National Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
A 1997 Sundance Film Festival award winner, MY AMERICA continues Tajima-Peña's film accounts of Asian Americans, which she began in 1989 with her Academy Award-nominated film, WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN? In MY AMERICA, which was co-produced by Quynh Thai, she recalls her childhood, back in the days when her vacationing family crossed five state lines without ever seeing another Asian face, and hits the road again to explore just how much the racial and cultural landscape of America has changed.
Driving coast-to-coast, she seeks out what it means to be Asian American in our rapidly-changing society and comes across an eclectic group of offbeat and distinctive people. Tajima-Peña's metaphorical guide is the film's "road guru," Victor Wong. An iconoclastic actor (SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET, JOY LUCK CLUB, THE LAST EMPEROR), ex-photojournalist, ex-Beat Generation painter and wanderer, Wong was immortalized by Kerouac in the novel, Big Sur. In MY AMERICA, the 70-year-old Wong emerges as a complex, Buddha-like character who has traveled the currents of post-war American life: the Beat Generation, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War era.
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"What is an Asian American? Am I Asian American?
All through school they taught us,
'Learn western history. Don't speak Chinese...
You're in America now boy.' I always thought,
as an Asian American, I really had to
write my own manual on how to live in this country.
It wasn't until the Civil Rights
Movement came along that I felt like
I could become part of America."
- Victor Wong in MY AMERICA (...or honk if you love Buddha).
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His story frames Tajima-Peña's travels, as she discovers how deeply Asian Americans have been entangled in the politics of race. In New Orleans, eighth generation Louisianan Filipinas describe growing up as "honorary whites" in the Jim Crow south. In Seattle, a pair of Korean rappers, known as The Seoul Brothers, express the political awakening of a new generation. Through it all, Tajima-Peña delivers comic projectiles at the stereotypes that color attitudes toward Asians, with characters like Mr. Choi, a fortune cookie-maker-entrepreneur who she dubs a veritable, "Horatio Alger on amphetamines."
But beyond the critique of racism, Tajima-Peña also explores the challenge for Asian Americans now that they are no longer "the invisible minority." Refusing to be cast as second class citizens, Asian Americans are grappling with the question, "What then is their role in the public life of the nation?" In Mississippi and Arkansas, the legendary activist Yuri Kochiyama -- a close friend of Malcolm X -- traces the roots of her own "passion for justice" to her years of incarceration at a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans. In Los Angeles, a young student named Alyssa Kang defies her mother's expectations and risks arrest to protest anti-immigrant legislation.
As film critic B. Ruby Rich writes of MY AMERICA, "The real road that Tajima-Peña is traversing is the delicate one separating public and private, group identity and individual personality, and she ain't no tourist. If Asian Americans have too often been cast as spectators in the drama of black/white America, MY AMERICA restores their centrality."
The 87-minute, 16mm film was shot in locations across the United States, ranging from the familiar Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York to unlikely locales such as New Orleans and Duluth, Minnesota. For the soundtrack of MY AMERICA, Tajima-Peña matched the eclectic regional milieu of the film with recordings by three generations of Asian American musicians -- from the 1950s/1960s Broadway singer Pat Suzuki (FLOWER DRUM SONG), to the hip hop mixologists Key-Kool & DJ Rhettmatic, the Korean American alternative band Hell Kitty, the folk singer Charlie Chin, bangra hip hop DJ Musa, and original score by the innovative jazz and new classical Chinese composer, Jon Jang.
MY AMERICA was co-produced by Quynh Thai, a longtime collaborator of the film's director and writer, Tajima-Peña. Tajima-Peña's previous works include THE LAST BEAT MOVIE (Sundance Channel); THE BEST HOTEL ON SKID ROW (HBO), which featured the narration of writer Charles Bukowski; JENNIFER'S IN JAIL (Lifetime Television), the story of teenage girls in trouble with the law; and the Academy Award-nominated WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN? an investigation into the death of a Chinese American in Detroit.
MY AMERICA is a presentation of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA) in association with the Independent Television Service (ITVS). MY AMERICA (...or honk if you like Buddha) debut son PBS Friday, May 1 at 9:00 p.m. (check local listings).
This website: Copyright © 2000 Studio Q Int'l Inc / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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Questions and Answers with Renee
You noted that when traveling with your family during childhood you never saw other Asian Americans. What is your recollection of that today?
I realized there was no place for us in the larger drama of American life and the southern states only magnified our irrelevance. You rarely saw other Asian Americans, especially in the South. Our family travels rarely took us to the South because it was too confusing. Which toilets do we use, the ones for "Whites" or for the "Coloreds?" My mother always told us to use the cleaner one, but that solution never satisfied me. It seemed back then there was no place for us.
How has Asian American been redefined during your lifetime?
Prior to the 1980's the Asian American was fairly simple to define. We were predominantly Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese; the majority of us were American-born and English-speaking. We shared a common history of labor immigration and racial discrimination. After Congress struck down race-based quotas in the so-called Asia Pacific Triangle through the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, the Asian American population multiplied sevenfold within the span of a single generation. The growth was characterized by a diversity in nationality, language, religion, culture, and class, the likes of which we had never seen before. Since the 1990's the rules of the game have changed irrevocably.
In your interview with The Burtanog Sisters, eighth generation Filipinos, they revealed that interracial marriage was not a problem in New Orleans. Was this the case throughout the country prior to the Civil Rights movement?
The Burtanog sisters could intermarry, attend school with, and get buried alongside the white citizenry. They were considered honorary whites. Audrey says her brother Walter used to play with another boy on the block named Willy. But as soon as Walter turned eighteen, Willy, being black, had to start calling his friend Mr. Walter. Benita Burtanog pointed out that her Filipino cousins in California could not marry Caucasians because of anti-miscegenation laws that classified Filipinos as Mongolians.
What do you think the Asian American perspective is on interracial marriage?
Of course, nothing is more labyrinthine than Asian Americans' own rules and rankings for proper marriages. Ask a random sampling of Asian parents for their own mating formulas and you will hear any combination of the following -- Parent A: "It's OK to marry Japanese or Filipino, but no Korean. Then comes white, then Vietnamese, then Puerto Rican. No black." Parent B: "Korean, Chinese, Indian for my son. Don't care about my daughter as long as he's not white." Parent C: "Chinese OK, then white, then Korean. No Japanese, no Mexican, no black. Parent D: "White or Oriental, I don't care which. Hispanic and Indian people maybe. No black." Parent E: "Must be northern Chinese. Period."
Did the Civil Rights movement have an affect on the Asian American experience?
There is a painful irony to Asian bigotry, as we owe so much to the black movement. Anti-miscegenation laws that persecuted Asians were struck down when a black woman and her white husband, aptly named the Lovings, went all the way to the Supreme Court to validate their marriage. A whole slew of legal guarantees for Asian Americans were born out of African American struggles for equality. I don't think there is an Asian American who lived during that period of change who has not been touched by the stunning advances in education, housing, jobs, creative expression, and all sectors of public life.
How has the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans become a defining experience for you and others?
The camp experience has always been ingrained in our family lexicon. To this day, whenever I meet another Japanese American, I ask by way of introduction, "What camp was your family in?" It is a way of breaking the ice and establishing connections. In my lifetime, I have rarely met another Japanese American with whom I did not have some link, via the camps, family, friends of friends, or our family homestead in Japan.
Was your family involved in the reparations movement of the 1980's?
All of my second generation relations - including my parents, aunts and uncles -- participated in some way, with a defiance I had never seen before. Through the testimony delivered to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment Camps, we, the next generation, came to appreciate the context of the times, and the depth of the personal nightmare our parents faced.
When did an Asian American presence begin to have an affect on the general culture?
The political mobilizations for racial equality and construction of Asian American identity during the 1960's and 1970's were a turning point for our participation in the public life of the nation. Like many others, I was weaned and raised on a steady diet of television. The Vietnam War provided the first sustained, public picture of Asians that I had ever experienced in my lifetime. This was the first time something close to my own image had ever reflected back at me and I looked like "the enemy," the "gook." Because the war was so radicalized, it radicalized a whole generation of Asian Americans. In meeting many different Asian Americans in the making of this film, I realized that we would not be distinguished by our level of assimilation (i.e., Americanization) and how people become Americans, but rather how America has become its people.
You can get in touch with Renee via email:
MyAmerica1@aol.com |
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