Asian melting pot
Asians have been intertwined with America's destiny since Chinese immigrants arrived en masse to build the transcontinental railway after the civil war. Look at where Asian societies have come into contact with America: it's all turning points. The Philippines was America's first bona fide imperial possession. The war against Japan was fought, in propaganda terms at least, as a race war.
Richard Nixon made a career of asking "Who lost China?" after Mao's victory in 1949, and feral US rightists still bitch endlessly about the Taiwan situation. Korea, the forgotten war, helped Joseph McCarthy along his road to other people's ruin. The conflict in Vietnam depraved the American polity for nearly 30 years, and spilled into Cambodia and Laos, finally disgorging thousands of immigrants and orphans on American shores, who are just coming of age today, people of Justin Lin's age, for example. And it's not like they're short of stories to tell.
New immigrant groups always take about a generation to ripen to full potential in America. In 10 or 15 years we'll start seeing movies from new Russian and post-Soviet immigrants, from transplanted Armenians and, who knows, Iraqi-Americans. Right now, though, there is a subterranean wave of Asian-American films, particularly documentaries, which can be detected at gatherings like the Asian-American film festival here last month. It was run under the auspices of Visual Culture, a distribution and production unit founded in the 1970s to serve emerging Asian audiences with low-budget films in their own languages.
Among the movies showcased, Better Luck Tomorrow might find common cause with Danny Pang's visually extravagant Nothing 2 Lose, would-be suicides postpone their big leap and vow to live their last hours utterly without constraints. Darryl Fong's Kung Phooey! -- in which a gag-happy Kentucky Fried Movie approach enlivens the story of a Chinese monk kicking satirical butt all over San Francisco -- finds its analogue in Shaolin Ulysses, a documentary about three real monks spreading the Shaolin code in America. And classical, family-based immigrant sagas like Ching C Ip's See You Off at the Edge of Town are thrown into relief by documentaries like Saigon, USA and Death of a Shaman.
The latter pair examine the trials of South Vietnamese immigrants and displaced Mien tribespeople from Laos. For the new Vietnamese-Americans, there's a sense of fortunes rising while "living on the hyphen," but for the Mien family of the shattering Death of a Shaman, the immigrant experience becomes a nightmare of linguistic isolation, generational divides, murder, drugs, girl gangs and more.
This is encouraging. Though all this activity is still local and underfunded, soon enough more Asian movies will surely rise on American soil, to compete with more tangible Asian influences on US cinema, like Hong Kong exiles, chop-socky flicks, Kurosawa, and Godzilla movies. In the meantime, for good or ill, Better Luck Tomorrow is pointing out some interesting routes towards the future.
Not everyone will follow, but at least the road is clearly marked now.
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