Great opening for a movie: Two Asian-American teenage boys are sunning themselves in the well appointed backyard of one of their parents. A pager goes off. One kid unhooks his from his belt. "Not mine." The sound is heard again. This time the other kid squints at his display panel. "Me neither." The pager rings a third time. A fourth.
The pair look at each other aghast, and immediately fall to their knees, then start crawling frantically across the thick lawn and tearing away at some obviously fresh-lain strips of turf. They both know exactly where to look. The camera creeps over their shoulders.
In the dirt, a disinterred hand holds the third pager. Fade to black. Title card: "Four months earlier ... "
That put the hook in my cheek, for sure. The movie in question is Justin Lin's stylish and unsettling Better Luck Tomorrow. Distributed by the venturesome MTV Productions, and styling itself the first Asian-American indie movie to break into the mainstream, BLT has just finished a successful outing in first-run cinemas here and, in revenue terms at least, has done its part in the long struggle to get Americans of Asian provenance on the screen.
Yet this isn't an uplifting saga of the immigrant experience, of hard-working new citizens making their mark in a hostile country and succeeding against the odds, and all that mindless-affirmation jive.
Model minority
Not at all. Lin and his cohorts have quite consciously taken the prevailing stereotype of Asians as "the model majority" -- with hallmarks like modesty, industry, thrift, brainiac kids, strong family values -- and beaten it unconscious with a baseball bat.
Our four heroes are high school seniors from an affluent neighbourhood. They are super-bright, all future, no filler. They take part in everything, live on the honor roll, and are exemplary students. But they're bored, so they embark on a long downward spiral that has them pulling guns on jock bullies, packing fat rolls of crack-smeared 20s, partying with hookers and finally scheming to kill one of their associates.
"What are you guys?" asks the hooker.
"Sort of like a ... club," says Daric.
"What, like, a math club?" she asks, in the movie's cheekiest au revoir to the goodie-goodie model-majority cliche. When the spoilt and wildly unbalanced Virgil starts stuffing his loaded gun into his thong underpants, even the street-smart working girl knows to cut her losses and flee. These boys are on the way down.
Sadly, I have to cite inappropriate, non-Asian films like Boyz N The Hood to assess Better Luck Tomorrow, because there aren't many Asian predecessors. Most notable films on Asian-American themes were made by white guys like Alan Parker (Come See the Paradise), Oliver Stone (Heaven and Earth) and Scott Hicks (Snow Falling on Cedars).
Wayne Wang, Ang Lee and Gregg Araki are the exceptions.
Out here on the Pacific Rim, this seems odd, as the Asian-American experience is all around us. Los Angeles has its own Chinatown, Koreatown, Japantown, Thai Town and Little Tokyo, not to mention many thriving, predominantly Asian enclaves nearby. I've had countless friends with oddly cool hybrid names like Randy Wong and Wayne Thieu, and I was once the only Caucasian in a building whose other occupants were an entire village of Montagnard tribespeople from Laos (they filled in the swimming pool with soil and planted vegetables).
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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