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July 18-24, 1997

On the Road Again

Renee Tajima-Peña chronicles Asian Americana

BY OLIVER WANG

At the dawn of the 1990s, Asian Pacific American filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña sensed that the community had changed dramatically and wondered: "Who have we become as Asian Americans? Is there such a thing as an 'Asian America?'" Tajima-Peña--who produced the Academy Award-nominated documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?, one of the definitive films chronicling the APA experience--set out on a cinematic journey to find some answers.

"I saw all of these activists, artists, and old-movement hands I'd known from over the years," she recalled. "It seemed everyone was walking around in a daze groping for meaning."

Her latest documentary, My America ... or honk if you love Buddha is styled after the classic American road film. But on this existential highway, she's aiming to map the diverse landscape of contemporary Asian America. Half-documentary, half-memoir, the movie travels from San Francisco to New York, Chicago, Florida, and points in between. Tajima-Peña plays the role of the roving documentarian, packing her camera gear into a mini-van and setting out for a rollicking ride taking the pulse of the community.

What she found was a new Asian American identity shaped by the battles over immigration, race, and multiculturalism. With actor and erstwhile guru Victor Wong riding in a symbolic shotgun seat, Tajima-Peña's work captures slices of Asian America that counter any notion of a monolithic APA identity.

As My America winds its way across country, we meet Asian American personalities such as: Pan-Ku Lau, a Hmong refugee working as a seamstress in Minnesota; Tom Vu, a Florida real estate mogul and motivational speaker; The Burtanog Sisters, an eighth-generation Filipino American clan in New Orleans; and Bill and Yuri Kochiyama, longtime activists from Harlem who met in the Jerome, Ark., internment camp during World War II. Each reflects different generational, class, ethnic, geographic, and cultural histories; together they form a complex and sometimes disparate patchwork.

In My America, Tajima-Peña uses a broad cinematic brush to show the diversity that lies within the increasingly complex APA community. Her own life story helps to frame the movie, with much of the narrative relating to her experiences as a sansei who grew up in Chicago and California. As the film unfolds, we learn about Tajima-Peña's grandfather, the first in the family to come to the United States. Facing anti-Asian racism in San Francisco, he left to go to Los Angeles, missing the 1906 San Francisco earthquake by just days. Tajima-Peña takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the whole affair by crediting "Asian haters" for forcing her family's patriarch to leave, thus ensuring her own eventual existence.

The road to My America started years ago when Tajima-Peña realized that the previous conceptions of Asian America had become outdated. As she reveals in the film, her involvement in filmmaking began as an outgrowth of her involvement in the APA political movement. As a social activist, she was drawn to filmmaking and writing as a means to capture and create vivid portraits of the Asian America she grew up in during the 1970s and '80s. An example of that era in Asian American history is captured remarkably well in Vincent Chin.

Similarly, My America tries to capture the essence of the 1990s. Many of the interviews uncover surprising ideas and thoughts, debunking stereotypical assumptions about what certain people are like and how they act. For instance, in one interview, Tajima-Peña talks with upper-class Chinese American debutantes in Los Angeles. While there is a lot of social-status posturing involved with the ball--just listen to how the parents spout off their children's accomplishments by rote--the women themselves prove to be very articulate and perceptive.

In deciding on the best interviews to shoot and use, Tajima-Peña said, "After watching a rough cut of the characters in My America [fellow filmmaker] Spencer [Nakasako] said what struck him was that 'Stereotypes are static, but people are always in motion.' Maybe that's what I was looking for in [these characters]. No matter what, they were--are--always in motion."

Tajima-Peña herself was in motion for much of the film, following interview after interview on the road, spending almost six years to make My America. The experience was quite natural to her. "I discovered America as a child on the road," she explained. "And I was attracted to road stories, especially Jack Kerouac's On the Road. He had this tremendous exuberance for the land and people of America, but at the same time he found a subculture of outsiders. I thought that was a good metaphor for Asian Americans."

As if to underscore the influence of On the Road, one of Kerouac's old beatnik pals, Victor Wong, plays a prominent role in My America. Wong's real life almost seems like a movie itself, with this son of a Chinatown mayor having been everything from a self-proclaimed "Jesus freak" to a news photographer during the social- protest movements of the '70s to an actor featured in Eat a Bowl of Tea, among other films. In many ways, Wong has walked the same avenues that Tajima-Peña explores in her film; he offers an interesting contrast to the signposts that Tajima-Peña discovers. "His life was stranger than fiction," she said. "There was no way I could write a life like Victor's."

If Wong is one principal partner in the film, so is the rich soundtrack that Tajima-Peña and composer Jon Jang have put together. In addition to Jang's original scoring, Tajima-Peña extensively uses pre-recorded songs from different musical eras and genres, as well as music from APA artists as wide ranging as pop singer Pat Suzuki to rapper Key Kool and rock band Hell Kitty. The ability of music to create a sense of identity seems to play as crucial a role in the movie as the interviews themselves.

"During the blossoming of the Asian American arts and culture movement in the '70s, we were always searching for the Asian American 'soul,'" she said. "I've realized that this eclectic cultural grounding is more emblematic of Asian American aesthetics than any singular cultural form--given we don't have a common language, common land base, or with the rise of new immigration, not necessarily a common history. But it is also the shape and the sound and the style of American culture."

As My America travels the nation's film festivals and special screenings, in anticipation of an eventual showing on PBS next year, the movie is helping to reshape the popular imagination of Asian America. While each interview is unique, some themes tie people's stories together--the idea of struggle being foremost among them. Whether it's Bill Kochiyama's remembrance of being a nisei soldier in World War II, or Wong's days as a photographer during the protest movements of the '70s, or Alyssa Kang's story of student activism at UCLA, My America's tales posit Asian Pacific Americans in a constant tug-of-war with the political system, with dominant values, with the force of history.

But rather than place Asian Americans as perpetually beleaguered and persecuted outsiders in American society, Tajima-Peña shares a different idea and perspective. "[Cornell professor] Gary Okihiro writes about looking at Asian Americans a new way--he proposes that the margins are the mainstream," she noted. "In other words, he says that because of our struggle here in the U.S.--fighting racist immigration and labor laws, segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, etc.--we have moved forward U.S. democracy. Rather than being marginal, our experience here makes us central to the American experience and the American democratic project."

My America ... or honk if you love Buddha opens New York's 20th Asian American International Film Festival on July 18. The documentary will be screened at Manhattan's Florence Gould Hall, 55 E. 59th St. For complete film festival information, call 212-925-6014.

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