Move Over 'South Park,'

Angry Little Asian Girl Is Here Actress and animator Lela Lee reveals her other self in her irreverant cartoon strip

By Mariko Thompson

She's trash-talking, politically correct and cute as a button. Compliment her grasp of English, and the Angry Little Asian Girl will blow up faster than a Scud missile: "I was born here, you stupid dip---." Call her an angry Oriental girl, and she will quickly correct you: "I'm angry Asian girl." Hand her a perfect SAT score and she will look at you in perfect dismay.

The Angry Little Asian Girl gets to say and do all the things her creator, 24-year-old Lela Lee, never could. That's what makes the animated strip so liberating and, in a strange way, endearing.

"It's honest," Lee says. "I also find it therapeutic because it makes me laugh. In a roundabout way, these are things that happened to me, but in the cartoon it's punched up."

Rude and crude, the Angry Little Asian Girl has garnered a cult following on the Web (www angrylittleasiangirl.com) and on the film festival circuit. The animated strip first hit the silver screen at a Los Angeles theater dedicated to obscure films and revivals, then was picked up earlier this year for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival. Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festival also bought exhibition rights, but a spokeswoman says there are no plans to air the strip yet.

The birth of the Angry Little Asian Girl was haphazard, almost accidental. Four years ago, a friend took Lee, then a U.C. Berkeley student, to her first animation festival. Struck by the low-end production values of the strips she saw, Lee went home, drew some pictures and put together an episode of the Angry Little Asian Girl for a video class.

She stashed the video away and didn't pull it out again until last year, when she saw a bootleg copy of South Park, a cartoon starring a band of foul-mouthed third-graders that sent shock waves through the realm of pop culture.

"At that moment I realized I could do it, too," Lee says. "I redid my first episode and made four more."

Lee has turned the Angry Little Asian Girl into an enterprise. Her cousin helped her set up a Web site where fans could view a strip, tour the character's home and leave messages about what makes them angry. On a whim, she ordered a batch of T-shirts with the benign, smiling face of her character. They quickly sold out.

So what exactly is this stripped-down cartoon about a back-talking Asian American girl tapping into? Abe Ferrer, co-director of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival, says Lee's character is building on the popularity of other cartoons filled with spare animation and borderline juvenile-adult humor, including Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butt-head and South Park.

"I'm not sure it would have had this type of reception 10 years ago," Ferrer says. Though other artists have delved into ethnic identity and stereotypes, "putting it in the form where it's disguised as a kids' cartoon turned it into something that came out of left field."

Jennifer Abe-Kim, director of Asian Pacific American studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, says Lee might be a needed voice for young Asian Americans, who are raised with the ideal of interpersonal harmony and grappling with the constraints of the "model minority" myth.

"There's anger and rage and other emotions that are not typically associated with Asian Americans," Abe-Kim says. "It's not culturally validated to be that expressive. She's breaking norms within the culture and breaking stereotypes outside."

Lee's Korean American upbringing provides her with a trove of material. Growing up around few other Asian Americans in San Dimas, Calif., (think Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure), she sorted through her parents' high expectations, her own artistic ambitions and her schoolmates' puzzlement over family traditions so different from their own.

Lee is the youngest of four girls and the only American-born child in her family. She attended an all-girls Catholic school and was "a total nerd," studying hard and keeping a 10 p.m. curfew. Socially, she walked a line between American and Korean cultures.

"For a long time I couldn't tell my school friends about the things we had to do because they seemed so foreign," Lee recalls. "It was sort of like a double life. For New Year's, you wear a costume called a hanbok, and you bow to your elders and they give you blessings for a prosperous year. I used to say, 'What am I doing? My friends don't have to do this.' "

True to form as the baby sister, Lee is the wacky, impulsive one. Her older sisters hold far more stable, serious jobs-one works at a museum, another is an investment banker and the third is a teacher. When Lee went off to U.C. Berkeley, her father hoped she would pursue a career in law, but she had other plans.

At 19, she caught the acting bug after landing the lead in a student play based on a Korean folk tale. The following summer, she took an acting workshop through the East-West Players of Los Angeles. During her junior year, she pulled the ultimate wannabe actress maneuver: She dropped out of Berkeley to wait tables and go to casting calls. Fearful of her parents' reaction, she told them she had transferred to UCLA. At the end of a frustrating year, Lee realized she'd be better off finishing her degree, drove home and confessed.

"I said, 'Mom, I haven't actually been going to school.' She looked at me and said, 'I knew that, Lela.' She had let it go so long and never said anything. My mom in her Asian way was saying, 'OK, that's what you want to do.' "

After graduating in 1996, she moved back to Los Angeles and was cast in two indie films, Yellow and Shopping for Fangs. Since then, she has guest-starred in an episode of Felicity and is featured in a new American Express advertising campaign.

On the Angry Little Asian Girl front, Lee is wrapping up a new cartoon and plans to create a new Web site, featuring her little Asian girl and four new friends.

"I can't say a lot about it except that they all hang out together, they're all cute, and they're very, very upset."

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