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During his first year of college, Kit Woo honed his riding skills by practicing eight hours a day, six days a week. Photo courtesy of Kit Woo.

Horsing Around with Asian LGTBQ Filmmakers

HORSING AROUND: In honor of the Year of the Horse, former professional jockey Kit Woo recalls his horse riding days with fond memories. Woo goes down in the history books as the first Chinese American jockey in New York. Even today, there are only a handful of Asian Pacific American professional jockeys. Because of his 5-foot height and his perfect jockey weight of 99 pounds, one of his counselors at Wisconsin University filled out an application on Woo’s behalf to attend a jockey program. Armed with a one-day airline ticket to Chino, Calif. and a fear of horses, Woo had little idea of the life he was going to lead over the next nine years. During his first year, he honed his riding skills eight hours a day, six days a week groomed the horses and worked as an “ exercise boy” at the race track — all for a meager salary of 50 cents per hour. After passing a three-race test, Woo got his jockey license and graduated to “apprentice jockey,” where he remained until he won five professional races. Retired from riding at the tender age 28, Woo has been running his own construction business in the Bay Area for the past 20 years.

Left: Actress Shi Tou. Right: Director/producer Kathryn Xian. Photos by Fiona Ma.

Shi Tou, starring in the first lesbian feature-length film from China, Fish & Elephant, flew in from Beijing for the festival. Tou, credited with being one of the first “out” lesbians in China, made her debut in front of 300,000 million viewers on a popular talk show in Hunan. She is also an accomplished painter and photographer, and was the only women pioneer of the Yuan Ming Yuan, a cutting-edge, contemporary artist collective started in the early ‘90s in Beijing.

Director/producer Kathryn Xian flew in from the sunny shores of her hometown, Honolulu. Her film, Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place, documents how Western colonization and modernization gave rise to intolerance and homophobia in Hawai‘i. “Amongst the Kanaka Maoli (native indigenous people), communal families accepted all types of sexuality as long as it didn’t hurt others,” reports Xian. Xian started her own production company, Zang Pictures, three years ago, and is working on putting together a mini film showcase on the trafficking of women and children in the sex trades.

Director Desiree Lim is proud of “pushing the political envelope” with her sex positive, lesbian love triangle in Sugar Sweet. Born and raised in Malaysia, Lim left for Tokyo at age 18 and moved to Vancouver last year. “[People] are labeled and put in boxes all over the world; filmmaking gives me more avenues to find a voice and get out there. I don’t want to live in a box anymore,” states Lim. The self-proclaimed Asian U.N. ambassador (who speaks fluent Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Malay and English), looks forward to making more feature-length films and TV movies to reach a wider and broader audience.