APA Grand Marshals Take Pride (Feature) Judge Assigns APA Attorney to Assist Moussaoui (in National News) APA State Legislators Back Davis for Governor (in Bay Area News) Ultimate Diversions: Breath of Fire II (in Business) Last Chance For National Title (in Sports) Tribal Tendencies (in A&E) Emil Amok: PBS’ Bill Moyers Does Chinese (in Opinion)

PBS’ Bill Moyers Does Chinese

If you were in the Bay Area feeling especially erudite about things this past week, maybe it was because of the aura emanating from all those PBS folk in San Francisco for their annual meeting.

Could that really be (gasp) Geoff Colvin of that new show, “Wall Street Week with Fortune,” the replacement for money icon Louis Ruykeyser and “Wall Street Week in Review”?

Well, yes.

Colvin, an old school chum of mine and the brother of singer Shawn Colvin, may yet become a PBS icon after the show premiers this week.

But for now, the PBS groupies were here to see the likes of Barney the purple dinosaur and Clifford the big red dog.

Who says there’s no color on the PBS lineup?

Among the non-animated, there was mop-top documentarian Ken Burns, a filmmaker who never met a still picture he didn’t like. And of course, the legend of all PBS legends, the closest thing to “saint as journalist,” Bill Moyers.

Moyers, in particular, should be of interest to all Asian Americans, especially those of Chinese descent. Sometime in early 2003, Moyers is set to roll out a project he says he’s been wanting to do for the last 25 years. With “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience,” Moyers puts his imprimatur on one of the primary histories of Asian America.

“What does it mean to be American?” asked Moyers, as he stood before PBS executives at a screening of clips from his multi-part series. “Except for occasional documentaries, PBS hasn’t told this story.”

The teasers featured most of the usual suspects. There were interviews with Berkeley’s Ling Chi Wang and author extraordinare Maxine Hong Kingston, and I think I heard Helen Zia’s voice underneath a montage of image.

Men and women spoke of their Chinese past and present using family photos. There was rich archival footage, as well as stunning new footage that did what a teaser is intended to do.

It made me want to see more.

Is this such a good thing?

Not so fast.

Haven’t we actually seen a lot of these stories told before by talented Asian American producer/film makers? In many ways, Loni Ding’s “Ancestors in the Americas” (read more about it at http://www.cetel.org), which aired last year with a third part due in 2004, seemed very similar to some of the clips presented. In fact, Ding, an old friend of Moyers, did talk to him early on about the project and was even offered a chance to “orient” his staff about the history. But in the end she turned him down, seeing Moyers’ journalistic approach as differing from her stylistic “docu-memoir.”

Still, the last few years have seen other noted Asian Pacific American filmmakers like the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated Arthur Dong (“Coming Out Under Fire”) and Felicia Lowe (“Carved in Silence”) put their Chinese American lenses on the Chinese American experience. Would Moyers’ lens stay true to the experience?

Others in the media community like Eddie Wong of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association wondered the same thing. Where’s the community input?

For the past five months, it’s been an especially testy period as Wong and others have exchanged ideas with Moyers on how to make sure the project didn’t come off like some white translation of history.

When I bumped into Wong at the PBS meeting, he said the lines of communication were smoother now that some key producers have been added to Moyers’ crew. But Wong was hoping there would be a Chinese co-executive producer. There isn’t.

What seems even more galling to those in the Asian American media community is how Moyers was able to pull off the whole thing. And of course it starts with money.

Moyers, whose great work in the past has been funded by PBS and the usual roster of corporate donors, pretty much can call his own shots. He personifies the public affairs tradition of PBS and can raise money with relative ease. No Asian Pacific American could do that. They’re more likely to deal with community sources, friends and family. And, of course, Master Card.

But Moyers didn’t go to his regular sources for the Chinese project. He, too, went to the Chinese American community, but not to the locals. Moyers went to the most elite group in the Chinese American community, the august Committee of 100.

To everyone’s amazement, the Committee gave Moyers an astonishing $5 million for the project.

“He was able to work closely with Henry Tang of the Committee of 100 and find individual funding and that’s a wonderful thing,” said Wong. “I just hope that trend continues and more work by Asian American producers are funded that same way.”

The Committee is now entertaining other projects. So Moyers didn’t bust the bank. He just got there first.

“I’m glad I could,” he told me during a break at the PBS meeting. “But I think the Asian American community will find in this a template, a stimulation that will work to their benefit in time.”

But what are the chances of getting another Asian story on after Moyers splashes his take on prime-time America? Is anyone planning any new Civil War documentaries after Ken Burns did his? It raises the issue of the importance of a Chinese person telling this saga now.

“It would look different,” Moyers told me. “But I look forward to the day an Asian American can tell the story of the American Revolution, tell the story of politics in Washington, and origin won’t matter.”

We all look forward to that day. Perhaps one with an Asian American Bill Moyers. In the meantime, we have Moyers doing the Chinese.

From talking to him, at least he knows he can’t do it without community support. He wants us to like it. And he wants us to like him. He told the crowd at the screening that his daughter adopted a two month old Chinese baby in Indonesia last year.

See, the guy’s practically Chinese.

So I’m keeping an open mind. I just ate at a place called P.F. Chang’s, a corporate restaurant chain publicly traded on NASDAQ, that’s doing better than your tech stocks simply by serving updated takes on Chinese food to mostly suburban whites. I was skeptical, but then I ate their killer Ma Po Tofu there. Better than anything I’ve had in Chinatown.

Ultimately, history is like food. Tofu is no less a fact to be diced, chopped and sautéed. If Moyers is serving it up, you at least have to taste.

Reach Emil Guillermo at emil@amok.com.