Asian Americans in Film

Bruce Lee - his presence on the big screen was short-lived - he died in 1973 when this blogger was in the 11th grade of high school.  Fear not for also admired was Peggy Lipton of the TV show Mod Squad.

There must have been quite a dry spell without Asian Americans in film.  Then a theatrical production, Paper Angels, aired on public television in 1985, and this blogger must have ordered this poster afterwards.  The play explored the experience of Chinese immigrants entering at Angel Island near San Francisco, the west coast version of Ellis Island.

Poster
(All images from this blogger's collection
except as noted)

Occasional high points of movie-going in the 1980s and 1990s were The Last Emperor, released in 1987, and The Joy Luck Club in 1993.  The year 2000 brought Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon proving the marketability of Asian actors albeit international stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, as well as the films starring Jackie Chan.

This blog posting covers many productions viewed through the years, including screenings for independent documentaries entailing Asian American stories.
 

In the year 2000 comedian Margaret Cho, survivor of a short-lived TV show, released a live comedy film I'm the One That I Want.  It was screened at the Nuart, and Margaret was at the door with a no-nonsense demeanor collecting tickets from attendees as we filed in.

Although the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival has been around since 1983 (originally under the name VC FilmFest) this blogger did not take notice for decades.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam was shown at the Arclight in Hollywood during the 2004 festival.  Here is the description of the film from the National Film Board of Canada: 

"This feature documentary offers a whimsical tour through the history of Chinese magicians and performers in the Western world. Long Tack Sam was an internationally renowned Chinese acrobat and magician who overcame isolation, poverty, cultural and linguistic barriers, extreme racism and world wars to become one of the most successful acts of his time. Filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming travels the globe searching for the story of her great-grandfather, the cosmopolitan Long Tack Sam. A celebration of the spirit of Long Tack Sam's magic and art, this richly textured first-person road movie is an exhilarating testament to his legacy and a prismatic tour through the 20th Century."  The film can be viewed at the National Film Board of Canada website.

Not owning any memento on this film,
this blogger almost forgot about this screening
(Image courtesy NFB of Canada)

At the 2006 film festival, The Queen from Virginia, the Jackie Bong Wright Story was an enjoyable documentary following a Vietnamese woman as she competed in the Ms. Senior America Pageant.

A Brief Flight, Hazel Ying Lee and the Women Who Flew Pursuit, was a 2003 film by Alan H. Rosenberg.  It was shown at an event hosted by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, based in Chinatown Los Angeles.  The screening date might have been a year or two after the film was finished.  Hazel was the first Chinese American woman to fly for the U.S. military, for the WASP (Women's Air Force Pilot) program.  She crashed during a mission resulting in her death.  She fulfilled her life's goal to fly, but racial discrimination nearly followed her to the grave as hometown  Portland, Oregon, objected to her burial in an all-white cemetery.

(Image courtesy of Pinterest:
Chinese Americans in the Military)

An autographed DVD was snapped up following a live performance at the Aratani/Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo in September, 2006 by the Kims of Comedy at the annual AADAP (Asian American Drug Abuse Program) fundraiser show.  The four Korean American standup comedians were Steve Byrne, Dr. Ken Jeong, Bobby Lee, and Kevin Shea.  (This blogger recalls a couple of Korean American standups from an earlier generation: Johnny Yune and Henry Cho.)

The 2008 film festival prompted attendance at two documentaries.  Long Story Short, Not Your Typical Song and Dance was a tribute to actress Jodi Long's parents, nightclub entertainers who also garnered an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Ticket

Filmmaker Arthur Dong released his documentary Hollywood Chinese, the Chinese in American Feature Films in 2009 or 2010 but not as part of the film festival lineup.




Another independent film widely screened in L.A., Hawaii, and many cities around the country was Cory Shiozaki's look at Japanese internment history through the Sierras freshwater fishing in The Manzanar Fishing Club.  It first came out in 2012 (?)

Its original working title was From Barbed Wire to Barbed Hooks.

In recognition of the Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month for 2015, the Japanese American National Museum presented a double feature in Little Tokyo:  a new documentary, On Gold Mountain, with a historical look at four Chinese American women; and The Curse of the Quon Gwon, a restored silent film with a new music score, thanks to filmmaker Arthur Dong.  Curse is the earliest known work by an Asian American director, who happened to be a woman, Marion Wong.  Here was my previous blog post on that terrific screening written in conjunction with admiration for artist Milton Quon.

2016's film festival screening of Tyrus at the Aratani Theater brought a full audience that included the subject himself, Mr. Tyrus Wong, who lived to see the Pamela Tom documentary.  Sadly, he died seven months later at the age of 106.

This year the 2017 film festival offered Robin Lung's Finding Kukan which prompted the blog posting from last month and continues to inspire for this current post.  Lung uncovers the story of the previously unheralded woman behind the making of the 1941 Kukan which was among the first documentaries to received Oscar recognition.

Asian Americans in film are gaining an inch of ground.  This blogger admires several actors, particularly as they have been able to attain roles that are not necessarily color-bound:  Ken Jeong, Lucy Liu, Sandra Oh, Gedde Watanabe and B.D. Wong.

Yet still a recent viewing of 1961's West Side Story on DVD brought a double-take, and nearly a jaw drop, as one of Maria's Puerto Rican friends, Francisca, was acted and performed by Japanese American Joanne Miya (real name Nobuko Miyamoto).

Finally, this blogger regrets to not have yet seen Linsanity from 2013.  The well-received film about phenomenal Taiwanese American NBA athlete Jeremy Lin is on the bucket list.

And the Oscar goes to...Li Ling Ai!

The 1942 Oscars ceremony was the first year that the Academy recognized achievements in documentary film.  One of two films which received a Special award (a certificate rather than a statuette) was Kukan, in which evil deeds by Japan were documented in 1940 -- one episode out of their years-long, relentless bombings targeting a city in China, then called Chungking.

Today a complete print of Kukan does not exist --  not even in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' film archive -- while the rich back story has been wonderfully uncovered by filmmaker Robin Lung in her own documentary Finding Kukan.

Kukan (1941, Adventure Films)

Kukan may have premiered in New York City at the World Theatre in June, 1941.  It also screened in Los Angeles at the Esquire Theatre at 410 No. Fairfax on August 15, 1941 and continued into September.  The Desert Sun, a California newspaper, advertised a showing at the Palm Spring Theatre in January, 1943.

The film made known to the American public of the plight of the Chinese, and it caught the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt.  One outcome of the film was a nation-wide drive to raise funds for the Chinese people.

From the Madera Tribune, August 27, 1941, of Gladys Ling Ai Li and Rey Scott

(Image retrieved from the California Digital Newspaper Collection)

Finding Kukan (2016, Nested Egg Productions)

Sunday at an encore "Best of the Fest" at the CGV Cinemas, Buena Park, Calif.

Finding Kukan was screened at the Visual Communications' L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival, Sunday, April 30th.  This blogger was not able to make that screening, but thankfully an encore screening was happening the following Sunday, May 7th.

Afterwards Robin appeared at the Q & A moderated by VC's Abraham Ferrer.

Robin described her eight-year journey in the making of this film.  She pointed out that much of the film consists of an original music score by Miriam Cutler.  This blogger enjoyed the fluidity of the film with its visual feast of shadow performers portraying "shadow" Li Ling Ai and Rey Scott.


Li Ling Ai and Rey Scott

Who were Li and Scott?  Rey Scott was the writer and photographer who risked life and limb to document the chaos and carnage through the film, Kukan.  Li was surmised in Robin's documentary to have been the actual brainchild of the film, but she was only given onscreen credit as a technical advisor.

Li Ling Ai (Li was her last name) was Hakka-Cantonese Chinese and born in Honolulu in 1908.  She traded the Pineapple for the Big Apple by having settled in New York, and she died in 2003.  The filmmaker Robin was struck by their shared backgrounds, and she regretted having discovered Ling Ai years after her death.

Ling Ai was a college graduate, poet, playwright, dancer, singer, lecturer, and as Robin's film emphasized, she was a political activist and filmmaker, making her a pioneer in many of these accomplishments as a Chinese woman.  But she was also the first and only Chinese woman to host an American television show.  And she publish a memoir in 1972.  [Clarification 6/5/2017:  Anna May Wong starred in her own tv show in 1951.] 

Flamboyant in dress and appearance, she was outspoken and seemed to be comfortable in her skin though she experienced the usual prejudices.  In retrospect Ling Ai has been described endearingly as a drama queen, a diva, a badass.

She was born in Hawaii when it was a fairly new U.S. territory -- she spearheaded the idea for Kukan successfully, all while the American ban on Chinese was still in effect on the U.S. mainland (the Chinese Exclusion Act would be repealed in 1943) -- her ancestral China turned communist in 1949 -- her native Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state in 1959.

An ample amount of news publicity exists that helped Robin in piecing together the story, but these were mostly about the dashing adventures of Rey and his making of Kukan.  Ling Ai's contributions were elusive.

One of the most amazing finds during Robin's quest was tracking down the raw footage held in a Kansas salt mine (about two hours worth of film?) from the post-production manager for a 1993 Turner Broadcasting Station interview with Ling Ai for a special about the life of Robert Ripley (of Ripley's Believe It or Not).  Excerpts of the interview are included in Robin's film - Ling Ai appearing at age 85 - the interviewers intended her to only speak about Ripley but the salty diva veered off onto tangents concerning her own life.  Ling Ai was a co-host on Ripley's Believe It or Not, a national television show during the early years of broadcasting, and Ripley was her friend and associate.

The footage of Ling Ai enamored this blogger.  Perhaps more of the interview could be packaged for a future documentary.  In the meantime, there is a gem of a 26 minute audio of a radio interview with Ling Ai conducting a Chinese cooking lesson and is available on the Internet Archive.  Or more likely she was conducting a Chinese life lesson for listeners.

This blogger just received her used copy of Ling Ai's Life is For a Long Time, a Chinese Hawaiian Memoir, purchased online.  This 1972 work was actually about the immigrant experience of her parents and was also a pioneering first - the Asian American political movement began about 1968 - books about the Asian American experience trickled out in the 1970s, and this blogger took an Asian American history college course about 1975.  So Ling Ai's book, about the Asian experience, was groundbreaking, appearing a handful of years before Maxine Hong Kingston's 1976 book The Woman Warrior.  Because Ling Ai was not an academic as is Kingston (who is a California transplant living and teaching in Hawaii), Ling Ai went undetected on the literary world's radar.

In 1972 perhaps the ongoing war in Vietnam was on her mind.

  But her words could just as well apply to how many of us feel in any period of our lives -- like 2017

A comment made last month by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the U.S. Attorney General, reminds one that Hawaiian islanders are considered to be on the fringe of the country.  Sessions was reacting to a judicial block on the Muslim travel ban by saying “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”

This post appears on May 19th, Ling Ai's birthday!  And it is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.