Minari (2020)

Minari is a film by - hyphenated - Korean-American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung. The film is partly autobiographical and fully beautiful.  

Watching films in which white families speaking English represented the American experience and growing up with a father who "came to America believing in the romantic dream of what he saw in films like 'Big Country' and 'Giant' - this fertile land able to yield so much promise" (via), Lee Isaac Chung wanted to create something that transcends borders and feelings of national identity. And he certainly succeeded. Minari is "about taming the soil, like so many westerns", a drama "in an eminently American tradition".  At the same time, the language mainly spoken is Korean. This intersection led to some controversy when the movie's Golden Globes category was not best film, but best foreign film (via).

While Minari is about immigrants arriving in an unfamiliar world, the film shows a light touch in its treatment of racial and cultural difference. The Yi children face what we would now call microaggressions from local kids, but these are presented as essentially benign in their cluelessness. This is true to his experience, Chung says. “I grew up feeling like the main obstacles that we were trying to overcome had more to do with how we survive together as a family, and less to do with external relationships that we had with the community. Racism did exist and I’ve experienced some horrific incidents, but when I think about those days, it’s more about farming and the difficulties of trying to love each other.” (via)

"A lot of people have had good discussions about what it means to be American, and we need to broaden our definition."

Lee Isaac Chung

"We grew up in rural Arkansas without any Koreans close by, and when I go to Korea feel out of place."

Lee Isaac Chung

"Because growing up as an Asian-American and growing up as someone who is not white, oftentimes in this country you can feel as though you're a foreigner, or you're reminded of being a foreigner, even though you're not. Even though inside, internally, you feel completely American."
Lee Isaac Chung

"Growing up where I was, there were no Asians, no minorities, and there was always something to remind me of what I'm not. And when I go to Korea it's the same thing. I'm constantly reminded that I'm not Korean."

Lee Isaac Chung

"I like the idea of all of us looking at the world with less of an emphasis on national borders and with more of an emphasis on shared humanity."

Lee Isaac Chung

"A lot of times we have these categories that maybe don't fit the reality of human experience and human identity. I'm completely sympathetic to what a lot of people in my community are saying - that often as Asian Americans we're made to feel more foreign than we internally feel ourselves."

Lee Isaac Chung

"I always tend to gravitate toward the idea of things being human: that this isolation I feel as an Asian American, even though it's real, other people have it too in their own way."

Lee Isaac Chung

"I wanted to make something that transcends borders and gets beyond this feeling of national identity."

Lee Isaac Chung

"Part of the fabric of America is that we have people from different countries who've come here and they are American, and yet they embrace their home ancestral culture. And this is their new home. And that's part of what makes this country unique in the history of human beings on this earth."

Lee Isaac Chung

"I hope that anyone facing or experiencing discrimination will, first of all, take to heart that this is not their fault, and they are not alone in this. Secondly, I hope they find ways to plug into communities to help prevent negative feelings of discrimination from festering."

Lee Isaac Chung

"Any time there is a film in a 'foreign language,' in Spanish or Korean or whatever language, it's usually not an American film. It's usually from another country."

Lee Isaac Chung

"I grew up watching films of predominantly white families speaking in English, and that this represented the American experience."

Lee Isaac Chung

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images via and via and via

Lunar Geisha. By Michelle Watt.

When Michelle Watt was four, her family left China and moved to the US where she grew up. As a young woman, Watt bar-tendered for a couple of years in New York and experienced what it means to be turned into the fetishised Asian woman. 

It happens still to this day, but you know how you’re treated as a young woman behind a bar. You’re like a baby sheep in a pack of wolves. And my Asianness kept coming up as a way in for them. Michelle Watt

Michelle Watt's reaction was to create "Lunar Geisha", surrealistic compositions, a portrait series of a Geisha, the metaphor for the hypersexualised Asian woman. In her photographs, Watt also symbolises the "good daughter" within Asian society and the object of desire within the US-American one (via). The series explores how Asian women "are thrust into playing certain roles, the ways in which they become complicit in those stereotypes and the ways in which they rebel against them" (via).

It’s not really an inspiration as much as it’s a compulsion to work it out. Deconstructing it through staging and storytelling and narrative in these symbolic ways ends up being a really healing way of dealing with those things.
Michelle Watt

“I wanted to show how, even within Asian society, women are forced to play roles in ways that they may not necessarily want to; roles that may often be silencing them. And how – in order to fit in, in order to find a sense of belonging – we betray ourselves, and we play along.”
Michelle Watt

“Am I being hired because I’m being used as a token? Is that okay? Am I going to fight that? It’s complicated. I always feel like I’m asking these questions.”
Michelle Watts

“I crave things like belonging and love. I want to feel like I’m attractive and to have that validated by men — or by anyone. And so I’ve been complicit in fulfilling these stereotypes in order to gain the favour of others. But the first step of breaking any sort of bad behaviour or habit is to recognise it. So making stories like this helps me address that.”
Michelle Watt

“It’s complicated because you want to play that part because you want to belong somewhere. But you also don’t really like that part, so you don’t really want to play the part. That’s kind of confusing. Codependency is a huge theme there.”
Michelle Watts

photographs via and via

Asian American Media Representation: Emasculate, Timid, Nerdy

Abstract: While the number of Asian Americans in the U.S. continues to grow and media use increases, misrepresentations of this group remain common in U.S. films. Examining representation of Asian Americans in the media is important because media can positively and negatively impact identity development, which is a fundamental cognitive, social, and developmental task related to understanding one’s place in the social world. Misrepresentations can also shape intergroup interactions by influencing how out-group members view and interact with Asian Americans. 

 

This study investigated representations of Asian Americans in the media through a film analysis. Observations of the film analysis focused on identifying the presence of representation that either resisted or confirmed stereotypes portrayed by Asian characters in films over the past 25 years. Data were collected on the frequency and type of role (e.g., lead vs. supporting character), characteristics displayed, and the content of dialogue by Asian characters in the films. Results suggested that the frequency of lead roles increased over the last 25 years, with more diverse genres emerging in recent years. Stereotype-resisting representations were present (e.g., brave, loyal, mischievous), especially in more recent films. However, stereotype-confirming representations remained prevalent (e.g., emasculate, timid, nerdy), which affirms the historic trend of misrepresentation of Asian Americans in film. The discussion centers on how Asian American representations in media may affect identity development in Asian American adolescents and young adults and influence intergroup interactions. The authors conclude with recommendations for future research and implications for practice.

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- Besana, T., Katsiaficas, D. & Loyd, A. B. (2020). Asian American Media Representation: A Film Analysis and Implications for Identity Development. Research in Human Development, 16 (3-4), 201-225, abstract
- photograph by Dorothea Lange via

The Stop AAPI Hate Report

Stop AAPI Hate (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) received 3.795 reports from March 2020 to February 2021. The types of discrimination reported are verbal harassment (68.1%), shunning (20.5%), physical assault (11.1%), civil rights violations like e.g. workplace discrimination (8.5%), and online harassment (6.8%).

More findings of interest: Women report hate incidents 2.3 times more often than men, Chinese are the largest group to report experiencing hate, and businesses (35.4%) are the main site of discrimination, followed by public streets (25.3%), and public parks (9.8%) (Jeung et al., 2021).

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- Jeung, R., Yellow Horse, A., Popovic, T. & Lim, R. (2021). Stop AAPI Hate National Report, link
- photograph by Dorothea Lange via