Spring. May. Each year, we go through the usual cliches and token celebratory "hoo hah" in American public television being dribbled out on America's public TV channels, the "so-called" heritage month to commemorate the "Asianness" of America's heritage and the so-called "ties" linking America to Asia-Pacific.
This year, when I reminded my fellow blogger from Taipei, Taiwan,中國紅 China Desk, http://thechinadesk.blogspot.com/about May being "Asian-American Pacific Heritage Month" in the U.S., especially in U.S. media, he responded with chagrin, as follows:
"AP Heritage Month in the US?"
"What a bitter irony."
"Just in time to pay pro forma lip service to tolerance, even as the
mainstream piles on China."
"Sickening."
"But true to form. Insult added to injury. Arrogance on top of ignorance."
As more immigrants settle in America today, leading to further "browning" and "yellowing" of America, the culture fault lines are increasingly becoming more and more pronounced.
Many Euro-Americans and white folks, as well as many native black folks, and even among native-born Asian-Americans,are discomfit, if not mortified and fearful of the influx of new immigrants from Asia-Pacific region, with their dramatically different set of cultural "bags and baggages", value systems and cultural traditions. Lately, the backlash has seen more clamoring and campaign against immigrants, and more political pressures for public officials to "close those damn doors" and "pulling the planks" against any further new immigration. In fact, there is a dumb move afoot to build a fence along the Southern border, as if this billion dollar fence would stop the influx from "South of the Border."
The stridency of anti-immigrant bashing is alarming,especially here in California, now undergoing the most intensely "browning" and "yellowing" of America's largest state. Today, 90% of San Francisco "food service workers," from dishwashers, busboys, kitchen help, food servers, are Latinos. There are mor Chinese restaurants in America than there are McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and Wendy's altogether combined. Click on Jennifer 8 Lee's YouTube video promoting her book, "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGZ6IwSDyyo
The sad reality for those of us, ethnic Chinese living in America today, is that the "cultural gaps" are not being bridged. America may be more diverse in terms of its ethnic, racial, and religious mix; but getting the ethnics, races, and different nationalities to truly interact meaningfully and interface with each other, beyond superficialities under the mantra of "diversity" is more difficult in reality.
And culture and Hollywood and the microcosm of what appears in American media evidences that there is still long ways to go in terms of bridging the gap. Let's call it like it is: "Hollywood is fundamentally still a "White Man's Game" and "White Man's Town;" albeit with more African-Americans breaking through those doors; but for the yellow man, he still remains "invisible" and marginalized.
And Arthur Dong's "Hollywood Chinese," with its narrative through many of the Chinese-American pioneers who play "subservient" and "demeaning" roles, his film serves a purpose in reminding us that there's ways to go before the ethnic Chinese is accepted as "full citizens" in America, and not marginalized.
Rather, biases and prejudices, self-imposed blinders and de-facto apartheid remain pernicious and cloud America's whitestream of consciousness with stereotypical imagery of the Chinese which is racist, offensive, and insulting.
This year, I am particularly pleased that apart from the sixth (6th) generation of China-based filmmakers continuing to pave new grounds in the world of films, there are also very remarkable great talents appearing in America among Asian-American filmmakers. These new cadre of Chinese-American and other Asian-American filmmakers are rocking the world of films and cinema.
Among Chinese-American documentary film-makers, I am particularly impressed by the amazing sensitivity and virtuosity of one Chinese-American documentary filmmaker, Arthur Dong. Mr. Dong, based in San Francisco, had previously produced a magnificiently well-done and poignant documentary film of San Francisco's old Chinatown nightclub, "The Forbidden City," which was an incredibly illuminating piece of San Francisco's Chinese-American community of the pre-and-post-World War II generation.
Now, this year, Arthur Dong has once again, gifted to us anew a fascinating piece of documentary about "Chinese Hollywood."
If there is one documentary that I would highly recommend that you see this month of May, Asian-American Pacific Heritage month, with respect to the genre of Chinese films, apart from "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Boy," the social satire that I earlier blogged in Spatium Trientis, about John Cho and Kal Penn's satirical romp exposing the utter ludricruousness of America through the eyes of Harold (our Korean-American anti-hero) and Kumar (our Indo-American anti-hero), I highly recommend Arthur Dong's " Hollywood Chinese." Click on for a trailer of the documentary:
http://www.deepfocusproductions.com/HollywoodChinese/index.html
Click on further for a review of Mr. Dong's "Chinese Hollywood;"
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/reviews/movies/HOLLYWOODCHINESE.DTL
