• 危机
• wēijī
• dangerous/critical point

I chose to present the Chinese for “crisis” since one of the films dealt with a Chinese family, and the documentary dealt with a “Chinaman” image.

Saving Face involved many sort of crises. Honor, romantic, personal, occupational. Ma’s crises begin with her pregnancy, being kicked out of her home, dating, and fear of motherhood. Since she was unwed and pregnant, Ma’s father kicked her out of his home. For him, having an unwed pregnant daughter caused him to lose face (a sort of social honor). Wil tries to get her on dates so that she will get married and move out, but she feels insecure about her age. She also kept repeating her fears about not being able to take care of the child well. She’s afraid she can’t manage it.

Wil faces crises over her relationship with Vivian. She is afraid to tell others about their relationship, mainly her mother and the Chinese community because she would seem like a disrespectful daughter. She also struggles to balance her job, her mother, and Vivian. When she lets Vivian go, whether because of her fear or for Vivian’s future, she fully admits she loved Vivian.

The Slanted Screen highlighted the roles that Asian American men have had in film and television. The real crisis about this is the lack of proper roles being presented.

In Slanted Screen and Slaying the Dragon the documentaries on Asian women and men in the film industry go through a crisis of portraying a “real” image of Asian cultures. So there is a bit of an identity crisis for both men and women in the tone of sexuality and of what Asians look and live like. Also, in Saving Face Wil has an identity of who she is, she is biologically Asian, but culturally she is not accepted. Katniss is not accepted in the Capital at all because of her rebellious meaning, yet she does not fit in with district 12 anymore. She tries to do her best to just leave this rebellion behind, yet most people around her are controlling the things around her and she has no idea. She sees herself as just an ordinary girl trying to escape, but then she has to use this image of the Mocking Jay for the rebellion. Katniss is confused about what is going on around her and what she feels inside. She is caught between what she is told is right and what she feels is right.

[boun-duh-ree, -dree] noun, plural bound·a·ries. 1. something that indicates boundaries or limits; a limiting or bounding line.

In class today we related Slanted Screen, Orientals, and Saving Face together by relating them to the term “boundary.” Above I gave Dictionary.com‘s definition of boundary  and in class, we defined boundaries as a division, borders, or lines. All three relate to boundaries of sexuality, opportunity, traditions, interracial boundaries and more.

We eventually moved onto East Main Street and the different chapters. Each chapter has a different topic, but they all have the same theme of having these boundaries given to them.

The first chapter we covered was chapter 6, “Within Each Crack/A Story.” This chapter covers the “political economy of queering Filipino American pasts” (117). The title can mean various things, like the cracks in our hans, or cracks in a story, or even a butt crack.

Queer has many different meanins; however, in today’s society, most people only understand “queer” as the derogatory term. In this chapter, though, queer is actually used in both the strange or odd conventional viewpoint and the homosexual meaning. On page 125 it states, “‘They like you because you eat dog,’” obviously this is a queer view of it being something that would seem mentally unbalanced in the American culture;  furthermore, this essay tries to use “‘queer domesticity’ to characterize pre- 1965 communitities of Filipino laborers”(119). In a sense, some habits of Filipino culture can be seen queer to the American eyes, yet what Filipino had to go through is quite queer itself insofaras to America sees the Philippines as “little brown children” (124). As the Filipino community tries to assimilate to America, America has set this boundary in which they cannot cross.

The second chapter we covered was chapter 10 “Miss Cherry Blossom Meets Mainstream America.” This chapter covered Japanes American second generation (Nisei) beauty pageants and how they tried to assimilate to American cultures. There was a boundary already set up against the Japanese-Amreican culture to prevent them from being part of the American culture so creating pageants that “mimiced” mainstream America (208). Their way of mimicing the American culture was their way to prove to the whites that they were trying to assimilate, “by dressing the queen in western garb and promoting her keen and usually native-born ability to speak English, the community highlighted the “Americanness” of Japanese Americans…They too could claim to be ‘All American Girls’ by mimicking and adopting hegemonic American cultural values such as innocence, sexual purtity, honesty, and caring” (207). Instead of being able to cross this boundary of beauty pageants, Nisei pageants ended up making a new boundary to acceptance of a new kind of beauty pageant of Japanese American culture.

The last chapter we covered for the day was chapter 14, “How to Rehabilitate a Mulatto.”

Slanted Screen: the crisis lies in stereotypes and the negative portrayals of Asian American men in films. However, like Slaying the Dragon, hindsight is 20/20, especially when the opportunities for Asian Americans in lead roles were nonexistent. At the birth of the movies these artists were groundbreaking in their contributions to the films. And while the racism, sexism, and other discrimination existed it isn’t until later, during it’s “midlife” when people begin to take these roles and plots apart, analyze them closely, compare them to history, and then critique them. Orientals is in, itself, an example of this midlife crisis. With Lee’s descriptions of movies such as Year of the Dragon and Rising Sun he illustrates the ways in which Asian American men are still misrepresented, underrepresented, and in need of a midlife crisis.

Saving Face: this movie moves past and breaks other stereotypes, such representing Asian American male sexuality (the many dates that Wil’s mother goes on, Cho’s attraction, and Little Yu’s surprise role) and the role of two queer Chinese American young women. While Wil’s character is a hard-working surgeon (at the beginning of the film the head surgeon says she will be Chief of Surgery by the time she is 45- five years before he stepped into the role) she is also seen as a multi-layered, complex woman. Other than the few, quick scenes in which she is seen in scrubs or her beeper is going off the majority of the film is focused on her as a daughter and a lover. This film also pushes back against the stereotype that women need to be put in physical danger or pressured situations to find love and be saved.

So here it is. The midlife crisis of Asian American films; without forgetting the contributions that Sessua Hayakawa or Bruce Lee made in showing other Asian Americans that representation is possible, it is now time to look at how those representations are limited and how the presence of Asian Americans on screen can (and needs to) still grow. Likewise, in Slanted Screen one of the people interviewed (the only women-who was white-) said that “there aren’t any good roles for Asian men in film.” I had a problem with this because it assumes that Asian men only have specific roles and unless those specific roles are written there is no part for them. As Lee points out in Orientals, the roles written for Asian American men were roles that subjected them to embodying the stereotypes that white America had projected onto them. Similarly, by writing “Asian roles” the projection of what an Asian role is and what the lead hero role is, recognizing the pattern in both of them to influence our acceptance of these stereotypes. On page 220 in Lee, there is an analysis of film Falling Down‘s main character and how his excessive reactions become comical.  Lee comments the audience is prompted to laugh at his reactions which becomes comedic despite his obvious, unnecessary rage. By “writing these roles” for white men and then writing the role for his antagonist and casting an Asian American man we are training the audience to desensitize themselves and accept the protagonist as funny. (See: Gran Torino.)

Today we talked about CRISIS and what role it plays in Asian American culture. Overall, I feel like there is a crisis within the Asian realm of media. For instance, in today’s movie earlier, we watched The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film and Television. In the documentary, there was a typical stereo-type of Asian men being either being a bad guy or some sort of “kung-fu” master. There was a famous actor, Sessue Hayakawa, who was the first Asian-American actor to incorporate himself in interracial relationships. Though it was a ground-breaking move for Asians in media, it still has not helped too much in today’s society. Keep in mind that these films were made many decades ago; however, movies today in 2014, are still very similar. Yes, there are Asian protagonists, yet there are still typical Asian stereo-types portrayed. In Romeo Must Die, Jet Li is Asian and he is very good at martial arts and the main female role, Aaliyah (African-American) does not end up with Romeo who essentially saves her. The title says ROMEO, so it implies a Romeo and Juliet sort of a tone, but they do not fall in love. Though that it just an implication, there are still stereo-types of Asian American men with knowing karate and being the bad guy in today’s society, creating a crisis of Asian American identity within media.

In addition to the stereo-types, there are also different standards that Asian-American men are held up to in America. There was a snippet of one of the Actors from The Slanted Screen about Bruce Lee and how in America, he had to keep his mask and clothes on to do his physical scenes; however, in China, he can reveal himself and take his shirt off to do his fighting scenes. I thought that this was a crisis in a way that, Lee’s films ended up being famous here in America anyways. Also, it sets up this standard that Asian’s cannot reveal their true-selves in a way. So again, a crisis with who Asian American’s are.

We also watched a movie, Saving Face, which is about a lesbian Asian woman who takes in her mother who is pregnant and will not tell who the father is. Their two roles already are seen as “disgraced” in a typical Asian culture. In this movie, this also creates a crisis again with identity. The characters do not stand as stereo-typed Asian women in a crisis with playing cheesy stereo-types, but a crisis in which they do not fit within typical Asian cultures.

Thinking about the title of the movie I see it relating to keeping the “face” or reputation of both Ma’s and Wil’s family. First off, Ma marries someone who she does not truly love and ends up having Wil. She marries this man to make her father happy and to keep the family’s successful reputation up. So he ends up dying and she somehow gets pregnant! Who is the daddy? Throughout the movie she does not say a thing. Ma ends up getting herself in this arranged marriage to, again, make her father proud of her and to keep his reputation up. However, Wil finds out that her mothers first marriage was not out of love, but business. At the end, we find out it was Little Yu that she had an affair with. And the mother accepts that she must follow her heart instead of instructions and orders.

Wil is a lesbian. Her mother, in the past, found her with a girl but did not say anything about it. Her mother ended up pushing Wil to find a man and get married. Her mother tried to cover up the possibility that Wil could be gay. This causes Wil to be very timid around her  mother about her social life. For instance, when her neighbor, Jay (who is black), comes over her mother makes really racist remarks against him in Chinese, very subtly though. This causes Wil to be aggravated. Then when Vivian pushes Wil to let her meet Ma, Ma accuses Vivian of not liking black people because she did not want to date Jay. When Ma acts up about Vivian dating Jay, it was as if Ma knew they were dating, but did not want to admit it to herself. Wil eventually comes out to her mother and tells her that that was who she was.

In this film, there was also some graphic nudity and identity crisis. I feel like this movie breaks a lot of ground as to having both leading roles to be disgraces to typical Asian cultures. This again, is like an identity crisis within their own culture. Both Ma and Wil cannot truly be themselves because it is not what their family wants to see. As for the graphic nudity, I find it amusing how before, Bruce Lee could not show himself without his shirt on here in the U.S., but now there are movies with lesbian sex scenes. Thus, there is media progress, but still identity crisis.

Overall, the films we had talked about today related to this crisis of stereo-typing and breaking ground in media.  In Slanted Screen there was discussion on both stereo-typing and making media history for Asian-American’s with interracial relationships and breaking the “bad guy” view of Asians. In Saving Face there is lesbian acceptance from her family and Ma’s father accepting her decision to be with who she truly loves. There is a lot of different scopes to see crisis; for instance, identity crisis within the media sphere and the identity crisis within one’s own culture. In the end I feel they all relate to identity and being able to make it within each individual environment.

Relating this all to Lee’s Orientals I would have to bring it back to stereo-types. So in Slanted Screen the Asian actors could not be “sexual” they can be romantic, but that’s it. So in Slanted Screen we saw Asian men as romantics, flirts, or sexual-less. Opposed to Saving Face Ma is a woman who has sex with someone, ends up getting pregnant, and does not share who the father is; thus, giving the stereo-type of Asian women has sly, secretive, and hyper-sexual. Wil, too, gets intimate with Vivian a few times, but acts very timid in public; therefore, leaving the audience to see both Vivian and Wil as these secret sexual beings.Then none of the men in the movie are scene as coming off as promiscuous in any way. This relates to the crisis of Lee introducing the sexual views that American’s have put on Asians. It still lives on in today’s media. So, how do we, as a society fix the media? I suppose that question is a crisis within itself.