Such a varied filmography demonstrates how Wang defies expectations, particularly in regard to his career arc. Good thing for cinephiles, then, that — unlike other good Asian sons — he went against his parents’ wishes for him to become a doctor. After receiving his MFA in film from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Wang returned to Hong Kong and started directing a popular TV soap opera, “Below the Lion Rock”. “The Hong Kong media was blowing up at the time,” says Wang, and his Hong Kong career seemed set — but he ended up returning to the United States instead.

During the interview, Wang also talked about running, painting, how the film version of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day fell through (”He was worried that I would get too close to the truth about his family, was what he told me”), abortion counselors, YouTube (”The Princess of Nebraska is too experimental, too open-ended, to show in theaters”), Chinese gangsters, specific plot points [sorry, can't post them because of possible spoilers!], his optioning of the film rights to Xiaolu Guo’s novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and cleared up the rumor about a forthcoming Adam Sandler - Zhang Ziyi “movie” Good Cook, Loves Music which he’s supposedly directing (”I don’t know how it ended up on my IMDb page. It’s not happening.”).

His two latest films, a return to his independent film-making roots, both based on short stories by the Oakland-based writer Yiyun Li. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (winner of four prizes at the San Sebastian Film Festival, including Golden Shell for Best Film), is in general release in theaters this month; The Princess of Nebraska will be released on YouTube’s Screening Room in October.

The interview took place in San Francisco.

American Pop [AP]: I know I should be asking about the two new movies, but I’m really curious about 1967 to 1982.

Wayne Wang [WW]: In ‘67, Hong Kong was in the throes of a lot of riots, which was a spillover from worldwide protests and changes. And the Chinese Cultural Revolution was spilling over into Hong Kong, so my parents told me, You better go to the U.S., go away, go to college there. My parents were traditional, conservative businesspeople who escaped to Hong Kong from the communists in China. So I was basically sent over here to Foothill College, down in Los Altos, and I lived on a ranch that was owned by some Quakers. They were obviously anti-war and conscientious objectors, and I remember David Harris and Joan Baez was there a lot, giving talks and meetings. So I became very political during that period.

I was supposed to be studying to be a doctor, but I started taking art classes, I fell in love with art history, painting; I had really good teachers that inspired me. So I told my parents I wasn’t going to be a doctor, I was going to study painting. By that time, I was quite radicalized, quite Americanized. I was a free soul, so to speak, in the early ’70s — and being in the East Bay, in Berkeley, I went to the Pacific Film Archive every night…

When I got out of school, I said, let me go back to Hongkong, because it was impossible in those days for Chinese to make films in the US. This was probably unheard of; it was impossible to break into the business. The best I could do was probably make documentaries for the TV stations.

AP: So this was a deliberate effort on your part, because you knew you couldn’t break in?

WW: Yes, that was part of it. But the other part was that I was beginning to feel that I was really American, and I didn’t know what the Chinese part of me was, and I wanted to track back to that.

“Below the Lion Rock” was popular and working, but I wanted to change it — which was not the thing you do for something that’s already working. They didn’t like that. I was a little more radical.

AP: Do you mean politically radical, or cinematically radical?

WW: I wanted to change it in terms of its narrative, the way the camera moved. I was very influenced by Godard; you are political by changing the film language. I also had problems adjusting with my parents… I think I came back to the U.S. after only eight months, tops.

I returned to San Francisco and did volunteer work in community agencies. I immersed myself in understanding what the community was about on many different levels. I worked there for five or six years, with different jobs — everything from teaching English to an administrator to developing curriculums for bilingual students.

AP: That’s how you fell in with George [Wu] and Laureen [Chew] and Presco Tabios.

WW: That’s right. Met a lot of people, almost everyone that’s cast in Chan Is Missing. George Wu [former San Francisco State University professor and director of the Newcomers' Language Center, who delivers a speech in the film on Chinese American apple pie] was my boss. Chan is Missing came out from all that. That movie is, in a way, almost like a fictional diary of my experiences.

I didn’t think anybody would be interested in seeing it. I gave it to the San Francisco International Film Festival, but they didn’t even open the package, so I sent it around, and finally the New York Museum of Modern Art had their New Directors Festival and they really liked it. Then Vincent Canby’s review came out in the New York Times and that was how it became more popular.

Documentaries and fictional Asian American films were very seriously sort of talking about how we were discriminated against, and how difficult our history was, blah blah blah blah blah, in a way was almost too serious. And almost like perhaps complaining about our experiences. Or trying to be too rah-rah about how positive we have to be. So Chan Is Missing was kinda looking at the complexity of Chinatown in a different way. It helped me find another way to express myself about Chinatown.

AP: I’ve showed your films many times to students in my Asian American Culture class, and once I invited Laureen Chew [star of Dim Sum and Associate Dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University] to talk to the class afterwards. She called Dim Sum “a deeply political act”. Could you talk about that a bit?

WW: [pauses] “A deeply political act.” [laughs] Laureen actually had differences with me about how she was portrayed; she wanted to be tougher, stronger, and not so guilty about her own culture and her own mom. I wasn’t that interested in that, because that would be too close to Laureen herself. [laughs] I was more interested in someone who was more conflicted, because there’s more drama in that.

I think it’s political because anytime you make a film about Chinese Americans and make it in a way that is authentic and realistic, it is political. Because nobody will go out there and do these films. Ang Lee made a few, and there are a lot of young directors doing it now. I think the heart and core of changing how people perceive us is through the humanity of the characters that are portrayed on screen. That’s why it’s political for me.

AP: I know they’re supposed to be seen as companion films, but there’s a sense in which Chan Is Missing is the companion film to The Princess of Nebraska, because they’re both about Chinatown, and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is the companion to Dim Sum.

WW: When I did Thousand Years I thought a lot about Dim Sum. I thought it was almost a similar film in a way, but now I’m older, hopefully wiser, more experienced that I could make the same film but a little different. I loved that Ozu made maybe forty films about the same story, almost, and each one is a little different…

AP: Dim Sum is Late Spring, and Thousand Years is Tokyo Story?

WW: Yeah… [laughs] Pretty much, I would say. Tokyo Story, definitely. Princess of Nebraska is in a way more Godardian. There’s a direct reference when she’s looking at a Godard poster, and lifts her shirt up; it’s like Masculin Féminin. it’s really like the Coca-Cola generation in China, in my mind.

I’d love someday to show Chan Is Missing with Princess, and Dim Sum with Thousand Years. And also Princess was very freeform, shot from the hip, and has a more shaggy-dog narrative.

AP: I figure the contrasting styles of camera work flowed organically from the contrasting themes of the two films as well.

WW: I was always kind of afraid that Thousand Years would be too classic — too Asian for people — so I wanted to just kind of break away from that also. Stylistically, that was part of the aesthetic choice behind Princess of Nebraska.

AP: What was it in the Yiyun Li stories that attracted you?

WW: They’re both about the Cultural Revolution, but I was attracted to the stories, I think, because it’s not obvious in what she writes. They’re more about characters and their complexity; those were the easy connections. But Princess was more about — I keep meeting these younger women from Beijing and Shanghai, and I find that they are lacking of any historical connection, like a lot of them don’t even know about Tiananmen Square.

AP: I was thinking that the line from the movie — where Sasha is asked about Tiananmen Square, and she says it’s something her mother once told her about — was a statement you heard in real life.

WW: Right, a lot of them would say, who would you identify with, and they’d say Paris Hilton. There’s also a line in the movie about that. I just find that that generation, growing up during the economic boom, is so interesting because they don’t really have a past to identify with, and they’re kind of searching for something.

AP: In A Thousand Years, Yilan has a line about how it’s easier for her to speak in English because she was not taught to express her emotions in Chinese. As an immigrant, was that something you experienced yourself?

WW: My parents speak Mandarin, and it’s a very formal language — so often you have to say things in these four-word proverbs, and if you don’t pick the right one it’s not quite understood. It’s just so limiting, it’s like wearing armor. So when I came to America — even though I spoke English in Hong Kong, it’s actually more formal British English. So when I came to America and started learning slang — you know, talking  – it really did free my emotions and… I remember when I first met my wife [actress Cora Miao], we would get into fights, and I would shift into English because I could express my emotions so much easier. That’s definitely something true.

AP: It’s interesting that some of the most eloquent scenes in A Thousand Years were the scenes in the park where they seemed to barely understand each other.

WW: You can express yourself if you have common experiences, through body language, through some kind of expression, through just the sounds that you make. I’m very interested in that, something more basic, more primitive, about communication. I think language is pretty sophisticated and sometimes language gets in the way, I think.

AP: Speaking of expression, I was going to say that it seemed to me that the movies that were somehow most personal to you were the ones that came in pairs.

WW: [laughs] Oh, that’s interesting! You know, I’d never thought of it that way, nobody’s seen it that way, but it’s true. The only reason why I would do another one is because I so get involved with the one to begin with. Like with Smoke, I loved what it was doing, I loved everything about it, I loved the cigar store, I wanted to do more. So that’s when I told Paul [Auster], let’s do something very different from Smoke, but let’s use the cigar store and some of the characters. That’s how Blue in the Face came about.

AP: Do you see similar themes in your more mainstream Hollywood movies?

WW: [quickly] No. [laughs] Well, there is a theme in all my work, because I’m interested in this a lot. I was born in Hong Kong, it’s a British colony, I was educated in an Irish Catholic school, my parents were very conservative, traditional Chinese — I’m pretty screwed up. And I don’t really know where I belong. So I’m always kind of an insider-outsider, and I’ve never quite connected to my own family or even the community. So if you look at all my films, they’re always about family, about formal and informal families. Smoke is about a bunch of people who are all isolated, but then somehow find a community. Chinese Box (1997) is about a man who’s from England, lives in Hong Kong, he’s an outsider, but he tries to understand Hong Kong. It’s always that same theme. Anywhere But Here (1999) is about Susan Sarandon going to Hollywood to become Hollywood, so to speak, living on the edge of Beverly Hills. That theme runs through all my work. Chan Is Missing is about a guy who didn’t belong and disappears… In that sense it’s all connected.

The thing I learned most from the studio films is how easy it is to fake emotions. In Thousand Years and Princess of Nebraska I wasn’t going for the easy drama, the easy emotions, I was trying to find what was true about the characters in the scene.

AP: Speaking of “easy” — or rather, the opposite — I remember seeing a lot of puzzled faces at the ending of The Princess of Nebraska when I saw it at the Pacific Film Archive earlier this year.

WW: It was somewhat going back to Chan Is Missing — in my first film, I talk about “what is not there is just as important as what is there”, that there’s no easy answers to things. I like the ambiguity of it.

AP: At the Q&A afterwards, Ling Li [the lead actress of The Princess of Nebraska] was joking that the movie had no ending.

WW: She never understood what it was, but it’s okay. [laughs] What was interesting for me was that I’ve seen The Princess of Nebraska with an audience maybe 20, 30 times, and each time the audience would say different endings, and each time I read it differently too. I really liked that. In the beginning I was always saying, [the movie ended like this]. Emotionally. But now, I’m more mixed, and I like the fact that over time, in different screenings, depending on where I am, I could read different things into the film too. And why does film have to be one way, one answer?

“Wang’s career has been a saga encompassing the American filmmaking experience: immigrant beginnings, rapid education and acculturation, immersion in ethnic politics, pioneering of the low-budget DIY ethic, Hollywood success and now a renewed return to roots.” 

That sounds just about perfect. One can think of a number of Hollywood directors — Steven Soderbergh, maybe — who have oscillated wildly between big-budget crowd-pleasers and looser, more experimental films. Wang’s career is one that similarly includes entire casts of non-professional actors on one hand, and Susan Sarandon, Jeremy Irons and Queen Latifah on the other.

A beginner can approach Wang’s career arc from either direction and perhaps be genuinely surprised: “He directed this?” It’s a seemingly wobbly trajectory that includes the ensemble drama Smoke (and its companion film Blue in the Face), the magisterial Chan Is Missing, from 1982 (an indie film well before Soderbergh’s own debut indie sex, lies and videotape came out in 1989), and a more recent slew of films that may have been dismissed as Hollywood lint. Less generous folks, not including myself, would see this as an unfortunate decline. For many others, J-Lo and Ralph Fiennes headlining your movie is just about as successful as you can get.

This might, in fact, remind you of one particular Asian director, and let me digress here for a moment by introducing it with a snippet of conversation I heard recently at the theater, said by one audience member to another, while waiting for Wang’s The Princess of Nebraska to begin:

“I don’t know what The Princess of Nebraska is about, but I sure liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

There’s a lesson here somewhere, but I don’t think it was learned; I just didn’t have the heart to turn around and correct the woman, whose friend didn’t know any better.

However, I think the comparison with Ang Lee is instructive, and not just because they’re both of Asian descent: a film career beginning in small-scale family dramas (Pushing Hands, Eat Drink Man Woman, and even The Ice Storm, perhaps his masterpiece), commercial and critical success, then a seemingly inexplicable turn to a Civil War romance with Jewel (Ride with the Devil, which wasn’t too bad) and a comic book movie better served by a cheesy television series (Hulk).

Where this “saga encompassing the American filmmaking experience” doesn’t apply pertains to Wang’s formative years in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late sixties and seventies, and I can only imagine it would just about mark anyone who had lived through that. It’s the “immersion in ethnic politics” that differentiates Wayne Wang most sharply.

It’s unlikely that Lee — and not just because of their different backgrounds — would have made something like Chan Is Missing. It’s a film that I’d like to think was not only forged from the activism of the late ’60s, but had been released in the early ’80s precisely because little in the intervening years had filled the gap between what Asian Americans had demanded during the early years of the Asian American Movement and what they still saw on the big screen. (Indeed, precious little in the intervening years between 1982 and now has fulfilled the promise of Chan Is Missing either, in terms of Asian American cinema. There, I said it.)

Chan Is Missing also happens to be one of the finest films about San Francisco (and not just set in San Francisco -– though arguably Vertigo couldn’t have been set anywhere else), a film about “the real San Francisco”, one even more keenly observant as Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (1961), about Native Americans in Los Angeles. But it’s also a film, its unique cinematic qualities aside, that was also intended as a political riposte to the demeaning roles (or the very absence of them) Asian American actors found themselves cast in. (Chan Is Missing is, formally, a detective movie, and it’s an explicit reference to Charlie Chan -– who, in his various incarnations for over eight decades, was mostly played by white actors in yellowface).

Let me make another digression, this time about Wang’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985). About a year and a half ago I was showing his movie to my Asian American Culture students at San Francisco State University, and I thought it would be interesting to invite one of its two lead performers, Laureen Chew, to come speak to my class. (She also happened to be my Associate Dean, at the College of Ethnic Studies, and had her office a few doors down.)

I was ready with all my filmgeek questions on improvisation and editing and the film’s motifs, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what Laureen was going to say. It isn’t often that I, or my students, have an almost one-on-one audience with a genuine movie actress. (There’s nothing like seeing someone on the big screen a few minutes before that person suddenly materializes in front of you, and the look on the students’ faces showed it.)

What Laureen did was something else: an inspiring and intensely personal look at her life, crammed with anecdotes. (The only thing I could think of, at the end of her talk, was that I and the class had received an unexpected, genuine gift.) She talked about her involvement in the Third World Strike (and her arrest and subsequent jail time), the movie’s semi-autobiographical aspects and her relationship with her mother, and the making of Dim Sum as a deeply political act with respect to its envisioned audience and the history of Asian Americans in film.

It’s this last part that surprised me the most, actually – though it shouldn’t have, as I was teaching an Ethnic Studies class, after all. Dim Sum is a quiet film about a mother and daughter and the relationship between filial obligation and marriage, and there seemed little that was “political” about it.

But of course, Laureen was right: the very fact that the film, actually depicting Asian women as rich and complex human beings, existed at all was, in 1985, a clear political statement, and it is perhaps also in this light that Wang’s career should be viewed. The fact that Dim Sum is also a beautiful, finely-observed movie — something of an homage to Ozu as well — makes it even more compelling. We still need political acts like these, particularly for people who can’t tell one Asian surname from another.

So I’m pleased to write that Wang’s two latest films, from 2007 – A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska – are both very fine returns to form, simultaneously a revisiting of and an elaboration on former cinematic themes explored in his first two major films. What “a saga encompassing the American filmmaking experience” indeed.

(A Thousand Years of Good Prayers [trailer on YouTube] will be opening at the Clay in San Francisco on September 26, and The Princess of Nebraska [trailer on YouTube] will be released on YouTube on Oct. 17. Both also played the festival circuit -– the former film opened the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival -– before this upcoming general release.)

[Tooting my own horn here: on one of my other blogs, I have reviews of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska.]

Those English skills were acquired unevenly, however: reading and listening came first and most easily, followed, with a little less grace, by writing. Speaking English, on the other hand, was the unexercised muscle, the deflated car tire dragged along asphalt by the other three wheels. (For college, I went to an agricultural school in the provinces, and one of the ways we boonie-dwelling college students differentiated ourselves from those in the city, i.e., UP Diliman, was language: over there, when people ask you for the time, they ask it in English, we’d whisper to each other.) But there was good reason for this unequal development: there was no need to talk to anyone in English because Tagalog — and Taglish, really — worked just fine.

So when I moved to the States, the daily grapple began: my Tagalog tongue refusing to cooperate, linguistic synapses working double time, trying to furiously stitch those strands of hearing and thought and speech together, my voice shaking when asking a question or making a comment in class. Store clerks spoke slowly to me, and I knew why. Unlike American-born Asians who would, for obvious reasons, take offense at such slow talk, I secretly appreciated this. It gave me a chance to think, a few seconds more to shape the words in my head.

I wish I could say this was the beginning of a romantic, semi-desolate life in exile — a man perpetually in dialogue with his different selves, split between the two identities evoked by the two tongues, spouting charming malapropisms, like some tweedy character out of some book by Nabokov — but of course not. (Besides, the idea of myself being “in exile” is too ridiculous to contemplate.) My slide into upstate New York-accented English was perhaps embarrassingly precipitous, so much so that a year later a classmate said, “You were born in the Philippines? I thought you were from Cleveland!”

I didn’t like hearing that at all. Just last week I was talking to this woman on the phone providing tech support — I was in the Bay Area, she was in Quezon City, in the Philippines — and she said (in Tagalog) that she wouldn’t have figured I was actually from the Philippines because I sounded “kanong-kano”, or very American. I didn’t like hearing that either.

***

My Filipino interviewees from Daly City would reserve their ire for fellow Pinoys who “pretended” they didn’t understand Tagalog. (Though who is to say, since Tagalog’s only one of many Philippine languages?) And then there were the contemptible Filipinos who were ashamed of their accents: “Ayaw nilang masabi na meron silang accent,” said one. “Sabi ko, pag nawalan kayo nang accent, hindi kayo Pilipino.” [They don't want it said that they have an accent. I say, when you lose your accent, you are not Filipino.]

I haven’t really lost my accent at all, honest; it lies dormant, ready to be sprung on the listener as a shared confidence. Give me a few minutes with a Tagalog speaker and you can’t hear the moment when I “turn on” the Tagalog accent, when my “cellphone” slips into “selpone” — it just happens. My friend Linelle, who is Filipino Canadian but living in California, tells me it’s not just the accent that shifts, unconsciously, in the presence of fellow Canadians or Filipinos; it’s the topics, the vocabulary, the mannerisms, the code-switching, an entire ethnolinguistic repertoire that — to me, at least — is the equivalent of comfort food.

(Although, to play a little devil’s advocate: when you hear one of your own peeps speaking in very heavily accented English, dear reader, does it sometimes make you cringe, just a little? And if you say in a huff, Of course not!, is it not this same first-generation immigrant accent that provides the fodder for comedians’ stand-up routines, even if they’re meant to be affectionate?)

So when I write that Arnel Pineda’s Tagalog accent is noticeable — my friend Barb writes that Pineda sings “Dohn’t geeve up” on the chorus of “Never Walk Away”, and it’s true — it’s not meant to be disparaging in any way. (I’ve played the new Journey songs to non-Filipinos and they simply can’t hear the Tagalog accent, but Filipinos, I think, hear it right away — yet another little secret between us.) Rather, his accent is a constant aural reminder of who he is, of who I am, of something that will never be lost, of something I have no intention of giving up.

Homesick or not, Pineda’s a busy man: Journey has released a new album called Revelation, and they’re touring with Heart and Cheap Trick. (The fact that Pineda covers “Alone” and “The Flame”, by Heart and Cheap Trick respectively, suggests that he may just as well step in for duet duties with them. That just blows my mind: Pineda used to sing Heart covers; now Heart is the support act for Pineda’s band.)

A number of the album reviewers on Amazon.com wonder whether Pineda will be “allowed” to let his songwriting voice bloom. I sure hope so, though I have his band’s debut album — it’s called Zoology, by Zoo — and it’s mostly competent and forgettable, I’m afraid, with the exception of the birthday song “Gimik”. (Of which there are no less than three versions on the disc, the best one being the “M5 Version”, which I realized just now has a bass line nicked, to my dismay, from Maroon 5’s “This Love”.) The new Journey material is merely okay as well, but I was never a big fan in the first place (although I slow-danced to “Open Arms” when I was a lot younger, long before I lay beside anyone in the dark).

Nonetheless, Pineda has an amazing voice, but is our admiration due to the fact that he can imitate so well? Let’s think of Pineda as a laborer for a minute, a worker who is selling a commodity — namely, his voice. But how specifically is his voice valued? Isn’t its intrinsic worth simply attached, ultimately, to Steve Perry’s?

When Ellen DeGeneres says “Unbelievable!” at the end of Journey’s performance on her show, what exactly is she unable to believe? (That he sounds so much like Steve Perry? That he’s from the Philippines? That he sounds so much like Steve Perry and comes from the Philippines?)

It’s a different kind of technical mastery — “This is not him lip-synching,” says Ellen to reassure her viewers — but one in contrast to the traditionally Western concept of originality and innovation. In this case, his (Filipino) musicianship is prized instead for its high fidelity to the (American) original. The musical ability accorded to Filipino musicians in general — who, apparently, can imitate any sound — relies on their capacity as mere instruments of mechanical reproduction. Tongues like parrots, indeed.

It’s Steve, and it’s not Steve. Rolling Stone calls his voice “spookily similar” [italics theirs] to Steve Perry’s, and it’s a perfect description, because Arnel Pineda will always be haunted by the phantom of Perry.

The oddest revelation with the new album, though, is a bonus second disc of Journey’s greatest hits — “Don’t Stop Believing”, “Faithfully”, “Wheel in the Sky” — re-recorded with Pineda’s vocals, uncannily, spookily, sounding like the original. There are some differences, notably the characteristic inflections that Tagalog speakers have when they speak English, but they’re negligible. But it’s precisely at those moments — when Pineda sounds most Filipino — that the specter of Steve slips through the grooves.

It’s Steve, and it’s not Steve, but the re-recorded songs exist, almost as if to say, there is no more Steve. It’s unbelievable, as Ellen says.

But let me tell you what I can hardly believe: the fact that all these audiences are cheering, ecstatically, for one of my people. And that’s why I’ll be there, hell, maybe even with the Philippine flag in hand, to cheer on this guy with the unbelievable voice. You, too, can close your eyes, and think it’s Journey playing — and open them and realize it wasn’t a dream after all.

Look: I think we should be supportive of having more Asians on television (or anywhere in the public sphere, really), but it doesn’t mean we should give mediocrity a free pass.

For instance, Elyse Chin writes in a short article on Ku called “Funny Asian”, right here in AsianWeek:

“Irreverent and not afraid to poke fun of sensitive subjects like accents and telling one Asian apart from another, the divide between Asian Americans and Asians is refreshing and not-so-mysteriously offensive, as her childlike approach to the jokes renders them insightful without any malicious subtext.”

I think there’s something missing in the sentence above (the “divide” is “refreshing” and “offensive”?), but Chin understands what Ku is doing. The deliberately atrocious Valley Girl accent, the constant uptalk, maybe even the pigtails: all shorthand meant to connote, one supposes, a general bubbleheadedness. I get what Ku’s doing, too, but just because the jokes are from the mouth of a ditz doesn’t mean they’re actually funny. (Actually, her quips about Asian guys provoked a weak laugh from an Xbox addict like myself.)

When Chin writes that Ku’s schtick is “to playfully undermine Korean stereotypes”, it’s not immediately clear how these stereotypes are exactly “undermined” by her performance. The trouble is, she traffics in the most exhausted and obvious stereotypes, in chopsticks and slant eyes. That is, it’s not the kind of humor that comes from acute observation, or a comedy animated by outrage, but a stand-up routine that’s little more than a superficial enumeration of cliches, strung together without rhythm. Which does not comedy make.

I’ll leave aside for the moment any discussion of judge Richard Belzer’s approving comment about Ku’s humor: “It’s legal for an ethnic group to make fun of themselves,” he said, also a riposte to Heath Hyche’s yellowface bit. (Surely Belzer, one of my favorite actors on the greatest television show of the ’90s, Homicide: Life on the Street, would know better than to talk about “legality”.)

But perhaps I’ll save, for you readers in the comments below, the question of whether or not it’s “self-hating” or “racist”. Part of a racial project, sure, but is it really racist? Would I be a little more forgiving if Ku were performing in front of an all-Asian audience, one that would at least recognize the whitewashed-and-dumb-Asian-chick persona better? Would I be more inclined to call it racist if she weren’t attractive and/or Asian herself? And would I be less disturbed if the audience didn’t sound like they were totally eating it all up?

In the end, it’s part of a long tradition of satire that took a wrong turn somewhere, like this. Of course, the readers of The New Yorker very likely got the joke — it’s obviously meant to illustrate the absurdity of such beliefs — but it’s not that funny considering there are people out there who really do believe Obama is a Muslim. There’s a similarly scary chunk of the American public who think all Asians look alike as well, and that’s no laughing matter either.

I’m sure you readers have already heard about Arnel Pineda, the new Philippine-born lead singer for the American band Journey: his hardscrabble life as a homeless twelve-year old with that burning talent; the videos of his cover band discovered on YouTube by Neal Schon, the Journey guitarist, looking for a new vocalist; maybe even the fantastic tale of how he got his visa. (If not, be edified: run off to YouTube and watch a CBS News Sunday Morning feature on the band from May.)

Now that you’re back — I hope you watched it all the way to the end, then went and called your mom — some thoughts. It’s a hell of a story, a tale for anyone who ever pretended to sing with a mic in the privacy of their bedrooms, its immigrant-American drama eminently marketable, and I’m sure his fellow band members in Journey recognized this. But it is clear that what Journey saw and heard, in that tiny YouTube window — what you also saw and heard — was that soaring, expressive voice of his (”the voice that has it all”, Schon calls it), an instrument that practically brooks no arguments. A quick look at the different tunes — power ballads and karaoke showstoppers all — that his band covers shows Pineda to be jaw-droppingly versatile, at least in the rock-belter tradition. “The man can sing anything,” Schon writes in the new album’s liner notes. Arnel Pineda is Robert Plant and Sting and Kenny Loggins all at the same time.

My friend Barb calls Pineda “the ultimate OFW” — that’s short for “Overseas Filipino Worker”, a bureaucratic term used by the Philippine government — and it’s an apt term, because it makes us think about the nature of Pineda’s labor, that he, in fact, is traveling overseas to work. (It should be pointed out that the very fact that there are 11 million Filipinos working overseas underscores the Philippine government’s parasitic dependence on the export of cheap labor to countries where workers’ rights are fraught with uncertainty.) Or maybe it’s just me, the cynic in myself that makes me think about these matters, as Pineda, like many other Filipinos, also hopped on the midnight train going anywhere.

And it makes me wonder: Do the guys hang out with him after work? What do they talk about — are they all friendly, or are the conversations sometimes awkward? Does he tell them stories about how he was a big Journey fan back in the day? Do the other band members reminisce about Steve, then remember he’s not there anymore? When they rehearse the old songs, does Pineda try to sing them like Steve? Does the band want him to sing it like Steve? Does he, like the other Filipino musicians I’ve interviewed, hole up in his hotel room with the old Journey CDs and sing the songs over and over until he gets them right?

Does he feel lonely? Does he get homesick? Does he think about his former bandmates, his family, his people, his homeland, thousands of miles away? Does he get to sneak out, away from the tour bus, and find the nearest Filipino restaurant? Does he get tired of the American food on tour, and long for tapsilog in the mornings?

[Next, answers to the rhetorical questions, kind of, in Part Three: It's Steve, and It's Not Steve.]

Me [right after watching Wanted]: It was stupid.

My friend Laurel: Yeah, but it was cool stupid.

Some of my friends think I’m something of a movie snob, and honestly, I’m not, but people still think my first reaction to the summer movie season is usually running for cover. On the contrary: I happily succumb to its adolescent delights every single year. This summer’s lineup, in particular, is shaping up to be a darn fine one, what with lots of stuff being blow’d up and unchecked CGI abuse everywhere.

An example, as hinted above, of “cool stupid”: Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted. There’s no need to rehash the ridiculous plot here; it’s about an elite fraternity of weaver-assassins with incredible muscle control, but who seem to forget their skills at inopportune moments. It also features Angelina Jolie, who isn’t really called upon to act, because all she needs to do is be there. (She steals scenes using only her lips, glistening crimsonly in the background, even when she’s out of focus.) Wanted is taken from a comic by Mark Millar, but it doesn’t even have the emotional depth of a graphic novel; it’s pure adrenalin-fueled videogame goodness wired directly into your brain. (Come to think of it, it shares an odd narrative resemblance with Kung Fu Panda, though without the cuteness or culinary gracenotes of the latter.)

When I talk about “videogame movies”, though, I’m not talking about such horrors as House of the Dead or Silent Hill, both movies made from video games — stinkers all, except for the hilarious 3D sequence in Doom. And I’m not talking about films that seem like trailers for the inevitable amusement park ride, like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, whose entire middle section practically sketches out the roller coaster’s architecture. Wanted, in contrast, seems to play exactly like something on an Xbox 360, complete with bad cutscenes, training sequences where you master different skills (there’s even the equivalent here of a “Retry Mission” do-over), different boss levels, and so on. Wanted has all the thrills of an immersive game practically unhampered by narrative requirements.

There’s a side-effect to all this, of course (and no, please spare me the lecture on movie violence). It has to do, ultimately, with reducing the audience (and the target market) to that of a 15-year old boy. The way the market works — and I’m still surprised by all the attention given to box-office receipts in this country, or who paid who for what and how much at Cannes or Sundance — is that the producers of the cool stupid movies can simply point to the numbers and logically say, “This is obviously what the public wants.” It’s not much of a surprise when the audience isn’t given much of a choice, though. (These movies are also, inevitably, what get exported around the world, to be peddled to folks in Asia as the cream of American cinema; nothing like using bullets to traverse cultural borders.) In turn, similar projects get the green light and the funding, thus fueling the vicious cycle of mediocrity. (There’s a political resonance about this too, about governments and the consent of the governed, but we won’t go there.)

Sometimes, though, it’s exactly what the audience wants. I was certainly one gratified customer. What Wanted actually does most impressively — other than the exhilaration of its action sequences — is to cram the highlights of cult movie-geekery in the last decade into just one film: every mock-ironic torture scene since Reservoir Dogs, the bullet-time sequences from The Matrix (with The Killer and Hard Boiled as its antecedents), Office Space’s bureaucratic tedium, and the sardonic nihilism of Fight Club. There’s surely a kind of art in this. The next time a self-proclaimed movie snob (like me) talks to you about “discerning” audiences, or the “dumbing down” of American cinema, tell them there’s a time and place for cool stupid. It’s summer time after all.

———-

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one movie currently in theaters that’s well worth your time, quietly competing for your attention amidst Hellboy 2 and The Dark Knight: Yung Chang’s brilliant debut documentary, Up the Yangtze, on China’s Three Gorges Dam Project. I wrote on my other blog that “Chang has such a remarkable sense of drama and rhythm, for the elegant ebb and flow of the parade of ordinary images before the camera — so much so that it feels less and less a documentary than a narrative feature,” but don’t take my word for it. Here’s the Metacritic review summary, but most illuminating of all is the Angry Asian Man interview with the director.

A Filipino guitarist told me a nugget of unbelievable truth one time, trying to explain to me why Filipinos were apparently such great performers. “Filipinos are the only people,” he said with all seriousness, “with tongues like parrots.” But his answer wasn’t prompted by the fact that it was his fourth shot of gin before it was even noontime.

He was one of the many artists I’ve interviewed extensively over the past two years who looked at me as if I had asked a stupid question — “Why do you think Filipinos are hired as singers and musicians all over the world?” — and gave me variations on the exact same answer: Filipinos can imitate any sound.

Not the reality of labor networks, mind you, or the history of English as the medium of colonial instruction in the Philippines, but an apparently inherent, even quintessentially Filipino ability to mimic, premised on replicating exactly what is heard.* Indeed, the Tagalog term for this (obviously dating from the seventies) is “plakado,” a compliment given to bands that can unerringly reproduce what is heard on the plaka, or vinyl record.

As Danny, a keyboardist, told me, “If you cannot copy it exactly, then you’re not a good musician.” (This, Danny said, was the main difference between Vietnamese and Filipino musicians. Speaking from his experience playing in Saigon in the early ’70s, Danny explained that the Vietnamese were “good instrumentalists, pag pumikit ka parang [Carlos] Santana, pero pag kumanta… [when you close your eyes it’s like Carlos Santana, but when they sing…].”)

Let me quote here from an online review of the Filipino band Freestyle to put the idea of “plakado” in better context:

“They did covers of Incognito, Mike Francis… Monday Michiru… Will Smith, Michael Jackson, George Michael… And no matter whose songs they did – you could actually close your eyes and not know the difference. It was, in local parlance: plakadong-­plakado.”

This act of closing one’s eyes is important. It signals a kind of erasure of cultural difference: that these Filipino musicians are, in a sense, aurally alienated from the products of their musical labor, so that they act as substitutes or copies of “the real thing.” And part of the pleasure in consumption of this technical mastery is that the audience would open its eyes, as it were, and discover, to its surprise, its music uncannily reproduced by the Third World.

*It’s worth noting that many of the singers I interviewed initially received little formal training other than long sessions of karaoke. For those of you unfamiliar with the technology (and for shame — get yourself to a karaoke bar!), many newer videoke machines give scores to the performers at the end of their songs; at a public gathering, this can result in either enthusiastic applause or outright humiliation. It is clear that the computer algorithm that rates the performance evaluates this on the basis of how closely the singer follows the tempo and phrasing of the tune; improvisation, or at least, any verbal deviation or unique expression of the singer’s personal singing style is therefore discouraged. Which is maybe just as well — it’s hard to indulge in Mariah-style melisma when you’re being graded — but the standard is, nonetheless, being plakado.

[To be continued, but to give you a hint about where this is all going: small town girl, lonely world.]

Seen in this light, this country’s grim fascination with capitalism and its unfettered demons (see also There Will Be Blood, or American Gangster) becomes more understandable. The fast track to economic success, even through illegal means (and gambling in casinos is arguably only a few degrees removed), is imbued with a special kind of monetary magic.

But the glamour of such illicit activity is interestingly parceled out in unequal doses, and, rather dispiritingly, also according to race. One ethnic group’s “entrepreneurship” and “strong familial loyalty” is another group’s “no regard for the law” and “clannishness”, even in real life. For Asian immigrants who are perhaps painfully cognizant of their unequal access to the American Dream, this is an odd form of marginalization; the figure of the successful Asian entrepreneur (and of course, the Gangster-as-Hero) is seen instead as an economic threat.

I do not mean, of course, to condone criminal behavior, nor to suggest that Asian gangs deserve a little more respect than their other ethnic counterparts. But the psycho-historical connection between capitalism, the borders of the law, and the American Dream also explains the singularly irresponsible thrill of driving around GTA IV’s urban landscape, jacking cars and beating up pimps for money. And it also makes me wish, if only for a minute, that the game’s character was some badass Asian guy in a tricked-out Honda.

“What does the American Dream mean today?” is the tag line for Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV, probably the most-awaited videogame release of the year. Niko is its anti-hero, a small-time gangster coming literally fresh off the boat from Eastern Europe and aghast at the squalor of his surroundings. It’s a stereotypical recent-immigrant scene — the deflating realization that there isn’t really gold to be picked up in the streets — but cliche aside, it’s one that also seems deeply, familiarly American. In Daly City, for instance, I interviewed newly-arrived Filipino immigrants who told me that they honestly thought that all of California would look like Baywatch — not just because they saw the television series, but because they heard from their cousins and siblings who would write, perhaps in wishful half-truths, about what life will be like for them in the United States.

Perhaps the idea of “keeping up appearances” — both to one’s neighbors, and to one’s family overseas — is also quintessentially American. In turn, this view of “American-ness” is inextricably tied to money; this is, after all, what fuels the dark heart of Grand Theft Auto IV. One only has to look at the advertisements for widescreen TV sets and SUVs in the pages of immigrant newspapers, and understand that the purchase and consumption of such items are seen (and marketed) as a way of buying into America. as part of an unquestioned American Dream.

[to be continued]