May 8, 2007

• Angry Asian Men

  Mike Kang (“West 32nd“), Ken Leung (“Shanghai Kiss“, “X2“, “The Sopranos“) and I took part in an interview (also see below) for The SF Gate about the age-old question on an artist’s responsibility in depicting violence on screen — especially in regards to the Asian Community in the recent wake of Seung-Hui Cho’s actions at Virginia Tech.   

   I’d already been thinking about this topic weeks before the interview when: 1) Someone asked me if I were offered the role to play Seung-Hui Cho in a telepic, would I take it? (read my answer in the article below) and 2) When I noticed the press kept trying to find leads behind Cho’s actions based mostly upon his ethnicity. 

  Some drew conclusions that he must’ve seen the Korean film “Oldboy” because he was once photographed violently wielding a hammer like the film’s main character.  Others, like Republican, Pat Buchanan ‘brilliantly’ theorized that the main reason was that Cho was an immigrant and therefore secretly hated America to begin with.  He wrote:

  Almost no attention has been paid to the fact that Cho Seung-Hui was not an American at all, but an immigrant, an alien. Had this deranged young man who secretly hated us never come here, 32 people would heading home from Blacksburg for summer vacation.  What was Cho doing here? How did he get in?
  
  Cho was among the 864,000 Koreans here as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, which threw the nation’s doors open to the greatest invasion in history, an invasion opposed by a majority of our people. Thirty-six million, almost all from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country, now live in our midst.  Cho was one of them… But are we really a better, safer, freer, happier, more united and caring country than we were before, against our will…

  So according to that op-ed, I suppose just in case — every immigrant should just be sent back, right Senator McCarthy?  (Seriously, who the hell puts these kind of lynch mob fueling people in places of power?) 

  Anyway, then it got me thinking about James Kim.  When the story broke and they found his body, I noticed almost none of the press articles mentioned that a Korean-American Man did this heroic act.  He was just a guy who worked at CNET.  And I thought it was so cool – the fact that race didn’t have to be brought into it. 

  But on the flip side, I wondered, “If race wasn’t brought up in regards to a heroic act, why is it now the only thing to be put up to scrutiny when it’s in a negative light?”  Where’s the balance?

  Read the article below, it’ll bring up some interesting conversation/debates.  In the end, my personal view is that violence in Film/TV in any form (to the images that are in the “SAW” movies to Jerry slamming a rake onto Tom’s toes) is not going to go away — and censorship is never the way to go. 

  Ultimately, my wife and I are going to have to be trusted to keep up our end as responsible parents to be that filter and moral compass as to what gets seen and heard by our daughter — and to sit her down for a reality check when those images do slip though. 

  Unfortunately there’s just no way to police that every parent will do the same (ie: keeping them away from the Grand Theft Auto games) or a guarantee that things will still not go as planned despite the best upbringing when they grow up and make their own decisions.

  Angry Asian Men — By Jeff Yang, Special to the SF Gate

  More…

  Recent events and media coverage seem to have swung the image of Asian American males away from the “meek, passive and mild” end of the spectrum and toward “violent, bloodthirsty and dangerous.” What does this mean for Asian American pop culturalists — and what, if any, responsibility do creators have for depicting the community from which they come?

  One might say that it’s been an annus horribilis for the Asian American man. From the racist rantings of Kenneth Eng, to the conviction of Hmong American Chai Vang in the shooting of six fellow hunters, to last month’s horrific murder spree at Virginia Tech, events seem to have conspired to swing perceptions of Asian males to the point where any sign of aberration is being transformed into evidence that we represent a simmering danger, a repressed wellspring of vitriol and violence waiting only for the right trigger to burst forth.

  Actual aberration, or imaginary: One of the truly strange signatures of the media analysis around the Virginia Tech tragedy is how blurred the line became between reality and creativity. In the wake of the murders, pundits provided line-by-line critiques of a handful of plays that killer Seung-Hui Cho wrote, trying to find within them harbingers of the horror he would unleash. They compared movie stills to poses Cho struck in his video testament, hoping to identify cinematic inspiration for his violence, and reported breathlessly on Cho’s love of computer games, even suggesting that he used them for “training” purposes.

  The art-as-evidence phenomenon quickly extended beyond Cho: In Cary, Ill., on April 23, high school student Allen Lee was arrested for “disorderly conduct” and removed from school after submitting an essay that his teacher said contained disturbingly violent content — despite telling students that the assignment was to write a creative work depicting strong emotions, on which there would be “no judgment and no censorship.”

  Around the same time, in Fort Bend, Texas, another Chinese American student was arrested and expelled from Clements High School after parents of classmates informed authorities that he’d created gaming maps based on the school for the tactical combat game Counterstrike. A search of his bedroom revealed five decorative swords and a hammer, which was enough for the police to declare him a “level 3 terrorist threat.”

  The hammer may have been what sent the police over the edge. After all, such a tool featured prominently in one of the most widely seen images from Cho’s video “manifesto,” a self-portrait in which he’s grimacing at the camera and holding a standard claw hammer over one shoulder.

  But the height of absurdity was reached with the controversy around the April 22 episode of HBO’s mafia epic, “The Sopranos,” featuring Ken Leung as Carter Chong, a mentally unbalanced Asian American youth who erupts in a spasm of violence. Comparing it to the Virginia Tech massacre, pundits called it an “eerie,” “astoundingly awful coincidence.” Media blurbalists wrinkled their brows and tsked at the “torn from the headlines” parallels.

  It took cooler heads, like blogger Jenn Fang, to point out that the episode was only by an elastic stretch of the imagination comparable to the story of the shooter who’d murdered 32 fellow students at Virginia Tech the week before — not least because the episode in question was shot six months before the massacre, making any kind of a direct connection between the two impossible.

  Fang aptly pointed out that the only substantive link between Cho and Chong (well, other than three letters of the alphabet) is that both are young Asian American males:

  “A racially Asian man with mental illness is automatically associated with violent mass shooting sprees because Asian craziness is a factor of one’s skin color. Whereas the countless depictions of white men with mental illness are non-threatening because white craziness has nothing to do with whiteness … mainstream america [is unable to] distinguish between a person of color’s race and his actions, be the actions positive or negative. Seeing one black man dunk a basketball or rap a song is proof positive that all black men are capable of such feats, and an example of one Korean American man who succumbed to the violent nature of his mental illness is evidence that all Asian Americans with mental illness will be Seung Cho reincarnated.”

  Even fictional ones. The rush to make the Cho connection is even more disturbing, given that the episode’s story arc is far more reminiscent of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” than the Virginia Tech tragedy: Chong gravitates to Junior as a role model — the charismatic, assertive maverick he’s always aspired unsuccessfully to be. When Junior takes meds that rob him of his aggression and vitality, Chong attacks him, unwilling to accept the sedated, pathetic creature his hero has become. Chief’s smothering of the lobotomized Randle McMurphy in “Cuckoo’s Nest” is driven by pity and mercy, while Chong’s assault is born out of rage and disappointment, but the underlying theme is ultimately the same. Both are narratives about suppression of the free spirit, the breaking of the unruly will, the shackling of self-expression. And with creativity increasingly being linked with criminality, Ken Kesey’s story seems increasingly worth rereading.

  If Looks Could Kill

  These are troubled and troubling times, so on some level, it’s understandable that little things like writing an essay, making a video-game map or pulling the wrong prank can prompt immediate reaction from authorities unwilling to make a deadly mistake. The question is whether these reactions are being inappropriately magnified based on race. Other racial groups are deeply familiar with the phenomenon.

  Say something stupid at the scanner line at an airport, and you may find yourself being pulled into detention for questioning. But if you happen to have Arabic features or an Islamic-sounding name, the repercussions are almost certain to be greater. Drive too fast through a white suburban neighborhood, and you may be pulled over and issued a ticket. But if you’re a young African American man, the cop stop may include a drawn weapon, an order to get slowly out of the car and a request to open the trunk of the car for a search. And now that same racial recontexting seems to be happening around young Asian males.

  “It’s funny,” says actor Ken Leung, who remains startled that his “Sopranos” appearance has generated so much controversy. “All these people made these comparisons between Chong and the Virginia Tech killer, and yet, if you actually watch the episode, two scenes later, there’s a guy getting shot through the eye. Well, the crime, the heinousness of the whole tragedy at Virginia Tech was the killings — not the fact that the murderer was Asian. And yet no one ever refers to the vicious shooting in this episode. That’s what Cho did: kill people with guns. But they ignore that, and instead have gone into the fact that I’m Asian, my character is Asian, and whoa, that’s eerie. What’s really eerie is people essentially saying, ‘Oh, it’s fine that this guy got shot in the eye, but look at this crazy Asian guy.’ That scares me.”

  It’s not that Leung doesn’t acknowledge a few cosmetic similarities between his character and Cho. Both are young Asian American males with short-cropped hair. But Cho was Korean American and 6 feet tall; Leung is considerably shorter and Chinese American. And interestingly, Leung says that the character as originally written was described as overweight — “this really big fat Asian guy” — with thick glasses. If an actor fitting that description had been hired for the role, would the same controversy had erupted? Or would viewers have been able to distinguish between fat, bespectacled Asian TV character and thin, tall, real-world Asian murderer?

  “Tomorrow” Never Dies

  “I was wondering who got that part — I, along with every other Asian male actor in L.A., auditioned for it,” says actor Parry Shen, best known for playing the lead actor in Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow.” “The director of that episode of ‘The Sopranos’ was Justin’s director of photography on ‘Annapolis.’ He told Justin that they were having a tough time casting that role and said they were opening the auditions up, so Justin sent it to all of us who’ve worked with him in the past. Basically, he e-mailed us saying, ‘I know that any one of you guys could pull this off and turn this into something worthwhile.’”

  Like Leung and most other working Asian American actors, Shen has played a roles with questionable morals — thugs, gangsters, even murderers. And he echoes Leung’s point that actors shouldn’t avoid portraying “negative” characters, because it’s an actor’s challenge and responsibility to make those characters three-dimensional, bringing humanity to them and illustrating their flaws.

  Shen’s breakthrough role, as Ben Manibag in the blackly comic “Better Luck Tomorrow,” was one such character — and in its time “BLT” provoked its own share of controversy. “People often forget that ‘BLT’ was inspired by real-life events — the Stuart Tay murder, back in 1992. A lot of people thought Justin just made the story up,” says Shen. “There were some in the community who criticized the film, saying, ‘Why are you showing Asian Americans in this light?’ And Justin’s response was that he thought it was important to show how these characters became so flawed, how they got from point A, honor-roll students, to point B, thieves and murderers.”

  While Shen, now the parent of a 2-year-old daughter, is conscious of concerns around the media’s role in desensitizing young people to violence, he also notes that not telling these stories, and not exploring the reasons why these tragedies occur, could potentially be even more harmful. “You have a responsibility to learn from history, or you’re going to keep repeating it” he says. “At the same time, I do agree that people in the media also have a social responsibility that’s different from just about any other profession. People don’t sit around thinking, ‘Oh, if I do this Excel spreadsheet this way, what’s the impact going to be in my community?’ But if you’re an actor, a director, a creator, you do. You have that responsibility.”

  That’s why a recent topic of discussion has dominated Shen’s circle of fellow actors: If someone were to make a TV movie inspired by the Virginia Tech shootings, and someone offered you the role of Seung-Hui Cho, would you take it?

  “I know it sounds hypocritical, given that I played the role based on a real-life murderer in ‘BLT,’ but my answer was no, I couldn’t,” says Shen. “I wouldn’t want to give his character any humanity, any excuse as to why he shot all those students. Maybe because it’s so fresh — maybe time makes a difference. There are people who’ve played Hitler brilliantly, but if the Holocaust had just happened, would any actor want to portray Adolf Hitler? And you know, we were all talking about this, all of my friends who are working actors, and across the board, everyone said no. They all felt like they had this responsibility not to reinforce the idea to younger kids that if you’re troubled, this is an appropriate outlet for your emotional problems.”

  Shooting From the Gut

  A young Korean American man walks through mazelike corridors, stalking his intended victim, gun in hand. He shoots, wounding his target, who tries to crawl away; he walks up to the supine, bleeding body, still twitching, and fires several more times at point-blank range, before moving on to other rooms, other victims. It must have been a gut-wrenching scene even 10 months ago when it was being filmed. In the wake of the events of April 16, it takes on another layer of resonance.

  The sequence is part of a bloody shootout that takes place in “West 32nd,” director Mike Kang’s much-anticipated follow-up to his award-winning debut, “The Motel.” The context in which it occurs — a bloody gangland burglary — is entirely different from the situation around the Virginia Tech shootings. But there will undoubtedly be those who watch the sequence and ask whether it’s a responsible one, given the shootings — whether it casts the Korean American community in a light that reinforces misperceptions and heightens tensions.

  “I don’t think you can create that way,” says Kang. “To me, the only thing you can hold on to is the integrity of what you’re creating. If you limit yourself to showing only positive images, that’s untrue. If you show only negative images, that rings false as well. I get annoyed at movies that come out that show gangsters as cool, violence as cool, and I get annoyed at movies that show them as inhumanly evil, as one-dimensional killers. This film is about representing a whole gamut of characters, good and bad, and representing them as three-dimensional people. I think that’s the only responsibility you have as a creator — to depict that kind of truth and complexity.”

  Kang admits that some concerns emerged early on from the Korean media, but that reporters and critics who’ve actually seen the film have recanted those concerns. “The fact is, Cho, that kid wasn’t Korean American — he was Crazy American,” says Kang. “He was mentally ill. He was disturbed. And if anything, he was a product of American culture, not Korean culture.”

  The antecedents of “West 32nd,” a beautifully shot film with an intriguing cast led by John Cho of “Harold and Kumar” fame and Grace Park of “Battlestar Galactica,” are, in the words of Kang and Edmund Lee, his co-writer, the great crime thrillers of the ’70s — “Mean Streets,” “Dog Day Afternoon” — films about wildly swinging moral compasses, where heroes and anti-heroes cross paths and morph into one another, where the darkness of humanity and the human side of darkness are depicted with grim reality.

  “West 32nd” is unashamedly a genre flick — “We’re products of our pop culture,” quips Kang — but it arrives at a time when even genre films are being looked at through an absurdly harsh lens. In the days following the release of Seung-Hui Cho’s video, critics held forth on how the famous “hammer portrait” was similar to a shot in Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook’s violent revenge thriller “Oldboy” — suggesting a connection, even though there’s no evidence Cho ever saw that film. How long will it be before critics can watch a film about young Korean American men with guns and not invoke the specter of Virginia Tech? What kind of a chill might this cast over Asian American creativity, if this kind of fear and anxiety continue to dominate the critical dialogue?

  “A friend told me something the other day: Fear moves down, reason moves up,” says Leung. “And because of gravity, fear moves faster. It sounds a little esoteric, but I’ve been mulling that over in my head. I think the only way to deal with this is to not push fear away, to not look at it as a bad thing — to embrace it, as part of our human ability to feel. And then maybe we’ll be able to overcome it. Maybe then reason will catch up.”

  We’re resilient creatures, we humans. We rebound from tragedy, and rise up. We are, I think, strong enough to encounter monsters, to look into the abyss, and not tumble in. We need to respect the memory of those who have lost lives, family, innocence — but we need to do so in a way that moves beyond the knee-jerk blaming of culture, creativity, and entertainment that has become the narrative around every act of atrocity in modern America.

  There is increasingly a reflexive condemnation of those who create — or even consume — “disturbing” works of expression. But shutting down these outlets is at the least a red herring, distracting our attention from the real problems that lead to emotional distress and violence in our society. And at the worst, repressing such works removes a form of catharsis that for some is a safe release of aggression, even a form of therapy. And for our society as a whole, that way lies danger — a fast road to censorship, and an outcome none of us want, artists and audience members alike: Suppression of the free spirit. Breaking of the unruly will. Shackling of self-expression.

  • 6:11 pm
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