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Tag: documentary
Memoirist and Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner explains her journey to appreciating Korean cuisine with journalist Lisa Ling.
HBO Max’s “Take Out with Lisa Ling” is a six-episode docuseries featuring East Asian and South Asian communities across the U.S. and how they keep their cultures alive through food. Michelle, the author of the best-selling and award-winning memoir Crying in H Mart, joined Lisa to discuss being grief-stricken at a Korean grocery chain H Mart location and how that grief inspired her to write about losing her mother.
The she lit book review can be found here.
In the sixth episode titled “Korean American Dream,” Michelle and Lisa meet at an H Mart in Northern Virginia.
“I knew pretty early on that the book was going to begin with: ‘Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart,'” Michelle says. “It’s like this private ritual, where I’m just in my thoughts and thinking about my mom.”
Likening her weekly shopping trips to H Mart as her version of “church,” she tells Lisa that she better understood why her mother depended on places like H Mart to connect to her native land.
“My relationship to Korean food changed so much because I was trying to resuscitate her in a way,” Michelle says over jjamppong, her mother’s favorite dish that’s a Korean noodle soup with ingredients like onions, garlic, Korean zucchini, carrots, cabbages, squid, mussels, and pork. The dish, along with many others, gets an honorable mention in the book.
Crying in H Mart centers on Michelle’s relationship with her mother and the fear she feels that her cultural awareness may disappear when her mother dies because she is biracial, her mother Korean and her father White American. How she illustrates her rich culture is mostly through food since authentic Korean ingredients over the years have come stateside through venues such as H Mart.
“Being mixed-race and losing your parent who ties you to this culture, you have to actively work to preserve it,” she says in the docuseries. “In writing this book, I learned so much about our relationship that I didn’t even realize before. That particular type of friction between an immigrant parent and a first-gen American is really a unique, tumultuous relationship.”
The memoir reaches a depth of making sense of a loved one’s premature death. In the docuseries, Lisa asks Michelle how she thinks her mother would’ve reacted to the book after they discuss feeling long-awaited pride in their cultures.
“My mom was really a private person, like a lot of Asian parents are, so I’m sure she would have scolded me for sharing some details,” Michelle says. “But I always think, like, if there was another half-Korean girl who wrote this story about her mother, and I bought this book for my mother and I, I think that my mom would say to me, ‘This girl really loves her mother.'”
Michelle’s book deal with Penguin Random House imprint Knopf came out of a winning 2018 essay of the same title that was published by The New Yorker.
For Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Netflix debuted a two-hour documentary about Chinese American best-selling author Amy Tan that focused on how her books became reflections of her life and her mother’s life.
After seeing immediate success with her debut novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989, Amy started a writing career that followed the story’s legacy of featuring two generations of American-born daughters and Chinese-born mothers.
The documentary follows Amy’s childhood where she loses her older brother and father both within six months of their back-to-back brain tumor diagnoses. Amy talks about feeling scared being left with her suicidal mother, who moves Amy and her younger brother to Holland from the San Francisco Bay Area. Once she returns to the U.S. for college, Amy reconnects with her best friend who was another child of the real-life Joy Luck Club, a small social group of Chinese American immigrants who met to discuss investment opportunities, play mahjong and cards, and feast at midnight with the kids.
Years later, Amy is making a career as a business technical writer and living with her husband. One day she receives a call from her brother that her mother had a life-threatening heart attack. She said she made a vow to God that she will spend more time with her mother and talk to her about her life in China. When Amy connects with her mother, she learns her mother experienced angina after an argument at a fish market. Her mother was fine, but the promise echoes and inspires her to sit down with her mother and discover her mother’s life in China.
“I started to ask her about her life, and I listened instead of saying, ‘I’m really busy now. I can’t listen to you,'” Amy says in the documentary. “I would listen to everything and that profoundly changed everything. I wasn’t fighting it anymore. And I learned a lot by simply being quiet and actually listen.”
The Joy Luck Club became an instant sensation resonating across cultures with the common thread of generational trauma.
“It gives you curiosity; you want to ask questions you want to understand and in the answers you get stories,” says author Isabel Allende in the documentary. “That’s what Amy has been doing. She observes her mother and her aunts and the culture and at the same time she totally belongs here. So it’s in the conscience, in the complexity that she finds her language, her inspiration.”
Four years later in 1993, the book became the first film to feature a majority Asian American cast. That success wouldn’t be repeated until 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians based on Kevin Kwan’s first book in his soapy series.
“Not to do any disservice to the amazing Asian American writers that came before Amy, but I think this is the first book that really crossed over into becoming a mainstream mass market success. It had such a huge impact on paving the way for other writers of color to tell their stories,” Kevin says in the documentary. He adds he saw the film five times in the theater growing up in Texas where all his friends were White, but he was proud to be able to show them “English-speaking contemporary Asians.”
The novel has also seen its critics who Amy says believed she had used ethnic tropes like starting the novel with a fake Chinese folktale to portraying the grandmother as a concubine who commits suicide. Except the tropes Amy is accused of putting in her book actually happened to her family and in her life, she says.
“When I was given this mantle for speaking for the Asian American community, suddenly there were these expectations. I started getting a lot of criticism. Some said I did it wrong, that I had created stereotypes and pandered to those,” Amy says. “Mothers speaking in broken English, or concubines who had killed themselves. These were stereotypes.
“In the beginning, I didn’t know what to say. I would be caught off-guard,” she adds, “but then I realized that they wanted really was role models. They wanted me to right the social wrongs, the social injustices and finally they had someone in the limelight who should now address that and not be pandering, so to speak, to the mainstream.”
Besides The Joy Luck Club, Amy is the author of seven other books, including memoirs and children’s books.
Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir is streaming now on Netflix.
Asian American creatives describe how Claudia Kishi of The Baby-sitters Club series defined their upbringings in the 1990s.
The companion documentary The Claudia Kishi Club from director Sue Ding premiered Friday on Netflix, a week after the latest rendition of The Baby-sitters Club topped the viewing list.
Birthed in 1986 by Ann M. Martin, The Babysitters Club followed five middle schoolers then eventually seven who start their babysitting business in the fictional Stoneybrook, Connecticut as they deal with family issues, boy issues, and school issues. Of the original four is Claudia Kishi, who is Japanese American yet broke the model minority myth by failing her classes and prioritizing her art and fashion.
This is the sentiment of the creatives who participated in the 17-minute documentary. Those creatives include Naia Cucukov, executive producer on The Baby-Sitters Club series and executive vice president of development and production at Walden Media, the series’ production company; Yumi Sakugawa, comic artist; Sarah Kuhn, author of the Heroine Complex series featuring Asian American superheroes; C.B. Lee, author of the middle grade Sidekick Squad series; Gale Galligan, the illustrator behind The Baby-sitters Club graphic novels; and Phil Yu, the creator of the Angry Asian Man blog.
Claudia Kishi has been played by Jeni F. Winslow for the 1990 TV series that aired on HBO, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon; Tricia Joe for the 1995 motion picture; and now Momona Tamada for the new Netflix series.
In the 1980s and 1990s, girls of color looked for the girls of color that represented them the most on TV, films, and books. Claudia became the literary heroine to look up to for Asian American girls.
“Usually the Asian American character or the woman of color character is the one you sorta feel you have to be,” said Sarah Kuhn. “Like if you’re playing Harry Potter, then you have to be Cho Chang where I feel like Claudia is the one everyone seems to want to be.”
Also the limited representation, or faulty representation, made a lot of girls of color question their visibility.
“You don’t see mirrors of yourself, thinking I’m broken or I’m not normal or I don’t exist. These thoughts are kinda subconscious,” said C.B. Lee. They’re pervasive, especially when you go on thinking that the world—or when you perceive the world as a world without you in it.”
The faulty representation also came from the lack of women of color being in charge of these media projects with mostly White women controlling the narrative.
“There’s definitely that quality of othering for sure where you know a lot of these stories are being told from the perspectives of young White girls,” said Gale Galligan. “In terms of racial representation—how do I put this?—I noticed that most of the people were White.”
The Baby-sitters Club famously switched perspectives between the seven members by telling their backgrounds in all of their books. With her Japanese heritage, Claudia is always described by her Asian features, which the creatives in the documentary found as offensive language that struck a chord.
“They somewhat problematically described her as having ‘almond-shaped eyes’ and ‘jet-black hair’ and ‘super-beautiful skin’ though she eats tons of junk food,” said Yumi Sakugawa.
The members include Kristy Thomas, the bossy president and founder; Claudia the vice president; Mary Anne Spier, the shy secretary; Anastasia “Stacey” McGill, the fun New York City girl and treasurer; Dawn Schafer, the fun California girl and alternate officer; Mallory Pike, the writer and junior officer; and Jessica “Jessi” Ramsey, the ballerina and junior officer.
For redheads, Mallory is the picture of representation as Jessi is for Black girls. Mallory and Jessi were introduced into the club later into the series as eleven-year-olds, so they have limited appearances in the Netflix show that just focuses on the original members.
Claudia is the only one who owns a landline, so the meetings take place in her bedroom where the girls exchange candy and other junk food that Claudia provides. Along with being the artsy candy lover, she is a horrible student always competing with older sister, Janine, who exceeds in school and speaks Japanese.
Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. the World, wrote the sixth episode titled “Claudia and Mean Janine,” also the title of the seventh book in the series published in 1988.
The author and now TV writer will be a part of “A Celebration of Claudia Kishi” along with Momona Tamada, Naia Cucukov; Heather Jack, director of episode “Dawn and the Impossible Three,” and The Claudia Kishi Club director Sue Ding. Hosted by Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, Gold House, Japanese American National Museum, and Netflix, the webinar will be held Monday, July 13 at 5 p.m. PST.