American popular culture is notoriously male-centered. For Asian Americans, however, the situation appears to be reversed, which may be yet another reflection of the power of the dominant culture. Novelist Amy Tan is more widely read than novelist Shawn Wong; comedian/actor Margaret Cho got a shot at a network television series, while Russell Wong had to settle for starring in the syndicated Vanishing Son; and Asian American women anchor local news broadcasts across the country, while Asian American men occupy less visible positions as field reporters. The Joy Luck Club, Picture Bride, and Double Happiness focus on women's lives. David Henry Hwang's Tony Award winning play, M. Butterfly, the story of a Chinese man who convincingly masquerades as a woman in order to spy on a French diplomat, puts it thus: "Being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man."

In the American popular imagination, Asian women are depicted as ultrafeminine sexual objects for white men, and that sexual formula leaves Asian men literally out of the picture. For example, a recent episode of the CBS television series Chicago Hope featured Julia Nickson as a Chinese American woman who helps a doctor played by Vondie Curtis-Hall to diagnose and treat an elderly Chinese immigrant. Although virtually all of her scenes were played opposite an African-American doctor, at episode's end Nickson's character accepted a date with a peripheral white character. Anxiety over black male sexuality certainly accounts in part for this resolution, and indeed actor Curtis-Hall seems constantly to downplay his sexuality - as if intelligent black men have to suppress their physicality in order to succeed in the white-collar world - but the complete absence of Asian American men (excepting the feeble-bodied patient) is even more striking.

Recent statistics show that the percentage of Asian American men and women who marry white partners is about the same. Nevertheless, out- arriage is perceived to be more common for Asian American women. This phenomenon has been dubbed WMAF (White Male, Asian Female) in the community, and the perception is reinforced by many Asian American filmmakers. For example, both The Joy Luck Club and Double Happiness depict Chinese culture as oppressively patriarchal. Most certainly it can be, but in these films, Chinese patriarchy functions mainly to shore up American culture as one in which women can flourish. Romantic relationships with white men provide the freedom that Asian unions would quash.

The absence of vital cinematic portraits of Asian American masculinity is the context that inspired Stephen Okazaki to make American Sons. The film is a bracing departure from Okazaki's previous work for PBS. Okazaki has dared to put angry Asian American men on display in a film that is confrontational and uncompromising. Americans Sons features four composite characters speaking against the abstract backdrop of a photography studio. The film is organized as if a series of talking-heads interviews were edited together topically, with the interviewer's questions excised.

The four characters represent diverse experiences, although most are working class. Kelvin Han Yee plays Mitchell, an nth-generation Chinese American (in Asian American-parlance, 'nth-generation' describes people whose grandparents were born in the U.S., i.e., Americans of at least the fourth generation). Of the four, Mitchell speaks with the most rage. Yuji Okumoto portrays James, a Korean adoptee raised by white, upper-middle- class parents; he is the least certain of his identity, but also the most questing of the four. Ron Muriera is Danny, the son of Filipino domestic laborers, who has devoted his career as an attorney to immigration law and minimum-wage cases. Lane Nishikawa plays Robert, a third-generation Japanese American (a Sansei) and a veteran of the war in Vietnam. These four men speak of their formative experiences with racism, their perspectives on what it means to be Asian American, and the various ways they have empowered themselves and contested the image of emasculated Asian American males.

American Sons' visual arrangement is spare and striking. Mitchell and Robert are positioned on the right side of the screen, while Danny and James occupy the left. Thus, the two working-class men whose lives have been marked by violent confrontation are distinguished from the two upwardly-mobile men who have adopted a more 'pacifist' approach. The pseudotestimonial monologues are arranged so that they comment upon each other, like themes and motifs arranged in a musical suite. The film is punctuated by musical interludes performed by a trio consisting of composer and jazz bassist Mark Izu (who also plays the sheng, a Chinese mouth organ), koto player Miya Masaoka, and tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Francis Wong. The film opens with the trio performing a soulful, strutting jazz groove, followed by our introduction to the four men. A menacing jazz riff sets up the second section, in which the men talk about their socialization, the ways that racism affected their parents' pursuit of the American Dream, and their growing politicization during the Civil Rights era. A searching melody over syncopated rhythms introduces the third section, in which the men discuss commonplace patterns of ignorance ("What are you? Chinese or Japanese?") and their stake in identifying themselves as Asian Americans and allying themselves with people of color. This segment ends with Mitchell directly addressing the audience, as he admits that he taught himself to fight, and that this violence empowers him. A ballad performed by solo bass sets up an introspective segment in which Robert talks about his experiences on the front lines in Vietnam, Danny discusses his family's pride in his decision to become an activist attorney, and James talks of his adult quest to find connection to Korean culture. In the film's final sequence, underscored by a clarinet and sheng duet (a haunting ballad called "Sheng Illusion," also featured in Okazaki's Unfinished Business [1985] and recorded on Izu's album Circle of Fire on AsianImprov Records), the four men read from newspaper accounts of racist violence directed against Asians and Asian Americans, including the shooting death of Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange student looking for a Halloween party, who was killed when he knocked on the wrong door in a Louisiana town; the shooter was acquitted of all charges.

The male-centered American Sons makes an interesting contrast with Trinh Minhha's female-centered Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989). In that film, Trinh restaged interviews with Vietnamese women in a studio setting, with amateur actors (mostly Vietnamese American women) enlisted to read the words of their Vietnamese counterparts. Like American Sons, Surname Viet, Given Name Nam is built on a fundamental disjunction between raw testimony and studio-polished presentation; but whereas in Trinh's film that disjunction serves to comment on the role of cinema and of translation in mediating the narration of personal experience, in Okazaki's film that paradox is down-played. American Sons would have us take its monologues as true testimonials, but edits those testimonials for dramatic impact. In this, the film has much in common with Anna Deavere Smith's theater pieces, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, both of which have confounded the critical establishment who are quick to praise Smith as a performer but seem uncertain whether she deserves to be called a writer. Smith's theater pieces and Okazaki's films are hybrid works, blending documentary form with theatrical artifice to produce an avowedly political expression rooted in the lived experiences of people of color. That hybridity is fundamental to American Sons' rhetorical strategy; it may also limit the venues in which it can be shown.

The structure of American Sons does not allow us the luxury of immediate access to Asian American men's experiences. Okazaki clearly has shaped and edited the testimony he has collected. Known for bringing a documentary sensibility to his fiction films, Okazaki's awareness that even scripted films take on a new life when actors bring themselves to their roles informed his decision to use professional actors to recreate a stylized documentary feel. When I spoke with Okazaki at the 1995 Seattle Asian American Film Festival, he said, "I really wanted so badly to say these things, and this is one case I just thought, I want the actors to say it [like I wrote it]. You know, I did that film on Hiroshima [Survivors (1982)], and someone says, 'I saw my mother and father burned alive,' and then they giggle and cover their mouth and apologize for saying that - I did not want anyone to do that, and I think in many ways most Asian Americans would do that in some way, 'This bad thing happened to me, but I still like white people.' And I just wanted actors to say, 'This is what happened,' and then hold it there, not start backing away from it. I normally love and believe in documentaries, but I felt stronger about the subject than I did about the medium on this."

Documentaries, while not objective, are governed by certain conventions that often imply objectivity. American Sons' polish is a constant reminder of the film's artifice. In a striking sequence, Mitchell relates a story of how he came home from school one day singing, "Ching Chong Chinaman," not knowing what the song meant. Mitchell tells us that his father took him aside: "Why are you singing that? Do you know what that means? You come from a great people with a great history! Why do you degrade yourself like that?" Mitchell's father's speech is not reported, but performed: the camera tracks in and the lighting shifts as actor Kelvin Han Yee becomes a different character. The performance is dramatically powerful even as it undercuts verisimilitude, for Yee's virtuosic performance destroys any lingering aura of naturalism.

Ultimately, American Sons succeeds best when it tests the limits of actively engaged. The pseudotestimonials are not mere stories, they are arguments. American Sons is designed not to inform but to stimulate discussion about the nature of Asian American masculinity.

That discussion begins with the film's competing visions of what it means to be Asian American. Is Asian American identity a matter of action or reaction? Does it involve the discovery and development of Asian American culture, or is Asian American identity shaped entirely by a racist environment? Danny's work as an activist-attorney defines his hope for the future, and his debt to his parents: he reports how he ran to tell his parents that he had passed the bar, only to find himself in tears when he finds his father at work polishing the lobby floor. "Now you don't have to be like your father," he is told, but instead of pursuing lucrative rewards Danny goes into public interest law, making his parents even prouder. By putting the Asian American community ahead of his personal gain, Danny asserts his connection to the past and to the future - he asserts his power to define his own identity and masculinity.

James, the Korean adoptee, seems less sure of his own future. Finding his parents unsympathetic to his desire to know more about Korean culture, James makes contact with Asian Americans in college (discovering that even the kids from Asian American families seem lost and confused), prizes his relationships with other Asian adoptees (marrying a Japanese American woman), and treasures the memory of the primal connection he felt participating in a performance of traditional Korean drumming. But James knows that he is not Korean. Visiting the country of his birth, he realizes that the instant he opens his mouth he is marked as an American. "So I float. I was born in Korea but I have no roots there. I grew up in America but I'm not welcome here. I just float. That's what being Asian American feels like."

Robert, the veteran, drifts through a series of bad relationships and lost weekends after returning from Vietnam. Visiting relatives in Hawaii, Robert comes to a realization echoed by other mainland Asian Americans who visit the fiftieth state for the first time: Asian Americans in Hawaii have nothing to prove. Seeing some 'brothers' standing confidently on the beach, Robert breaks down and cries. He finds his pride again when he begins volunteering with troubled kids at a community center, and he lets the anger go.

In many ways the charismatic Mitchell, who has held onto his anger, provides the film's center. Mitchell notes that he is a product of his environment: "Racism made me the way I look, the way I walk, the way I talk." He also admits that he might have been something besides a bouncer had he grown up in a different atmosphere. But Mitchell refuses to let other Asian Americans off the hook: "I meet Asian Americans who say they've never experienced prejudice in their lives. They say, 'Why are you so angry? Racism's never affected me.' I look at them and I think, 'Whoa - check again, brother! You got your shoulders hunched up, your eyes are staring at the ground, you're so used to being treated like a houseboy you don't even know the difference. You're so oppressed you think it's normal!'" Mitchell's accusation echoes how many people of color feel about middle-class Asian Americans, the 'model minority.' The Sansei poet David Mura observes that many Asian Americans have accepted white America's invitation to ride in the front of the bus - as long as they ignore the people in the back, and as long as they don't ask to drive. Mitchell, like Mura, rejects 'honorary white' status.

For Asian American men, emasculated or ignored by the popular media, anger provides a dramatic means of redefining Asian American masculinity. The more conciliatory path of Danny, while it may ultimately do more for the community, might be explained away as a model minority pursuing the American Dream: son of immigrants does good. Other people of color may look at Danny and conclude that he's simply helping other Asian Americans move to the front of the bus. It is Mitchell's anger that allows Danny to be seen in a different light: as a committed, antiracist Asian American.

Unfortunately, it is Mitchell's anger that may prevent American Sons from being seen as widely as it should be. Six of Steven Okazaki's films have played nationwide on PBS, but Okazaki knows that American Sons will not fit in the same PBS cubbyholes (if only because it is neither documentary nor theater). Ironically, American Sons may have done too good a job of redefining Asian American masculinity. Many fans of popular Asian American media may not recognize these men! That very disjunction should provoke the debate that American Sons clearly wants to initiate. Okazaki is attempting to get the film shown in high school classrooms and on college campuses. "If there's any audience I care about, it's college-age Asian Americans, at that age where the pieces are slowly falling together - confronting you actually. I don't really care if it does well elsewhere, I want it to get into Asian American Studies classes, I want people to have arguments and discussions about it, I want it to start people talking, and just free people to say the word: 'racism.'" American Sons makes the stakes clear by ending with accounts of anti-Asian violence.