- COPYRIGHT Cineaste Publishers Inc. 1997. Used in the UCB Media Resources Web site with permission.
A Peculiar Sensation: A Personal Genealogy of Korean American Women's Cinema.(Race in Contemporary American Cinema, part 8)
by Helen Lee
Cineaste v23, n1 (Wntr, 1997):36 (3 pages).
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Her hair is wrapped smoothly in a possibly comfortable bun, higher
than seems right but that was the style then. She is perched on a rock,
near flower bushes, smiling. My mother also clutches a small handbag with
gloved hands, her legs neatly arranged. Like my father, she wears a crisp
suit. I don't know what color because the image is from a black and white
photograph, not a memory. They are about the same age as I am now.
As adults, I think we are haunted by an image of our parents in their youth, a time we never knew them. For child immigrants, these images of the past also come from another place. Not here. A place far enough away that a telephone call occasions worry first, not joy. My parents left Seoul when I was three years old. A year later, my sister and I joined them in Toronto, Canada. Our young tongues, trained in Korean food and language but unschooled and now uprooted, were soon eager for French fries and making friends in English. I think those years especially, around ages three or four (just prior to grade school, when private home life becomes formatively public), were critical. When I try to recall where photographs end and memory begins, it isn't clear.
It is a kind of curse, I think, to leave your birth place when you are young enough to lose your mother tongue but old enough not to forget the loss. For my generation, Korean American/Canadian women filmmakers who were born there but raised here, the utter contemporaneity of our experiences means back there and back then as much as right now. As someone who writes about and makes images about such tongue-tying experiences, I would like to try. to remember the particular haunting quality of our representations, where language is the spine of memory. Through our images, the faded pictures of our mothers speak with new force, saying something about our lives here. I am certain we all became filmmakers as soon as we stepped off the plane.
For now, let's put away those childish wishes for assimilation and discover a new desire for what we share. Looking at the work of my peers, other Korean American women filmmakers, and discovering the connections among their work and also the films I have made. I wondered if there was anything specific about the efflorescence of media work over the past few years which represented commonalities of location. How did our experiences as kyopo (overseas Korean) women inform our esthetic practices? I was interested in how these works functioned from the perspective of cultural displacement and feminist intervention, where race and gender identifications were prominent. How did the overlapping of Korean diasporic sensibilities (our "kyopo-ness" or identities as overseas Koreans), and our varied positionings and constant negotiations as women and artists of color in this new world reflect in our work? What kinds of representational strategies are being deployed, and what did this new visual culture signify - simply, what were we saying, and how were we choosing to saying it?
First, I am quite struck by the fact that most Korean American filmmakers are, in fact, women. For a generation destined, according to classical immigrant narratives of social and economic progress, to be brilliant doctors and lawyers (and by patriarchal imperative, good wives to boot), this is a startling find. Given the male-centered legacy of cinema history, theories of the cinematic apparatus and the world of film production itself, it is also extraordinary. Was the desire for self- representation so intense as to supersede all the traditional barriers which usually placed women and people of color as outsiders looking in? Or, in the case of Korean American women filmmakers, did our peripheral status accord a privileged view - a double vision?
I imagine a girl standing before a mirror, or a woman holding a camera to her eye. Slowly, she turns to behold her image reflected back at her, like a doubling or twill. Not identical, different but same. She sees herself, as if for the first time.
A kind of double consciousness is available to us, as minority women in the white-dominant culture of North American society. In an American context, we are Korean. In a Korean context, we are women. These media works embody an ambivalent and contingent status of American/Korean, white/other, here/there, and very often a place in-between. Issues of race and gender are impossible to ignore when their privileges and oppressions affect dimensions of everyday life, not to mention the critical and artistic expressions we try to bring to it. Aptly named a triple bind by Trinh T. Minh-ha, alluding to competing allegiances to different communities, this unique equation of subjectivity - Korean/woman/artist - can also prove immensely enabling. Could it be that patriarchal expectations for the son have, ironically, liberated the daughter? (Sometimes I do wonder if I would have engaged in such an unstable profession as filmmaking if I'd been expected to be the family breadwinner.) More likely though, the Korean daughter became a feminist with something to say.
Our issues are different from what I imagine our female contemporaries in Korea, immersed in anticolonial, nationalistic discourse in conjunction with feminism in a neo-Confucian context, might take on. In the Eighties, while Korean students were taking to the streets, the business of assimilation and dreams of professional prosperity were occupying Korean American youth. Immigrant success meant moving into ivory towers, not smashing them. But this is a crude simplification (especially now, with government gestures toward political reform baffling former student movement members of the Eighties, faced with a Korean society as economically stratified as ever in the postwar era; as well, Asian Americans are coming to the economic and political fore as never before). Ultimately, for individuals and organizations devoted to progressive change, the question of what comprises socially committed, critically informed work is answered by where we are located. While cut from the same anti-imperialistic cloth as our Korean colleagues, I think we're more likely to critique ideals of Western democracy and liberal society as illusions, than to claim them. Too many encounters with racism make it impossible to be a chestbeating American nationalist (and for a Canadian, it is downright anachronistic). Still, for mostly middle-class Korean Americans, the seduction of capital usually overrides considerations of class and sometimes even race. That's why when I speak of identity, it is less a personal one (though it may be that, too) than a socially constructed, politicized identity which needs to be earned or declared. Although I was always Korean, becoming Korean American or Korean Canadian was a longer, self-examining process. Acts of community in the context of racism and acute marginality are, in this way, themselves political.
These films and videos by Korean American women (see Filmography) are highly conscious, artistically and theoretically mediated works (all produced by filmmakers with full benefit of college educations or art/film school, usually both). They are not naive in any sense, taking part in this highly politicized arena with strategies of reinvention and resistance. Much of the groundwork laid by feminist cinema and Asian American media has informed our filmic practices and we, in turn, extend those histories. Fortified by debates around political and third cinema, the rigidities of realist filmmaking and pressures to produce only "positive images" of the community, we've roundly rejected the banality and victimology associated with minority filmmaking. Mere oppositional, stereotype-fighting documentaries or simplistic identity films (I am Korean American, and this is a portrait of me...) do not constitute this oeuvre. Like some nationalistic Korean, I am proud of this. A fierce and prodigious discursivity is at work; like a persistence of vision, these plural or multiple forms of consciousness pervade our films. The combined forces of our immigrant family pasts, the lingering effects of Korean male patriarchal traditions, Korea's own colonial national history, they all feed into our contemporary North American perspectives. Sometimes there's a kick at the can of postmodernity and cultural theory, too. As signposts of new knowledges and new subjectivities, these media works represent complex and personal articulations of race and gender, representation and the politics and esthetics of identity formation in film.
If there is a godmother to this recent flowering of work, it is the late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Her profound, luminous legacy of critical and poetic writing, performance art and film and video work has left its traces. Although few of the film/videomakers discussed here would regard Cha's influence as a direct one (I knew only her name when making my first film), the themes and formal concerns of her media work during the Seventies and early Eighties surface again and again in these contemporary films. Cha's semiotic explorations of language, memory, and subjectivity in the context of feminism and Korean colonial history are especially prescient. While the feminist, postcolonial writings and films of Trinh Minh-ha gripped me as a cinema studies undergraduate during the mid- Eighties, I didn't know of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha before her. Like Trinh, Cha can be at once poetic and interrogative in her unusual forms of address, almost oracular. As a body, Cha's work rematerializes the site of Korea-as-cold-war-victim, and re-maps the emotional and cognitive terrain of Korea into something tangible for kyopo understanding, a groundswell of critical fictions, diasporic imagination, and genuine political struggle.
Talk about marginal. Until a few years ago, an identity as specific as Korean American filmmaker was an impossibility in the American cultural consciousness, even in its alternative quarters. When I made my first film, Sally's Beauty Spot (1990) and was living in New York, the prevailing term, politically and organizationally, was Asian American. For someone from Canada coming to the States, even Asian American sounded great. To encounter organizations such as Asian CineVision in New York, Visual Communications in Los Angeles, and the National Asian American Telecommunications Association in San Francisco, was a revelation. This history of Asian American filmmaking, I discovered, was predominantly Chinese American and Japanese American, and consisted primarily of documentaries. These organizations, devoted to supporting the production, promotion, and exhibition of media work by Asian American film/videomakers, also mounted annual film festivals. I decided I was going to make a film to show at ACV's New York festival. The film wouldn't be documentary and wouldn't be earnest, but elliptical, theoretical, feminist and, hopefully, funny and accessible. This Asian American audience would be my primary audience. Besides, how could they turn me down; just how many Asian American filmmakers were there, anyway?
Enough, I guess. I showed the selection committee a silent cutting copy which kept falling apart in the projector. They turned down the film. Come back next year, they said, when it's finished. I did.
Sally's Beauty Spot is an image- and idea-driven film. Rather than focusing on characters or story, the deconstructionist tendencies of the film and its hybrid esthetics were inspired by a personal excitement with theory. Using a despised black mole on a young woman's breast as a metaphor for the threat of cultural difference, the film explores Western notions of Asian femininity and idealized romance. Sally tries rubbing, scrubbing off and covering up the skin blemish. Made without a script per se, the piece collages together my interest in postcolonial and feminist film theory with pop cultural elements. At the time, I was researching the representation of Asians in the history of American film and television. In the postwar period, a spate of Asian/ white romances had emerged from and my clear favorite, was The World of Suzie Wong, starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan. I know I should spit out this bit of colonial candyfloss, but in truth I've loved eating it since childhood. The film was regularly on TV, and Kwan's prostitute was one of the few popular images of Asian women around. This kind of obsessive, acculturated form of spectatorship was interesting in itself: Korean girls in Canadian suburbs, glued to California sitcoms and old Hollywood movies on the tube; we were not exactly the intended audience for this once racy bit of entertainment. True, during all those times of looking, rarely did any of these images look back at me. But this one did.
Kwan's Suzie Wong was dragon lady and lotus blossom rolled in one, but, caught in a racist time warp, could you really blame her? She was beautiful, feisty, and deserved reclaiming. Homi Bhabha's seminal rethinking of the stereotype did the trick. Instead of arguing the Hollywood, what I call miscegenation melodramas. Ubiquitous among them, derogatory or false nature of racial and sexual stereotypes, Bhabha(*) reconceptualized them as an arrested form of representation. Stereotypes should be viewed relationally according to other representations, he suggests, rather than held up to any picture of reality, thereby releasing it from burdens of truth or moralism. My Suzie Wong was a total fiction, pulp romance. As a Korean growing up in North America, it was impossible to be a real essentialist. No one knew where Korea was, so what could they really know about you, if they didn't even know where you came from? In this way, I became an Asian American before I became Korean American. Pillaging troves of Hollywood fare such as these mixed race dramas, I found all the Asian characters were Japanese or Chinese anyway (though I don't want to fight for Orientalist crumbs, this problem of the lack of a popular Korean signifier or image still dogs me to this day). Although Suzie Wong herself is from Hong Kong, the main character in Sally's Beauty Spot, while played by my sister, Sally, is not specifically named as Korean, Chinese, or Japanese, to underscore the shared dimensions of Asian American women's experience.
Sally's Beauty Spot tries to give a pulse to these linchpins of racial and sexual identity, in tandem, as inseparable preoccupations. The discourse of race in the United States was, and still is, overpoweringly white versus black. If Asians are admitted into the dialog, it is almost exclusively in relation to whitedominant culture. Such a status quo- reinforcing focus on the white/other dynamic is not only supremely irritating, it also surely doesn't reflect our multiracial society, just the workings of power. Personally, I haven't been interested in the representation of Asian/white couplings. The predominant relationships in my films have been between Asian and other Asian, black, or Native characters, and then, only marginally, whites. In Sally's Beauty Spot, Sally's vacillation between white privilege and the prospect of a liaison with a black man (a pairing you'd be hard-pressed to find in Hollywood), reflects the tension of broaching an Asian presence in the stratified minefield of American race relations. On the soundtrack, different musical idioms and numerous abstracted voices interrogate this terrain. Clips from The World of Suzie Wong, photographs and voices of other Asian women and images of Sally's body punctuate this narrative of discovery and subjecthood. The film maps this progression of psychic and theoretical attachments to the body, spectatorship, and voice with a simple story about an unwanted mole.
When I showed the film to Homi Bhabha, one of the critical inspirations for the film, he remarked how the mole or beauty spot on Sally's breast functioned as the punctum of the piece. Roland Barthes used the term to describe how a peripheral detail in a photograph may prick or unsettle the viewer in ways unexpected from the photograph's more conventionally coded meanings. The punctum's effect is startling, like a sting, speck, cut, little hole. Registering a visceral effect, "...it also bruises me," Barthes writes, "is poignant to me." Such a compelling detail may give a clue to how we come to remember an image or photograph, through the body. My sister, Sally (who by the way has no neurotic impulse towards her mole), had an immediate but different response to Bhabha's suggestion. To her, the punctum was the stretch marks on her breasts. The film's final images are of a black man's lips dissolving into Sally's own, radiant smile.
No one today is purely one thing.- Edward Said
From our simultaneously split and doubled existence as Korean American women, we have learned to become adept, sophisticated readers of images. From this minority position, we had learned to focus on subversive readings and peripheral details, seeing how the punctum satisfies. Now, we take up the whole frame; as writers and filmmakers, we have created new images, enlarged those details. But can the production of an image of identity lead to the transformation of the subject in assuming that image? The representation of Korean women is complex, figured by and interpolated through a variety of discourses, but each frame of these moving images elucidates us, bringing the image of the colonial subject one step closer toward self-identification. The idea of home, memory, language and desire obsess us; we try hard to translate these collective thoughts in ways never imagined for us. These narratives of the tongue, voice, and body, they all speak with newfound specificity. The velvet grain of Mae East's voice, Sally's crooked smile, the flaring of Jeanie Lee's hanbok, Cha's silent lips - all engaged in a perpetual motion of search, these explorations signal a kind of kyopo arrival. While the question of identity is never guaranteed, this new clamoring of images suggests other, curiously beautiful ways of travelling in a strange land.
* Bhabha, Homi K., "The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism," in The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 68-84.
This article is excerpted from Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, edited by Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, due Fall 1997 from Routledge.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
Be Good, My Children: Christine Chang, 1992, 47 mins., 16mm. Women Make Movies (WMM), 462 Broadway, #500, NY, NY 10012.
Camp Arirang: Diana Lee and Grace Yoon Kyung Lee, 1995, 28 mins., video. Third World Newsreel (TWN), 335 West 38th Street, NY, NY 10018.
Comfort Me: Soo Jin Kim, 1993, 8 mins., video. Soo Jin Kim (SJK), 201 Wayland Street, Los Angeles, CA 90042.
Daughterline: Grace Lee-Park, 1995, 11 mins., 16mm. Grace-Lee Park, 6104 N.E. Sacramento, Portland, OR 97213.
Distance: Soo Jin Kim, 1991, 13 mins., video. SJK.
Do Roo (Circling Back): Soon Mi Yoo, 1993, 14 mins., 16mm. Yellow
A Forgotten People: Dai-Sil Kim Gibson, 1995, 59 rains., 16mm. Crosscurrents Media (CCM), NAATA, 346 9th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.
Golden Dreams: Alice Ra, 1995, 9 mins., 16mm. CCM.
Great Girl: Kim Su Theiler, 1994, 14 mins., 16mm. WMM.
Halmani: Kyung-ja Lee, 1988, 30 mins., 16mm. Pyramid Film & Video, 2801 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404.
Here Now: Yunah Hong, 1995, 32 mins., 16mm. Yunah Hong, 223 East 4th Street, NY, NY 10009.
Homes Apart: Korea: Christine Choy and J.T. Takagi, 1991, 60 mins., Mija: Hei Sook Park, 1989, 30 mins., 16mm. Visual Communications, 263 So. Los Angeles St., Los Angeles, CA 90012.
mouth to mouth: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1975, 8 rains., video. Pacific Film Archive (PFA), University of California at Berkeley, 2625 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94720.
My Niagara: Helen Lee, 1992, 40 rains, 16mm. WMM.
Permutations: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 10 mins., 16mm. PFA.
Prey: Helen Lee, 1995, 26 mins., 16mm. Canadian Film Centre, 2489 Bayview Avenue, North York, Ontario, M2L 1A8, Canada.
Red Lolita: Gloria Toyun Park, 1989, 6 mins., video. Gloria Toyun Park, 3064 Cardillo Avenue, Hacienda Heights, CA, 91745.
re/dis/appearing: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1977, 3 mins., video. PFA.
Sa-i-Gu: Christine Choy, Elaine Kim, Dai-Sil Kim Gibson, 1993, 36 mins., video. CCM.
Sally's Beauty Spot: Helen Lee, 1992, 12 mins., 16mm. WMM.
Through the Milky Way: Yunah Hong, 1992, 19 mins., video. WMM.
Translating Grace: Anita Lee, 1996, 20 mins., 16mm. Nagual Productions, 704 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada MSS 2S9. Undertow: Me-K. Ahn, 1995, 19 mins., video. Asian American Renaissance, 1564 Lafond Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55104.
Videoeme: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1976, 3 mins., video. PFA.
What Do You Know about Korea?: R. Vaughn, 1996, 7 mins., video. Katharine Burdette, 15308 Alan Drive, Laurel, MD 20707.
The Women Outside: Hye-Jung Park and J.T. Takagi, 1995, 60 mins.,
16mm. TWN.
