Saturday School Podcast

We've arrived at the last episode of Saturday School Season 8, which explored the history of Asian American sci-fi films! And we end this semester of boundary-pushing imagination with a… documentary! Pailin Wedel's “Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice” from 2018, which is available to watch on Netflix. “Hope Frozen” is about a Thai family who decide to have their two-year-old daughter Einz's body cryogenically preserved in Arizona after she dies of brain cancer. While to some, it may seem like they're embarking on a fringe pseudoscience -- or alternately, that they're forcing their daughter to be a time traveler -- the film is a quiet mediation on family and love. It's a scientific quest passed along from father to son to accelerate, perhaps even invent, the technology to give Einz a second chance at life. She is the youngest cryopreserved patient to date. One of the reasons this season of sci-fi has been illuminating is because Asian American cinema often values authenticity, a natural reaction from a community that has seen their images distorted in Hollywood. But with recent films like "Everything Everywhere All At Once" and "After Yang," there seems to be a hunger for Asian American stories that may seem impossible or dare to rewrite the future. It's been 6 years since we started Saturday School: Sept 8, 2016 to be exact. The landscape of Asian American cinema has changed a lot since then. Thanks for listening, reading and joining us on this journey!

Where were we going with a Saturday School season delving into the history of Asian American sci-fi? In some ways, all episodes prior were leading up to Jennifer Phang's "Advantageous," a 2015 feature film that started as a 2012 short film in the Futurestates series. Often, Asian Americans and other people of color in Hollywood sci-fi represent a post-racial future. But what if in near future, these inequities are not gone but intensified? Jacqueline Kim (who co-wrote the feature film expansion with Phang) plays Gwen, the spokesperson of a cosmetics company that wants to replace her with someone more "universal," just as she needs the money to send her daughter Jules (Samantha Kim) to an elite school. Gwen, a single mother, believes this is Jules' only shot at a decent future in a world where society is collapsing. So in order to keep her job, she volunteers to be one of the first subjects for a procedure that will transfer her consciousness into a new, younger (less-Asian) body. "Advantageous " won an award at Sundance, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and is available to watch on Netflix.

On this week's Saturday School, we're continuing our exploration of Asian American sci-fi with a second episode on Futurestates, a groundbreaking sci-fi short film series spearheaded by Karim Ahmad that ran from 2010 to 2014 on public television and online. Before Black Mirror was another anthology series set in the future, Futurestates gave directors – including many notable Asian American filmmakers - opportunities to tell unique stories that imagined the future. Last week, we looked at Greg Pak's short films, and this week, we delve into Tanuj Chopra's shorts “Pia” and “Teacher in a Box,” and J.P. Chan's “Digital Antiquities.” “Pia” takes place in a futuristic San Francisco where robots are named Pia – and played by Pia Shah. “Teacher in a Box” explores a relationship between a teacher (Rebecca Hazlewood) and a student (Sarika Sanyal) who mostly converse through virtual reality but find reasons to connect in the real world. And “Digital Antiquities,” starring Jo Mei and Corey Hawkins, takes place in a future where CDs are antiquated and a man finds the only store that can help him decode the data his mom left for him after she died.   Watching these shorts ten years later, many aspects of these stories seem uncannily similar to our current reality.

Throughout this season of Saturday School, we've been exploring the history of Asian American sci-fi films. So far, we've mostly focused on indie films from the 1980s to 2000s that overcame limited budgets and technologies to show what creative genre storytelling about Asian Americans could look like. Where was it leading? What would be possible if there was some organized funding around these stories? In 2010, the public TV and web series FutureStates, spearheaded by Karim Ahmad, commissioned filmmakers to create short films that imagined today's social issues in tomorrow's America. We're going to spend the next 3 episodes on FutureStates, starting with an interview with director Greg Pak, who was one of many Asian American directors who were asked to participate in the series. Greg Pak writes comics for both Marvel and DC - everything from the Hulk, Hercules, Darth Vader, Batman, Superman to Amadeus Cho. But because we are Saturday School, we spend all of our time talking to him about "Robot Stories" - which we started this season with! - and his FutureStates shorts. "Mister Green" stars Tim Kang as a government official who has failed to prevent the worst case scenarios of climate change. "Happy Fun Room" stars Cindy Cheung as a traumatized kids' show host trying (unsuccessfully) to warn the children of dangerous robot uprisings outside.

Before "Shang-Chi," before "Ms. Marvel," Asian American film gave us the superhero Lumpia Man. On the latest episode of Saturday School (where this season we're exploring Asian American sci-fi), we revisit "Lumpia" (2003) and its sequel "Lumpia with a Vengeance" (2020). "Lumpia" was shot in director Patricio Ginelsa's hometown of Daly City with his high school friends. In this comic book movie, narrated by Joy Bisco of "The Debut," the Americanized Filipinos are bullying the Filipino FOBs. But luckily, the FOBs are protected by Lumpia Man, a silent teenager whose weapon is lumpia. It's a charming time capsule of NorCal Fil-Am culture in the 90s, with the DJs, house parties, karaoke and K-mart. The home-made film developed enough of a cult following that Ginelsa ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel about decades later. He got the old crew back together, added some trained actors (including Danny Trejo) and built out a larger "Lumpia" cinematic universe with a new generation of characters.

We're back to continue Season 8 of Saturday School, where we're exploring the roots of Asian American science fiction films. This week, we're thinking about movies like "Frankenstein," "Face/Off" or "Eyes Without a Face' -- plastic-surgery-gone-wrong films. So we are revisiting Pamela Tom's 1990 short film "Two Lies." It's from the point of view of a Chinese American teenager and her younger sister. Their mom recently left their dad, and she decides to get eyelid surgery as part of her "new grip on life." She's wearing sunglasses and secluding herself in the bathroom to hide the bandages around her eyes. She's dating a white man who's passionate about "the Orient" and calls her "Lotus Bud." She even talks differently. Is it a scientific experiment with horrific consequences, or just a regular procedure? As common as getting braces, their mother insists!

On Ep. 4 of Saturday School Season 8 (looking at Asian American sci-fi), we're talking about Shu Lea Cheang's 1994 experimental film, Fresh Kill. Shareen (Sarita Choudhury) and Claire (Erin McMurtry) are drawn into a corporate conspiracy when their daughter eats contaminated fish, her head glows green and she disappears. The same evil conglomerate controlling the internet & TV is also making radioactive cat food that is killing cats. But a sushi chef/hacker (Abraham Lim), a poet/dishwasher (José Zúñiga) and Claire's mom (Laurie Carlos), a public access host/activist, are working with them to expose the company. The film is written by Jessica Hagedorn, the playwright/author known for Dogeaters, and sometimes it feels like theater or spoken-word poetry. Other times it feels like someone with no attention span flipping through channels or TikTok/Instagram stories. Fresh Kill comes out of a time in 80s/90s New York when artists, activists, poets & filmmakers were trying to blow up categories of gender, sexuality and race. It was a time when casting people of color was called non-traditional casting. Another queer Asian American film of that time, Ang Lee's "The Wedding Banquet," is about negotiating with your parents. Fresh Kill negotiates with no one. It's available to watch online as part of the "My Sight is Lined with Visions" retrospective until Jan. 25.

This week on Saturday School, we continue our season on Asian American sci-fi with the 1988 film "The Laser Man." What happens when an immigrant actor/director (Peter Wang) who's been one of the faces of burgeoning Asian American cinema in the 1980s (with the seminal indie "Chan is Missing" and "A Great Wall," the first US feature to be shot in China) just wants to make a zany, nonsensical detective parody about killer lasers? And he brings together Asian American actors like Marc Hayashi (also of "Chan is Missing"), some famous connections in Hong Kong cinema (Tsui Hark, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Sally Yeh) and up-and-coming American filmmakers like Ernest Dickerson and Christine Vachon)? The result is something probably too strange and cringe-y for 1988, but arguably hilarious for 2021. Full of illogical hijinks and (we think) made-up Confucius sayings, this is another episode where we tell you about a movie you can't really watch because we want you to know that this happened. In 1988. With much more brazen confidence (to be weird) that we even get to see now in Asian America.

For Saturday School Season 8, we are exploring Asian American sci-fi films. In this episode we explore the genre's prehistory, diving into the robots, Buddha livestreams, and fantastic futures of video artist Nam June Paik. We took a field trip up to SFMOMA, which is presenting a massive retrospective of Paik's work, on display until October 3. Paik is considered the pioneer of video art, and is credited with coining the term "electronic superhighway" in 1974, basically predicting the internet. So for episode 2, we get lost in his vision of a technological future. He was all about breaking down barriers between low art and high art, bringing sexuality and shenanigans into classical music, and stitching together the real and the virtual, leading to such oddities as TV cellos, TV bras, TV glasses, TV chairs and TV gardens. As a Korean educated in Japan and Germany before coming to the U.S., he also resisted labels of nationality and proposed through his art a more utopic global vision of the future.

It's the year 2021. Asian Americans have survived the apocalypse, but as we emerge as a community blamed for the deadly virus, are we the villains, are we the misunderstood heroes or are we the robots? To help us figure it out, we're exploring Asian American sci-fi films for our 8th season of Saturday School. This is not a season about Hollywood sci-fi films with Asian Americans in it. For that, please listen to All The Asians On Star Trek, Marvel and Makeup, Nerds of Color -- anyone but Brian & I, who are laughably ignorant about a lot of mainstream sci-fi. We're looking at films where Asian Americans were the auteurs, so for the most part, indie films, experimental faire. Stories that imagine alternate versions of Asian America, dare us to break out of our boxes and think of other possibilities. We start this season talking about techno-Orientalism, how Hollywood sci-fi often portrays Asian spaces without any Asian people. Or if we exist, we are emerging superpowers to defeat. As a contrast to typical Hollywood sci-fi films, we begin our new season of Saturday School revisiting Greg Pak's 2003 film Robot Stories, "science fiction from the heart." Here, robots (and Asian Americans) are not something to fear; instead, something to love. Robots are the babies we are learning to take care of, a source of healing during a tragedy, the hero of the story who just needs a friend, and a way to connect with lost loved ones, even if it's complicated.

We promised ourselves we would finish this season by the end of 2020, as it was inspired by the events of 2020. And here we are: episode 10 of our Saturday School semester on Asian American interracial cinema. We started from the 70s/80s and slowly worked our way up to the present. Ursula Liang's documentary "Down a Dark Stairwell" had its premiere in March 2020 at the True/False Film Fest, right before the lockdown, and has been doing the festival circuit all year. It'll be available to watch on PBS in April 2021. It's about an innocent Black man Akai Gurley who was killed by a Chinese American police officer Peter Liang in 2014. Over 100 Black men have been killed by the NYPD in the past 15 years. The only NYPD officer who has ever been convicted is a Chinese American rookie cop that shot into a dark stairwell. As Asian Americans, it was hard for us to watch Chinese/Asian American organizing emerge in full force yet devolve so quickly, chaotically and unnecessarily into warring factions - one deemed racist, the other deemed race traitors or worse. Does the film leave us with any hope that Asian Americans can fight for our communities, without dismissing other communities of color? Maybe only from looking back at pioneers in history and imagining where we can still go in the future. But it's one of the most powerful documentaries of the year. We learned a lot from making this season, every time we revisited a moment where work was being done to find interracial solidarity, even if there were and will continue to be numerous missteps along the way. We hope you took away something useful from our season too. Happy new year from Saturday School, and here's to being more prepared for whatever 2021 brings.

It's the second to last episode of our season on Asian American interracial cinema, and this week, we're talking about Jennifer Reeder's 2017 film "Signature Move," written by and starring Fawzia Mirza. It's about a Pakistani American lawyer, Zaynab, who falls for a Mexican American bookstore owner, Alma. As they get to know each other, they compare their respective soap operas, mangoes and mothers. After lots of stories this season about racial strife, it's nice to watch a fun rom-com, where the cultural differences are a means to connection. What a coincidence that when Zaynab picks up an unlikely wrestling hobby, that her romantic love interest's mother happens to be a former lucha libre star! Must be meant to be. Except, Zaynab has been keeping some secrets from her single mother, played by Shabana Azmi, who is obsessed with finding her daughter a husband. Often, Asian American films about interracial romance are also about intergenerational differences, and it becomes a choice between your parents or your true love. In "Signature Move," which is equally about the love between mothers and daughters, the mother's approval might be complicated but the relationship with the mother will never be sacrificed.

In this episode of Saturday School, where we're exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we look at the 2014 documentary "Lordville" by Rea Tajiri. The filmmaker had purchased a property in Lordville, New York, and she learned the land title traces back to John Lord, one of the original founders in Lordville, and his wife Betia Van Dunk, a Native woman of the tribe that owned the land before it was stolen from them by settlers in the early 1700s. What does it mean to own land? The film is an exploration of the land, and it also makes us think about the relationship between Asian Americans, our immigrant dreams and the Native legacies that have been erased. Also, ghosts.

In this week's episode of Saturday School, as we explore Asian American interracial cinema, we revisit Grace Lee's 2013 documentary "American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs." The director Grace Lee first interviewed Grace Lee Boggs when she was searching for different women with the name "Grace Lee" to interview for her first film "The Grace Lee Project," She found the energetic octogenarian in Detroit and got more than she bargained for. Ten years later, she dedicated an entire film to her. As depicted in the movie, Grace Lee Boggs, who passed away in 2015 at the age of 100, was a Chinese American philosopher and author known for her role in the Black Power Movement and other activism work that spanned seven decades.  In an interview, her Black activist friend says they all thought of her as "one of us," whereas her FBI file assumes she must be "Afro-Chinese." We chat about how she's become an icon for Asian Americans and intersectionality, as well as how we appreciate the film as an intro to Grace Lee Bogg's life and an invitation to learn more.

In our next episode of Saturday School, where this season we're exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we look at the 2011 documentary "The Learning" by Ramona Diaz. It's about four women from the Philippines as they're recruited to be teachers in the American public school system around 2006. It follows them over the course of their first year teaching at a predominantly Black school in Baltimore. Over a century ago, the U.S. colonized the Philippines and established an English-speaking public school system there, inadvertently creating a workforce of Overseas Filipino Workers that could be exploited decades later. The Filipina teachers come because they are able to earn over 20 times as much teaching in the U.S., and they can send money home, which also supports the economy of the Philippines. We're reminded of a popular trope in Hollywood, where an outsider white teacher comes to teach at a low-income school and ends up uplifting Black and brown students, and then Michelle Pfeiffer ends up in a Coolio video in a shiny black leather jacket. But in "The Learning," the power dynamics are more complicated. These women teachers come to a new country and are often separated from their husbands and young children for a whole school year for these jobs. Here, there are no white saviors, just the failures of colonialism on both sides of the ocean that bring Black and immigrant Filipino communities together to figure out how to save themselves and each other.

As we've been exploring Asian American interracial cinema this season at Saturday School, we've covered a lot of heavy subject matter. But not everything related to cross-cultural storytelling is traumatic and existential. This week, we revisit the 1997 comedy "Fakin' da Funk," starring — are you ready for this? — Dante Basco, Pam Grier, Ernie Hudson, John Weatherspoon, Tatyana Ali, Margaret Cho, Kelly Hu, Amy Hill, Ron Yuan and more. Not bad for then-first-time filmmaker Tim Chey.  The movie (currently on YouTube)  follows a Chinese American adoptee Julian, played by Dante Basco, who is adopted by a Black family in Atlanta. The family moves to Los Angeles, and while everyone back in Atlanta understands Julian to be the adopted son of a well-loved preacher in the community, many of their South Central neighbors don't know how to respond to this new Chinese American kid on the block who is culturally Black. In a parallel subplot, Margaret Cho and Kelly Hu play Chinese exchange students who are actual outsiders to not only the Black community but America in general.  Yes, there are some gaps in logic you have to accept to enjoy this film, from "Dante Basco is Chinese American" and "Margaret Cho is a Chinese immigrant" to "A game of basketball can solve pretty much everything" to "Why is this film called 'Fakin' da Funk' when the entire premise is that the main character is NOT faking the funk?" Looking at it 30 years later, there's a lot that is cringe-worthy. But if you compare it to "Rush Hour," which came out a year later, there's at least a humanistic attempt to understand all these different perspectives (the Black community, the Chinese American adoptee, and the first-generation Chinese immigrant) and think about how everyone can overcome their ignorance and biases, and not only co-exist but love each other.

This week's episode is a rebroadcast of our Season 2 episode on Mira Nair's 1992 film "Mississippi Masala." Our second season was about "Asian Americans in Love," and this romantic drama. about an Indian Ugandan family in Mississippi, is also an example of a story that ties Asian American and African American history together. So as we explore the topic of "Asian American interracial cinema," we wanted to revisit our 2017 "Mississippi Masala" episode in a different context and think about: how do we emotionally work through these shared experiences of hardship, intergenerationally and romantically?

In this week’s Saturday School episode, in our season exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we look at the 1993 documentary “Sa-I-Gu” by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Christine Choy and Elaine Kim, as well as Kim-Gibson’s update 10 years later in 2003’s “Wet Sand: Voices From L.A.” Both films are available to watch for free on YouTube, courtesy of the Korean American Film Festival New York after they hosted a retrospetive of Dai Sil Kim-Gibson films in 2011. A fixture in Asian American studies courses, these films explore the aftermath of the 1992 L.A. riots/uprising/rebellion with a particular focus on Korean American women. “Sa-I-Gu” was filmed only three months after the events, so the tragedies are fresh and feelings are still extremely raw. For us, it was fascinating revisiting the film at this time, because when we recorded, it was also only about three months after the George Floyd protests spread across the country. “Sa-I-Gu” argues that it was the media that unfairly pitted Black and Korean immigrant communities against each other, often showing video of the Rodney King beating by LAPD alongside the killing of Latasha Harlins by a Korean woman convenience store owner. The film shows that Korean immigrants were also victims of white supremacy, and it fights for the legitimacy of a perspective that centers Korean American voices, stories and language. Ten years later, Wet Sands revisits the three main women in “Sa-I-Gu,” and this time around, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson shows the value of getting multiple perspectives in one film, showing variation even within Korean, Black and Latino communities. One of the Latino workers says in Spanish that nothing has really changed, that the inequities are still there and that it’s still a ticking time bomb. After the 1992 uprising, Korean Americans held their own protest with signs that asked for peace, explaining that their life's work was now gone. 28 years later, I covered a protest in Garden Grove, home of Orange County’s Koreatown. This time around, the signs said “Korean Americans for Black Lives,” “Asian Americans for Black Lives." There were Korean Americans protesters who specifically showed up to the Black Lives Matters protests, because this time around, they wanted there to be a different narrative.

For this week's episode of Saturday School, where we're exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we have a special guest: Josslyn Luckett, assistant professor of cinema studies at New York University! We've invited her to our podcast to tell us about her research, which explores the beginnings of an affirmative action initiative at UCLA's film school in the late 1960s and early 1970s called Ethno-Communications. Before there were organizations created to center each racial group's specific experience (some of these students branched off to create Visual Communications, which produces the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival), aspiring filmmaking students of color in L.A. studied together, ventured out into different ethnic communities together, protested injustice together, got arrested together and made films about it all together. Laura Ho's 1970 short film "Sleepwalkers" explores the headspace following an arrest for protesting on behalf of an unjustly fired Black food worker. Duane Kubo's 1975 "Cruisin' J-Town," which we covered in Season 3, ends with a cross-cultural rendition of El Teatro Campersino’s “America de los Indios.” And Alan Kondo's 1974 "...I Told You So" documents Japanese American poet Lawson Inada, who grew up in a Chicano community, was influenced by Black music and later became one of the co-editors of a 1974 anthology on Asian American literature (published by Howard University Press). Brian and I often joke that accessibility is not a requirement when it comes to the films we talk about in Saturday School. Many of these films are only available in college libraries or in the archives of Visual Communications in their Little Tokyo office in downtown Los Angeles. But even if we can't watch all of them, Josslyn wants us all to know that there is a long history of Asian American, Black, Latino American and Native American filmmakers working in solidarity to document and illuminate each others' music, poetry and struggles.

Welcome back to Saturday School! This is our 7th season, and this semester, we'll be exploring Asian American interracial cinema. When we signed off last season, coronavirus had just taken hold and the nation had erupted with protests for George Floyd,  Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter. As racial tensions escalated, it had many Asian Americans grappling with questions like: What is our place in this? How can we help? How are we complicit? What can we do moving forward? And for us, thinking about our podcast, are there ways that Asian American film can cross racial lines to show that Asian Americans don't exist in racial silos and need to confront interracial issues? As with most things, if we go back into the vault, we realize that there is a long history of Asian American interracial cinema, including some films in the spirit of social activism and solidarity. This semester, we start with Christine Choy. She's most known for co-directing the seminal documentary "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" Before that, she co-directed the 1984 documentary "Mississippi Triangle," which looks at the intersections between the white, Black and Chinese communities in the Mississippi Delta from the late 1800s to the 1980s. The directorial team consisted of a Chinese American woman (Choy), a Black man (Worth Long) and a white man (Allan Siegel), and they all interview their own communities (brilliant), so there is some eyebrow-raising truth-telling going on. Some of it feels dated, while other parts feel uncomfortably current. But by deeming Asian Americans as part of the triangle, Choy carves out space for us to have our own voice and agency, and not just be a wedge group that's silenced or pitted against other groups.  10 films, 10 weeks. Join us in our exploration.

Our final episode of Saturday School's sixth semester, where we explore Asian films about Asian America, is about the 2010 Karan Johar film "My Name Is Khan," which brings us full circle to the first episode of the season, where we explored Bollywood's earlier portrayal of Indian America in "Kal Ho Naa Ho." Over the last decade, no one ever thinks to ask Brian and I, or our special guests Rowena Aquino and Winghei Kwok (who we worked with at Asia Pacific Arts), if we have touched Shah Rukh Khan. Which is probably a good thing cause turns out if we were asked, the story of how we touched his jacket, his backpack, over and over again when he was going through a crowd, in character, trying to tell the president of the United States impersonator "My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist" would take a very long time - and we would sound a little bit like crazy people. But here, we tell you our story about getting racially profiled and then escorted onto a Bollywood set at UCLA, because they needed the crowd at the rally to look like America. In Bollywood's America circa 2009, they had a need for East and Southeast Asian extras, and they found a few snooping around campus early one morning after hearing that SRK would be there. This is kind of our love letter to Asian American entertainment journalism and fandom. But after freaking out and giggling through half the episode, we also think about "My Name Is Khan" and how it intersected with Asian American film history. This film, that tackles Islamophobia in America head-on, could never have been made in the U.S. Definitely not by a Hollywood studio, and independent Asian America, especially at the time, didn't have the resources or SRK-Kajol-level star power to dream about attempting something of this scope. But at the same time, Asian Americans would probably be more likely to cringe at the idea of taking topic like post-9/11 Islamophobia, combining it with a story with a man with Asperger's, putting him on a search to find President George W. Bush after a 9/11 hate crime creates a chasm between lovers, dropping him midst of Hurricane Katrina (of course), and having it all end with the unwavering belief that love conquers all. It's been a blast covering Asian films about Asian America this season. It's a reminder that it's not just Asian Americans or even Americans that tell stories about us. The motherland still thinks of us, and while their filmmakers might sometimes make distorted versions of our realities, setting their stories abroad also sometimes allows them to tackle local issues in a way that might be hard for them to address in a film set at home.

For the second week in a row, Brian and I take you back to Dec 2019, when we recorded this and then didn't edit it for months cause that's the kind of responsible Saturday School hosts we are. It's a bittersweet episode and last minute addition to our syllabus after Godfrey Gao passed away last November, and we try to honor him through revisiting the 2017 Chinese romcom, "Love is a Broadway Hit." This season, we're exploring Asian films about Asian America, and this is a film produced in China but set in New York, where two Chinese American aspiring actors are trying to make it on Broadway. In this warped-mirror version of China's imagined New York, race (and lack of English-language skills, in the cast of leading lady Claudia Wang) is 100% not an issue when it comes to Hollywood and theater casting. This America is colorblind, gender-blind and super into Chinese culture, whether it be its food, opera or melodramas. It's not the best movie, but it's worth watching to understand the appeal of Godfrey Gao, who became a global icon when he was dubbed the first Asian male supermodel after signing with Louis Vuitton in 2011. Others knew him from Taiwanese dramas and briefly Hollywood (Magnus Bane in "Mortal Instruments: City of Bones"), and he eventually ended up working in China, which is where his heart suddenly stopped while participating in a physically strenuous challenge for a reality show. He was only 35. It's impossible to talk about his appeal without (unabashedly, repeatedly) fawning over his looks, but it's also hard not to see him as an underdog, as a Taiwanese-Malaysian Canadian trying to carve out a career in both Asia and America. Onscreen, he also had a genuine sweetness and innocent goofiness that made it easy to root for him. For us watchers of Asian American entertainment, which is often about how we don't fit in anywhere, he represented a fantasy of an Asian American man who could fit in anywhere, his hotness blinding and undercutting any potential prejudices. We knew that wasn't how things worked in real life, but sometimes that's how it worked in film, and it made us hopeful and happy. RIP Godfrey Gao.

We accidentally took a months-long break, recorded our last few episodes of our season in Dec 2019, then accidentally took another break, and then coronavirus happened. But last week, Ada's daughter was back to Chinese school on Zoom, so we're back too.  In this week's episode, we continue our exploration of Asian films about Asian America through the 2007 Hwang Dong-hyuk film "Our Father," starring Daniel Henney and Kim Yeong-cheol. It's inspired by the true story of Aaron Bates, a Korean American adoptee who, with the help of the Korean media, finds his birth father when he's in the army there, only to realize his father is on death row. This is one of those episodes that rewards our regular listeners, as we compare Henney's gracious assimilation into the Korean melodrama style of acting, compared to his Chinese American/Canadian contemporaries who were too cool for school and blew up the Hong Kong film industry with "Gen X Cops" and "Gen Y Cops." We compare Henney's performance in this film to "Shanghai Calling," where he was able to act in the style of a Hollywood rom-com. And we compare "My Father's" uplifting, cutesy, very good-looking depiction of the Korean American adoptee story (where a guilt-ridden father can be forgiven and Korean America is open-heartedly embraced by Korea) to Deanne Borshay's autobiographical "First Person Plural," and her most recent "Geographies of Kinship," which shows that sometimes the adoptee experience is not that simple and questions who stood to profit off of the 200,000 babies Korea that have been sent to foreign countries.

On this week's Saturday School, we continue to explore Asian films about Asian America, diving head first into the international film festival/art film world with the 5 hour 15 minute Lav Diaz film "Batang West Side" from 2001. It's a film that takes place in the snowy New Jersey winter. A Filipino American cop Juan (Jose Torre) is investigating the murder of a Filipino American teenager Hanzel, and through the course of the 5 hours, we get to know Hanzel's family members, friends, and girlfriend. We also get flashbacks of Hanzel, as well as glimpses of Juan's life in the U.S., isolated from his family back in the Philippines. Lav Diaz has become revered, especially in the last several years, for his marathon-length, deliberately paced art films that have gone up to 11 hours. Batang West Side, while not one of his more accessible films, is interesting because it marked a turning point for Diaz's filmmaking. It's almost like his time living in the States that inspired Batang West Side gave him the artistic freedom to forgo the commercial Filipino film market and really create his own unique style that he'd still be known for decades later.

In this week’s Saturday School, we break our sixth season streak of epic, emotional and honorable love stories, and as we hit the turn of the century, we look at “Asian films about Asian Americans” from an entirely different, warped mirror. We’re talking about 1999’s “Gen X Cops” and 2000’s “Gen Y Cops,” which is like a who’s who of Asian American/Canadian/Australian actors who briefly ruled the Hong Kong film industry, when the powers-that-be there were thirsting for new talent and caught some ABC fever. You got Daniel Wu, Maggie Q, Nicholas Tse, Stephen Fung, Edison Chen, Jaymee Ong, Terrence Yin -- and post-“Clueless,” pre-“Anchorman” Paul Rudd (“the dark days of Paul Rudd”) with bleached blond hair playing an FBI agent that says things like “You're the one going to the bamboo Alcatraz!” But back to the ABCs: Their Cantonese isn’t great. Their English-language acting is only debatably better. But they’re hot, they don’t give a fuck, and that’s kind of exactly what Hong Kong needed for this new type of hero leading high-octane action flicks with explosions, evil foreign adversaries (like Paul Rudd), nonsensical plot twists AND ROBOTS. History showed that this archetype of an Asian American too-cool-for-school sexually-liberated renegade, a la Edison Chen, wasn’t going to represent the future of the Hong Kong film industry. And probably for good reason, because Asian Americans from the other side of the ocean might have found it all a little bit embarrassing. But looking back, for a brief moment, Asian Americans were ruling the box office in Hong Kong. How did they pull it off? Did they totally improvise their own English lines because nobody behind the camera could tell them otherwise? Probably. And it was kind of glorious.

This week's episode of Saturday School continues our semester of tear-jerking romances... just kidding, our semester on Asian films about Asian Americans, and we've progressed semi-chronologically to the 1990s in the Philippines with Lea Salonga. 1995's "Sana Maulit Muli" stars Lea Salonga and Aga Muhlach as a young couple who hope to start the next stage of their lives in America in pursuit of a better economic future. But she gets a visa first and is tearfully convinced by her boyfriend to go without him. He'll join her soon, he promises. And never forget how much he loves her, he says. Does she forget? Or is it that even if she's certain of his love, love is not enough if they're stuck on separate continents, pre-Skype? And when the complications of immigration causes a relationship to reach its breaking point, can they ever go back to the way it used to be? In some ways, it's a universal tale about a long distance relationship and what happens when power dynamics in a relationship shift. But this is also a very specific story about Overseas Filipino Workers, the pressures to succeed in America to provide for your family, the struggles to get and retain a visa, and what happens when sacrifices you make for your partner become too soul-crushing, but "yesterday, tomorrow and today, you'll be the only one I love." This 90s classic was digitally restored and re-mastered in 2015 for its 20th anniversary, so it looks beautiful and, unlike some of the more obscure films we talk about, this one is easily accessible on iTunes or Amazon Prime. So take advantage!

This week's Saturday School is about the 1987 Mabel Cheung-directed film "An Autumn's Tale," starring Chow Yun-fat and Cherie Chung. We revisit a period in the '80s after the British have made a deal to hand over Hong Kong to China in 1997, there is a fear of of losing freedoms, a wave of emigration and a curiosity about what it'd be like to be an overseas Chinese. "An Autumn's Tale" is about Hong Kong woman named Jennifer who follows her boyfriend to New York to study, only to learn that he's found a more "liberal minded" Chinese American woman and thinks she should broaden her horizons. Her family has arranged for her to stay with someone who's a rumored to be a stand-up guy, the leader of the community, and it turns out it's Chow Yun-fat, a rambuctious working-class drinker and gambler with a soft side. Many Hong Kong films set in America at this time are martial arts action movies depicting it as the wild, wild West. "An Autumn's Tale" also shows New York's Chinatown as a grimy, slightly dangerous place, but one with the possibility of romance, especially if there's a handy fellow immigrant around to help you navigate it.

This week's episode of Saturday School continues our Season 6 theme if exploring Asian films about Asian America, and we're looking at the 1978 Japanese film Take Me Away! (Furimukeba Ai), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi and starring both on-screen and off-screen couple Momoe Yamaguchi and Tomokazu Miura. It's a love story so sweeping that they are taken away to San Francisco, a city of love and escapism that rivals Paris in the 1970s Japanese cinematic world. We see a distinct difference between this hopelessly romantic melodrama from Asia versus Asian American films being made during this time. (Curtis Choy's 1976 "Dupont Guy," which we covered a couple seasons ago, comes to mind as a film around the same time, set in the exact same place.) Whereas films by Asian Americans during the 70s are inherently tied up with a frustration with oppression, difficulties of assimilation and a fight for civil liberties, "Take Me Away!" is more about Japanese global cosmopolitianism, and these characters, while they have heart-wrenching secrets, are cool, comfortable and breeze through the world like only extremely good looking people can. America is a place where they can find true freedom, true love and their true selves. To Asian Americans with any sense of history, this definitely feels like ridiculous fantasy, but looking at it years later, it's a fun alternate reality to imagine. You get the 1970s Japanese American immigrant bad boy, who's ruling the disco clubs, and basically worth overriding any sort of practical decision-making pertaining to love because I mean, this guy... THIS GUY can sing and play the guitar. To quote Brian Hu, he might be trouble if you're thinking about the rules of what makes a better partner, but shirtlessly he's the better choice.

We recorded the latest episode of Saturday School a while ago, but fitting that we’re posting it when I’m actually in Taiwan! This season, we’re exploring Asian films about Asian America, and this week, we’re looking at the 1970 Taiwanese film "Home Sweet Home," which gives a glimpse into why Taiwanese people of a certain generation would have wanted to come to America (masters and doctorate degrees) and their decisions to stay in America vs. come back to Taiwan. Even though neither of us were around in 1970s Taiwan, luckily this topic is something Brian has been researching for a decade. This film is mentioned in his new book, “Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” as are statistics like: In 1965, only 5% of Taiwanese people going abroad were coming back, so “Home Sweet Home” was part of a Taiwanese government propaganda push to convince its people that if they went abroad, they needed to return to help build the nation. By 1975, 25% were coming back. We take the listener through a lot of the film in this episode, because it’s hard to find in the US. It's amusing to us to see the characters talking about “a Western scent” some of these Taiwanese Americans exude. It's also funny that part of being Westernized involves becoming more sexually liberated/impure – a stereotype that we still see 50 years later in this year’s Netflix series "A Taiwanese Tale of Two Cities." And we bring it all back to Ang Lee, because that’s what all Taiwanese Americans are required to do when discussing Taiwanese Americanness.

Season 6 of Saturday School (where we explore Asian films about Asian America) kicks off with us inviting one of our favorite people to talk about one of our favorite actors. Journalist Angilee Shah thought we were joking when we asked her to join us to discuss the 2003 film "Kal Ho Naa Ho," because 15 years of friendship hasn't taught her that we don't joke around about these things. "Kal Ho Naa Ho" is about an Indian American family in Jackson Heights, New York who are struggling, a family friend who arrives from India on a mission to help them get their lives back on track, and a love that lasts multiple lifetimes. We talk about Angilee's complicated relationship with Bollywood, its history of storylines about NRI characters whose lives are made better by rediscovering India and female characters whose lives are made better by falling in love with Shah Rukh Khan. We also dissect the America-flag-filled dance number "Pretty Woman," a remix of the Roy Orbinson song, to understand the stereotypically multicultural way Indians may have viewed America in the mid-2000s.

It's our Season 5 finale of Saturday School, and in some ways, it's all been leading to the most famous Asian American of all time: Bruce Lee. In this episode, we discuss his films "The Big Boss" from 1971 and "Way of the Dragon" from 1972, as a way of highlighting the movies he made in Hong Kong that are specifically about the diaspora experience. "The Big Boss" takes place in Thailand, and "Way of the Dragon" takes place in Rome, Italy. We talk about Bruce Lee's legendary backstory - born in the US, raised in Hong Kong before moving back to the US, and how it wasn't until he went back to Hong Kong that he became a big star internationally (and Hollywood REALLY came a-knocking). We try to examine which parts of these films we can claim as "Asian American," knowing that everyone tries to claim Bruce Lee and that most scholarship about him has been about his Chinese-ness or global Hong Kong-ness. We also talk about Chuck Norris' chest hair. So much chest hair. And this leads us all to the grand master plan we had for our 2018-2019 "school year" all along, which is that this season, we're talking about Asian Americans in Asia, and next semester, we'll be flipping it. Asians on Asian America, with all the stereotypes, expectations and desires that audiences and filmmakers in Asia have of Asian Americans. Will be fun!

This is the 9th (and 2nd to last) episode of our 5th season of Saturday School, and those who've been there with us from the beginning can probably tell that we start to get a little senioritis-y at this point in the semester. So in this episode, about Shanghai Calling by Daniel Hsia, we spend about 7 minutes delivering what we promise: a comparison to A Great Wall, as we look at 2 films about Chinese Americans going back to China - one from 1986, the other from 2012 - and talk about what this says about geopolitics during the different time periods. And then we spend like 17 minutes straight ranting about Daniel Henney (and his hotness) as a symbol of the evolving possibilities for Asian American actors in Hollywood. Shout-out to Haikus With Hotties.

Thanks to film programmer, producer, YOMYOMF writer Aimee Anderson for being our guest on this week's episode of Saturday School. This semester, we're exploring Asian Americans in Asia, and this week, we're talking about the 2007 film, "The Rebel," directed by Charlie Nguyen starring Johnny Nguyen and Veronica Ngo. Turns out it's much more than a fun martial arts action period film with beautiful people doing high-flying scissor kicks and acrobatic headlocks. Anderson tells us about how 10 years ago, a group of Vietnamese Americans from Orange County -- who cut their teeth in Little Saigon's Paris By Night scene -- went back to Vietnam, and, with the success of "The Rebel," transformed an entire film industry that had been primarily state-owned to becoming a booming privatized, commercial industry. Out of all the various Asian Americans from different countries who have gone back to Asia to work in entertainment, Vietnamese Americans have probably been the most successful. They've been able to consistently knock out mainstream box office hits for the local Vietnamese market. Basically, Brian and Ada always learn so much from talking to Anderson, and we're excited that this time, he let us record it so we could share it with you!

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're revisiting one of Asian America's rare historical epics: Ham Tran's Journey from the Fall fr om 2006. There's really no other film like it. It's the story that starts with the Fall of Saigon and traces a family's harrowing journey to Orange County. But unlike most classic Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War, which are usually told from the perspective of white male veterans and end when U.S. troops leave Vietnam, the Vietnamese American refugee struggle continues when they get to America. There's a scene in the film on the boat with when the mother is looking at her young son and wondering - Will our children miss our homeland like we do? Will they ever understand? And Journey From The Fall is kind of the complex answer to that. The Vietnamese American community rallied together not only to fund this movie but to share their oral histories to help Ham Tran make something that their children and grandchildren could see, experience, and hopefully understand. And it still resonates today.

In this week's Saturday School, we revisit the 2015 film Seoul Searching, which follows a group of teenagers sent by their parents to a government-sponsored summer camp in Korea for them to reconnect with their roots. However, according to the film's prologue, this real-life program in the 1980s (which director Benson Lee himself attended as a young man) was canceled after a few years cause the kids were too much to handle. Seoul Searching is a nod to John Hughes movies, with the Korean American characters all embodying a certain stereotype -- whether it's the punk-rock Sid Vicious wannabe, the Madonna vixen, the Korean Mexican lover, the uptight Korean German, the Korean American adoptee -- before the film really dives into deep-seeded cultural struggles that exist behind the teen angst. In that sense, the characters in Seoul Searching, including the authority figures, carry much more weight than is allowed in the world of a typical John Hughes movie (incidentally a fictional world where the only notable Asian American character is Long Duk Dong). So go back and watch it, cause it's on Netflix, and it's fun. 80s music. Soju. Fiery romances. Stud muffins. Teary-eyed reunions. Makes us Taiwanese Americans look forward to Valerie Soe's upcoming documentary on The Love Boat, the Taiwanese American equivalent of teenagers getting sent to the homeland for cultural learning with sometimes scandalous results.

After a few weeks of exploring the grittier, more traumatic side of Asian Americans in Asia, this week's episode of Saturday School is a little more light-hearted and fun. We're revisiting the 2011 documentary "Big in Bollywood," which follows Omi Vaidya (at the time, your typical working but little-known LA actor) who lands the role of a lifetime. But it's not in Hollywood, it's in Bollywood, and he's the main antagonist in the new Aamir Khan film, 2009's "3 Idiots," which would end up breaking records as the highest grossing Indian film of its time. Because "Big in Bollywood" is made by Omi Vaidya's American friends who know very little about Indian cinema, it has an outsider perspective and therefore is a good intro to Bollywood. We see the moment Omi's life changes: when he arrives at the red carpet premiere, no one knows who he is, and shortly after, he's being mobbed by fans. It's interesting to think about how his big break requires him to play an American idiot; in fact the filmmakers partially cast him because they thought he spoke Hindi with a laughably bad American accent. But at the same time, it's hard not to be swept up in the underdog story and the whirlwind of Bollywood stardom -- and to imagine how meaningful it'd be to achieve success in your immigrant parents' home country and to be able to share that experience with them. Also, Ada can't help berating Brian when she realizes he hasn't seen "3 Idiots" yet, even though she gave him the blu-ray years ago as a gift. He's watched it since the recording of this episode, so the shaming was successful.

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we're revisiting the 2005 thriller "Cavite" by Ian Gamazon and Neil dela Llana, which is a unique take on our exploration of Asian Americans in Asia. The film basically takes all the anxieties Asian Americans can feel when we go back to Asia -- the awkwardness of not speaking the language well, the feeling of being completely lost, the guilt over having turned into a foreigner in what's supposed to be our "homeland" -- and transports this all into a thriller scenario, having a fictional terrorist exploit all our main character's insecurities in a life-or-death hostage situation. Adam (played by Ian Gamazon), a night security guard in San Diego, is on his way to the Philippines for his father's funeral. But as soon as he gets to the airport, he hears something ringing in his bag, and finds someone has slipped him a cell phone. Turns out the man on the other end of the line has his mother and sister, and will kill them unless he does everything he says. The film is super low-budget guerrilla-style filmmaking. Most the film feels like a home video following Adam racing through the streets, alleyways, and busy marketplaces of the Philippines as this man is taunting him -- and it's an impressive feat they pulled off. It feels like a scary documentary. Also, this was post 9/11, so in some ways, it's reacting to Islamophobia through the lens of a non-practicing Muslim Filipino American man.

This week's episode, as part of our season on Asian Americans in Asia, we revisit the 2003 documentary "Refugee," by Spencer Nakasako, which follows three Cambodian American young men as they go back to Cambodia for the first time to confront their family histories. Like most of Nakasako's films of the time, the documentary makes use of the subjects' personal video diaries and Nakasako empowers Mike Siv and his friends Paul Maes and David Mark to pick up the camera themselves and film their own stories. Mike Siv, who's 24 at the time, has been told his whole life that he and his mother escaped the Khmer Rouge when he was a little kid, leaving his father and brother behind. He only recently found out that his brother doesn't actually know his father, so his assumption that if he had stayed in Cambodia, that he'd have a father, is shattered. So we see what happens when see a Cambodian American, from the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin, brings his very Americanized perspective of what a father should be -- what a son deserves to have from his father -- to war-torn Cambodia. And we see that this is just the beginning of a journey: 12 years later, Mike Siv would make his own feature length documentary, 2016's "Daze of Justice," where he follows a group of Cambodian American women back to Cambodia so they can testify at the Khmer Rouge trials.

The second episode of Saturday School (Season 5) on Asian Americans in Asia is about the 2000 documentary "First Person Plural" by Deann Borshay Liem. It's a personal documentary about a Korean American adoptee who comes to realize she's not the person her American family thinks she is. And as she uncovers the mystery behind her identities, she brings her adoptive parents to Korea to meet her birth family for the first time. Deann Borshay Liem was adopted in 1966, so her story is a predecessor to some of the Korean American adoptee documentaries we've seen more recently from younger generations, including "AKA Dan" and "Twinsters." Also, 10 years after "First Person Plural," Deann Borshay Liem made a sequel 2010's "In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee," and now that it's 8 years after that, someone tell her we need a 2020 update to round out the trilogy!

Saturday School - our podcast where we force your unwilling children to learn Asian American pop culture history - is back for Season 5, and this semester, we are exploring films that involve Asian Americans in Asia. We start with a 1957 episode of a TV documentary show called "Bold Journey," where the legendary Chinese American silent film star Anna May Wong shares footage she took when she visited China in the 1930s, and we talk about how Asian Americans are often called upon to explain Asia to American audiences - and sometimes we're excellent cultural translators, while other times, we're quite clueless ourselves. Then we revisit 1986's "A Great Wall," directed by Peter Wang. (Not to be confused with the 2016 Zhang Yimou monster film "The Great Wall," starring Matt Damon.) "A Great Wall" is reportedly the first American film shot in China, and it's about a middle-aged Chinese American man from San Francisco visiting Beijing for the first time since he left at age 10. There's both confusion and intrigue as his Chinese American family meets his older sister's Chinese family. Some see the overseas Chinese as a threat, while others see them as Western saviors, and it's all wrapped up in a warm-hearted cross-cultural comedy.

For all you overachievers out there, Saturday School hosted an AP Honors discussion group with 5 people who have seen Crazy Rich Asians in theaters 5 TIMES *OR MORE.* The #CRA5timersclub. Like the SNL 5-timers club, but more Asian. Spoilers galore. And full disclosure, Ada's only seen it 3 times, so she's both hosting and crashing the party. Brian has only seen it once, so he was not invited. If you're obsessed with the movie as much as Phil Yu, David Magdael, Cheryl K, Minji Chang and Marvin Yueh are, we'd recommend first listening to Crazy Rich Asians episodes of our fellow Potluck Podcast Collective podcasts: They Call Us Bruce, KollabCast, First of All. And then come to Saturday School if you want to talk about stuff like: why Curtis was flown to Singapore, was that Teresa Teng's "Tian Mi Mi" playing in the background, and did the addition of that one line de-creepify Peik Lin's brother just a little bit or was it always there? Hang on tight, the super crazies have got the mike.

It's the last episode of Saturday School Season 4, our exploration of Asian American troublemakers in film, and we don't want to say we saved the "best" for last, but we definitely saved the most badass for last. This week, we're talking about 1965's "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" by Russ Meyer, starring Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams. It's a cult hit among certain circles: admirers include John Waters, Quentin Tarantino, and the late Roger Ebert, as well as fans of burlesque. Stories from the late Tura Satana link her to Elvis Presley's dance moves and the creation of Charlie's Angels. But the film is not as often talked about in Asian American circles, even though both Tura and Haji are biracial Asian women. Tura, who was in the incarceration camps as a kid, has a mix of Japanese, Filipina, Native American and Scots-Irish blood. Haji is British and Filipina American. There's an upcoming documentary about Tura Satana (narrated by Margaret Cho, co-produced by YOMYOMF) that is in currently in post-production, and we can't wait to see it. In the meantime, here's a taste of Tura, as Varla, who Phil Chung called "The Most Kickass Asian American Woman to Ever Grace the Silver Screen." And as a wrap-up to this semester, we ponder other Asian American troublemakers that didn't quite fit into our 10-episode season -- the renegades we are eternally grateful for, and even the ones who spout messages we think are harmful to society -- understanding that to truly appreciate Asian America is to grapple with all of Asian America, troublemakers included.

For Episode 9 of our season on Asian American Troublemakers, we revisit Jiyoung Lee's Female Pervert -- a film that we put at the top of our Asia Pacific Arts 2015 Best Asian American Films list, when 2015 was actually a really impressive year for Asian American film with lots of stellar movies that didn't, like, get one-star reviews calling it "more creepy than quirky" and a "ponderous laugh-free zone." To fully appreciate Jiyoung Lee, one must place her in the Atlanta independent filmmaking scene, be charmed by the music of Pleasant People, be properly confused by Moral Sleaze, not be above fart jokes, think it's funny someone would Kickstart a movie called Female Pervert for $6900, and generally enjoy following strange, awkward characters trying really hard to accomplish a goal while navigating a "normal" world that can be very strange and awkward. Jennifer Kim is Phoebe, an Asian lady who scares off all the nice eager hipster white boys she's dating by being a little too aggressive with her sexual desires. You feel somewhat bad for the boys, but her desires are more random than perverse, so mostly you want to say/sing: hey man.... you knew she was trouble when she walked in. Female Pervert is available to watch for free if you have Amazon Prime. 63 minutes of glorious weirdness.

In this week's episode of Saturday School, we're going back to 1993 to revisit Jon Moritsugu's Terminal USA, his over-the-top, grotesque, drug-filled take on a Japanese American sitcom family. Moritsugu plays dual roles: twins Katsumi, a punk drug dealer, and Marvin, the repressed model minority. Their sister Holly is not as pure as the all-American cheerleader vibe she gives off, the father has some issues with murderous rage, and the mother makes a barter to have sex with the pizza boy, under the condition that he gives her extra cheese bread. Plus, they're waiting for grandpa, who is bed-ridden, to finally kick the bucket so they get a hefty pay-out. The hour-long film was commissioned by ITVS looking for unique stories about the American family. However, once it was finished, many PBS stations across the US refused to play it. Understandably! Though what's funnier to us, 25 years later, is that many PBS stations DID play it. Moritsugu often makes films that aren't about Asian Americans, so it's a delight to see what he accomplishes once he turned his focus on Asian American stereotypes and identity.

Episode 7 of our season on Troublemakers, and we're looking at the 1997 Rea Tajiri film, Strawberry Fields, which was part of the Class of 1997 "Asian American New Wave," featuring debut works of directors like Justin Lin, Quentin Lee, Eric Nakamura, Michael Aki, Chris Chan Lee, and Rea (the only woman of the group). Strawberry Fields features a firecracker performance by a young Suzy Nakamura, who folks might recognize more recently for her role as Dr. Ken's wife on the ABC sitcom. She plays Irene, a pyromaniac teenager haunted by ghosts of the past. Because the film takes place in the '70s, Brian talks about how he loves how Strawberry Fields subverts the 1970s counterculture road trip movie, by reminding us that the open landscapes of America that were home to these Hollywood renegades were also home to Japanese internment camps and other haunted histories. And then because it was shot in the '90s, Ada tries to convince Brian of the similarities between the Strawberry Fields characters and the characters in My So-Called Life. Shout out to all the hard-core My So-Called Life fans that also keep up with important Asian American cinema.

Skipped school last week, but we're back - and this week's episode is about Harry Kim's 2008 documentary Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe. Artist David Choe is kind of the ultimate Asian American troublemaker in ways that are both empowering and problematic. He exists in the often breathtaking intersection of beauty, insanity, genius, violence, machismo, perseverance, addiction, vulgarity, turns to God that are quickly cast aside so he can indulge in his next whims, and general ridiculousness. The film covers seven years of his life in his 20s -- he's in his 40s now -- and as we watch a documentary that makes the audience feel like an accomplice, we marvel at the aspects we still deeply appreciate, while raising new concerns and questions we weren't thinking about while watching it 10 years ago.

We probably had a little too much fun with our latest episode of Saturday School as we continue to explore Asian American "troublemakers" in film. We look back at professor/filmmaker Nguyen Tan Hoang's experimental videos from the '90s and early 2000s, where he "pirates" Hollywood film, Vietnamese karaoke videos, and gay pornography and then appropriates them into his personal anecdotes about being a Vietnamese immigrant in America. Whether he's sharing his refugee experience in "Pirated!" through sexual fantasies of virile German sailors saving him from Thai pirates, turning to Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop stars as gay icons in "Forever Jimmy," or challenging stigmas and assumptions about gay Asian men being bottoms in "Forever Bottom!" -- his works are always graphic, playful, and humorously unapologetic.

Bonus episode of Saturday School this week, as we speak with director Bing Liu and producer Diane Quon about their Sundance Award-winning documentary Minding the Gap. In the film, Bing Liu documents the stories of a couple of his skateboarding friends from Rockford, Illinois, and they bond over their volatile relationships with their fathers. We talk about Bing's route into filmmaking through his experimentation within the skateboarding video form, how he expands beyond it into traditional documentary, and how he worked with Steve James' Kartemquin Films to bring his story to life. It's playing this Saturday, May 5 at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival - and since they're on a nation-wide, world-wide festival run, it's very likely coming to a film festival near you.

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're looking at Ravi Kapoor's 2015 film "Miss India America," a pageant comedy that we're arguing is the closest thing Asian America has to a heist film. But instead of stealing money, she's stealing the crown. We also wish there were more Asian American heist films, because Asian Americans are really good at cheating, whether it be in gambling (for example, the real life story of "21") or in any sort of cheating in high school scenario (aka "The Perfect Score"). Also, we just want Tiya Sircar to be the next Reese Witherspoon, because "Miss India America" is basically the Indian American "Election."

For Episode 3 of our season on troublemakers, we quickly review the history of Asian American male gangster films, before focusing on a pair of Byron Q-directed films that made us think of gangster films in a whole new way. Bang Bang is a coming-of-age film starring Thai Ngo and David Huynh that is unique because the cast is made up of a combination of actors and gangsters and it also addresses the class differences between teenagers that are drawn to gang life for different reasons. Raskal Love is a documentary that tells the story of Vanna Fut, one of the actors in Bang Bang who became a member of the Tiny Raskal Gang at a young age after his family came to Pomona, CA after escaping the Killing Fields. As we compare real-life Asian American gangster stories to silver screen ones, we rethink the idea of what a troublemaker is. Also, we realize that we were both in attendance for a climactic scene of Raskal Love and had no idea what we were witnessing at the time.

Part of the reason we thought it'd be fun to do Season 4 of Saturday School on Troublemakers was to highlight some of the bad girls/bad boys of Asian American film, but another reason was to remind ourselves that the Asian American movement itself was born out of a desire to create trouble. So for episode 2, we go back almost 40 years to Curtis Choy's 1976 film essay "Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue," which embodies this spirit -- spitting in the face of reporters, cops, the white gaze, Hollywood, Chinatown tourists, and the general establishment, even calling out fellow Asian Americans in the industry as sell-outs. We reflect on how the goals of Asian America have evolved over the years and jokingly lament that there aren't that many public Asian American "Frank Chin vs. Amy Tan, David Henry Hwang, and Maxine Hong Kingston" feuds anymore.