random adventures in vicarious thuggery and public radio
It was two weeks ago that I watched Better Luck Tomorrow with Mr.DevilsAdvocate, fulfilling our cultural obligation to see the film and support more opportunities for Asian American film actors. There's been a certain amount of controversy about whether or not the film was based on a real murder and failed to disclose that in its credits, but issues surrounding artistic license aside, what intrigued us was this whole promise of a film that would dispel the general stereotype of Asian-Americans as goody-two-shoes math nerds (it's actually goody-two-shoes math nerds who know kung-fu, dammit). Certainly the film delivered on that promise, or at least part of it.
I grew up in Vancouver during the height of the Hong Kong diaspora, living in a city transformed by an influx of Chinese from varying social strata, all fleeing the '97 Communist takeover made more sinister by Tiananmen Square. Going to boarding school, I knew more than my fair share of overachievers with middle and upper class backgrounds, and, with few exceptions, the worst crimes we were involved in were high stakes rounds of Big Two (aka Chinese poker), played in our dorm rooms after lights out. If one looked beyond that, to the outer suburbs with the sub-par public schools where the lower-class Hong Kong migrants mixed with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, one found a different picture, of immigrant children living on the margins of a society, bearing the alienation of being forced out of one home and trying to make a life in the overburdened shores of another. One would see the same story of migrant clannishness slipping into organized thuggery replayed from similar legends about what the Irish and Italians fell into in Boston and New York a century before, except with a hip hop soundtrack and slammed hotrods.
What I'd like to see was some portrayal of this underside of Asian-American culture -- at the kids who weren't forced to know the quadratic equation at birth and laugh at the prospect of even attending university. Kids who, because they grow up in the shadow of the math nerd stereotype are left out of affirmative action and generally ignored by social services. I think that could have been a more powerful message than simply talking about kids who turned to a life of crime because they were bored.
Expectations aside though, I thought it was a decent film. There were several moments that rang true for me, where in the midst of a well placed line or nicely turned facial expression, Mr.DevilsAdvocate and I would look at each other and laugh because we both knew someone that would've said or done the same thing. Like the Top 5 lists in High Fidelity or the sundry observations on club life in Human Traffic there's a small pleasure derived from having the media recognize an aspect of your life and play it back for you -- seeing a small part of yourself on the silver screen. For me, the film was worth seeing for those bits alone.
It was one week ago that I went to see This American Life on tour, picking up $25 seats to listen to Ira Glass, Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris wax poetic on Chicago architecture, the Battle Hymn of The Republic and all-male strip poker. Before going in, my friend, MsExpat confessed that she had never listened to This American Life before, but said that she trusted my taste well enough to go in for a ticket. Stuck in the middle of a crowded lobby, I couldn't quite explain the allure to her -- how I lost count of the number of times I felt touched by the stories I heard and indulged in the magic of listening to someone tell their own personal story in their own voice with just the right soundtrack running in the background. Though, I didn't really need to after the house lights came down, and the stories of lost virginity and scraps of text found on street corners started to flow.
My OlderSister came up from New York to catch the show, and when we asked her if we needed to get her a ticket, she said that she talked to NPR and one should be on reserve for her -- one of the many fringe benefits of being David Sedaris' agent. I left dinner early to meet up with friends who still needed to pick up tickets from me and I told her that I might have one available since one of my friends was starting to get sick, and she shot back, "man, if there isn't a ticket waiting for me at the Berklee, I'm going over to the TAL producers and telling them 'take off your glasses, you're getting a beating.' "
David's story was about playing strip poker with classmates in high school, and how he savored the memory as his one highlight of an adolescence that was on the verge of trouble and trauma. After the show, I met up with my sisters in the orchestra section, and made our way over to the stage, so OlderSister could say hi. David spotted us from about twenty rows away and waved us over.
"Hey you guys, how are you doing? There's this WBUR reception at some fancy hotel, but most of us were thinking of bailing from that early and getting drinks somewhere. There's this place called Bukowski's, I think? Do you want to meet up there in say an hour or so?"
And that was how I wound up spending a couple of hours, hanging out with David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and Ira Glass, sharing glasses of rapscallion ale over a crowded bar counter while David asked me, "so, all male boarding school, huh? Did you guys play cards?"
I grew up in Vancouver during the height of the Hong Kong diaspora, living in a city transformed by an influx of Chinese from varying social strata, all fleeing the '97 Communist takeover made more sinister by Tiananmen Square. Going to boarding school, I knew more than my fair share of overachievers with middle and upper class backgrounds, and, with few exceptions, the worst crimes we were involved in were high stakes rounds of Big Two (aka Chinese poker), played in our dorm rooms after lights out. If one looked beyond that, to the outer suburbs with the sub-par public schools where the lower-class Hong Kong migrants mixed with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, one found a different picture, of immigrant children living on the margins of a society, bearing the alienation of being forced out of one home and trying to make a life in the overburdened shores of another. One would see the same story of migrant clannishness slipping into organized thuggery replayed from similar legends about what the Irish and Italians fell into in Boston and New York a century before, except with a hip hop soundtrack and slammed hotrods.
What I'd like to see was some portrayal of this underside of Asian-American culture -- at the kids who weren't forced to know the quadratic equation at birth and laugh at the prospect of even attending university. Kids who, because they grow up in the shadow of the math nerd stereotype are left out of affirmative action and generally ignored by social services. I think that could have been a more powerful message than simply talking about kids who turned to a life of crime because they were bored.
Expectations aside though, I thought it was a decent film. There were several moments that rang true for me, where in the midst of a well placed line or nicely turned facial expression, Mr.DevilsAdvocate and I would look at each other and laugh because we both knew someone that would've said or done the same thing. Like the Top 5 lists in High Fidelity or the sundry observations on club life in Human Traffic there's a small pleasure derived from having the media recognize an aspect of your life and play it back for you -- seeing a small part of yourself on the silver screen. For me, the film was worth seeing for those bits alone.
It was one week ago that I went to see This American Life on tour, picking up $25 seats to listen to Ira Glass, Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris wax poetic on Chicago architecture, the Battle Hymn of The Republic and all-male strip poker. Before going in, my friend, MsExpat confessed that she had never listened to This American Life before, but said that she trusted my taste well enough to go in for a ticket. Stuck in the middle of a crowded lobby, I couldn't quite explain the allure to her -- how I lost count of the number of times I felt touched by the stories I heard and indulged in the magic of listening to someone tell their own personal story in their own voice with just the right soundtrack running in the background. Though, I didn't really need to after the house lights came down, and the stories of lost virginity and scraps of text found on street corners started to flow.
My OlderSister came up from New York to catch the show, and when we asked her if we needed to get her a ticket, she said that she talked to NPR and one should be on reserve for her -- one of the many fringe benefits of being David Sedaris' agent. I left dinner early to meet up with friends who still needed to pick up tickets from me and I told her that I might have one available since one of my friends was starting to get sick, and she shot back, "man, if there isn't a ticket waiting for me at the Berklee, I'm going over to the TAL producers and telling them 'take off your glasses, you're getting a beating.' "
David's story was about playing strip poker with classmates in high school, and how he savored the memory as his one highlight of an adolescence that was on the verge of trouble and trauma. After the show, I met up with my sisters in the orchestra section, and made our way over to the stage, so OlderSister could say hi. David spotted us from about twenty rows away and waved us over.
"Hey you guys, how are you doing? There's this WBUR reception at some fancy hotel, but most of us were thinking of bailing from that early and getting drinks somewhere. There's this place called Bukowski's, I think? Do you want to meet up there in say an hour or so?"
And that was how I wound up spending a couple of hours, hanging out with David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and Ira Glass, sharing glasses of rapscallion ale over a crowded bar counter while David asked me, "so, all male boarding school, huh? Did you guys play cards?"