Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View

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Where Are You on the Scale of Asian-ness?

I spent much of my life not celebrating my culture and heritage, but that didn't mean I wasn't Japanese American, or that I was denying my Asian-ness.

"Ramayana Ballet" by Gamelan Tunas Mekar

I was a "banana" in some ways - yellow on the outside, white on the inside - but I still was connected to my roots through my family and appreciation for basics such as Japanese food. I ate tons of sushi long before eager white yuppies discovered the joys of sushi bars. It's true, though, that in recent years I've made a much more conscious effort to really connect with my Japanese heritage.

But because of my banana youth, I realize that there's a scale of Japanese-ness, and where one falls on this scale doesn't make her or him any more or less valid as a Japanese American, or as an Asian American. In fact, the cultural content on the scale of Asian-ness is often achieved by those who aren't Asian at all.

This weekend Erin and I reveled in Asian-ness. On Saturday, we attended a performance of the "Ramayana Ballet" by the Denver-based Balinese gamelan group Tunas Mekar. On Sunday we visited the Foothills Arts Center and Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, where a fabulous exhibit of contemporary Japanese Quilts are display; both galleries also hosted a "Festival of Japan" with traditional culture demonstrations. And Sunday night we attended a concert featuring Chinese-born singer Hao Jiang Tian.

I've seen Tunas Mekar perform on numerous occasions, and enjoy their music. This time the full orchestra-sized group was augmented by performers from around the country for a traditional dance about love, jealousy and revenge, an ancient and universal story in every culture.

The full Tunas Mekar orchestra.

If you aren't familiar with gamelan music, it's an intricate and hypnotic sound made by musicians playing various bells, drums and what look like shortened, beautifully ornate xylophones. The melody emerges out of the interweaving rhythms of these percussion instruments. Tunas Mekar is a world-class gamelan group and has performed in Bali.

But the striking thing is that the 15-year-old group is comprised mostly of Caucasians. There are a couple of Balinese in the group, including composer and artist-in-residence I Made Lasmawan, a master drummer who led the group during the Ramayana performance. Because of their commitment to the music and culture of Bali and Indonesia, Tunas Mekar has fought for acceptance as cultural paragons for gamelan because of their racial background. It simply should not be an issue, but the group has been turned down because they aren't Balinese or Indonesian. One woman who hired the group wthout seeing them actually blocked the door to her home when they arrived, fearing that her guest that night, the governor of Colorado, would be offended. Of course, he wasn't.

Non-Asians are often more interested in traditional culture than Asian Americans.

At the Japanese festival the next day, although there were plenty of Japanese giving demonstrations (among them my mom and her friend Mrs. Iwahiro brush-writing American names in katakana for passersby), a Caucasian, Matthew Johnson, performed an intricate traditional dance at the Foothills Arts Center. Matthew is an employee of the Consul General of Japan in Denver, and more Japanese than I am. He lived in Japan and speaks Japanese, and learned his dancing from a master in Japan - as the only non-Japanese student. Down the street at the Quilt Museum, traditional Japanese quilting arts such as shibori, a style not unlike tie-dye, were demonstrated by non-Japanese - more proof that you don't have to be Asian to be steeped in and respect Asian culture.

Hao is an opera singer, and I don't mean the Beijing Opera. I mean Verdi and Puccini opera - the opera of the West, of Europe, of white people. He's an acclaimed bass with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City who's been in over 300 performances at the Met since his debut there in 1991. A native of China, he first came to the US in the early '80s to study at the University of Denver.

The concert, a benefit for the Asian Pacific Development Center which also featured soprano Shu-Ying Li, pianist Fu Gen Wei and several guest musicians, was well-attended and wonderfully performed. It seemed perfectly natural for these Asians on stage to be singing in German, Italian, French and English in a classical European form.

They also performed a couple of Chinese melodies (sung in operatic voice) as well as an assortment of Broadway numbers, such as "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" from "Oklahoma" and "All I Ask of You" from "Phantom of the Opera." But they ended with a stirring version of "America the Beautiful" segueing into "God Bless America."

Hao Jiang Tian singing classic European opera.

I'm not much of a fan of the second song - I think it's corny and since the 9/11 attacks, an obnoxious ploy for patriotism - but the two songs together really hammered home for me the fact that this was an awesome display of Asian America.

This paradox - being foreign and American at the same time - is of course the central fact of Asian Pacific American identity.

It's an obvious fact but it's often ignored in favor of boosting up our Asian-ness. That's why I think the recent movie "Better Luck Tomorrow" has stirred dialogue and debate within the APA community nationwide.

The film follows a group of Asian American teenagers in suburban Southern California who do well in school but get excitement in their lives by slowly immersing themselves in deeper and deeper levels of criminal activity. It's a dark, disturbing film but one that in years to come may be noted as an event that helped establish an APA voice in the American mainstream.

It's certainly being marketed as a mainstream movie by its distributors, MTV Films, to teenagers everywhere. Its writer and director Justin Lin was smart enough to keep the film, which he funded with a stack of credit cards and money from friends and family, from being relegated to the "ethnic art film" ghetto.

The cast of "Better Luck Tomorrow" with director Justin Lin, foreground.

Although the film's lead roles are all young APA actors, he consciously left out any parent-authority figures or any references to any Asian cultures these kids might be exposed to in their home lives. They don't even eat Asian food - the most obvious expression of their culture - and instead are shown in cafeterias and fast-food joints. They speak the language of the all-American teen, and in fact the only Asian thing in the film aside from their faces is a tattoo of a Chinese character on one girl's shoulder.

The film's story can be told through the perspective of a group of friends of any ethnicity.

In a now-famous quote after a screening of "BLT" at the Sundance Film Festival last year, where an audience member confronted Lin about showing more positive APA role models, critic Roger Ebert yelled back, "Asian American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be. They do not have to 'represent' their people."

Ebert hit it on the nose. This movie is worth seeing exactly because Justin Lin and the cast didn't feel the need to "celebrate" their Asian-ness. They simply expressed themselves as Americans who happen to be Asian. In fact, the film raises an interesting question: Does celebrating our Asian-ness keep us trapped as the alien, the outsider, the other, in American society and reinforce stereotypes that non-Asians foist on us?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know I'm more to the Asian side of the ethnicity scale.

Still, I applaud the film for hopefully opening the door for other APA movies and actors who don't have to mired in clich�d images of martial arts, internment, geishas, samurai, kimonos, Asian accents, war refugees and restaurant owners.

ARCHIVES

Where Are You on the Scale of Asian-ness?

Copyright 1998-2003 by Gil Asakawa -- not for use without permission.
Contact me if you'd like to run "Nikkei View" in your publication.
Thanks for reading!

ARCHIVES

Where Are You on the Scale of Asian-ness?

Copyright 1998-2003 by Gil Asakawa -- not for use without permission. Contact me if you'd like to run "Nikkei View" in your publication. Thanks for reading!

Copyright 1998-2003 by Gil Asakawa -- not for use without permission.
Contact me if you'd like to run "Nikkei View" in your publication.
Thanks for reading!