Starting My Own Religion: Metadivinism

  • February 15, 2012 12:05 am

The Quan Yin of Buddhism

My mom was a Buddhist, so I was raised as both a Buddhist and a Christian. I went to a protestant school since Grade 1 and I found biblical stories to be quite fascinating whereas the Buddhism that I grew up with was essentially idolatry. To this date, my mom will pray to Quanyin for things she wants without really thinking much about it.

When I was impressionable and young, I really wanted to become a Christian but my parents told me to wait until I was eighteen. When I hit college, I was constantly bombarded by Asian Christians and their dogma on campus and that really made me think twice about being Christian. To me, Judeo-Christianity is a way of thinking and the foundation of Western culture rather than dogma. And then I started meeting Buddhist friends who embraced Buddhism as a philosophy and way of living rather than the idolatry that I was raised with. A great example is Ms. Canyon Sam, my documentary subject, who passionately follows the teachings of the Dalai Lama.  Read more...

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The Foul-mouthed Professor

  • February 7, 2012 8:44 pm

“What people intentionally don’t speak Mandarin? Assholes… According to my knowledge, a lot of Hong Kong people don’t identify themselves as Chinese. They say, ‘We’re Hong Kong, and you’re China.’ These people are assholes. These people are so used to acting as dogs in a British colony. You guys are still dogs, not human. I know a lot of Hong Kong people are good people but yet a lot of Hong Kong people up till now are still dogs,” said Kong Qingdong, the foulmouthed professor from the University of Beijing on national television.

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Around the Horn: Room for Improvement

  • January 31, 2012 1:55 pm

“Room for improvement” was one of these popular comments I got from teachers when I was going to school in Hong Kong. On some subjects, I worked my ass off and did better than half the class and I would still get the comment “room for improvement.” Personally, I never quite enjoy hearing a comment with the word “improvement” because it reminds me of how difficult and competitive it was going to school in Hong Kong.

What does “improvement” mean for you? And if there’s one thing you can improve this Year of the Dragon in your life, what would it be?  Read more...

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The Flowers of War

  • January 24, 2012 5:48 pm

When I was visiting my family for Chinese New Year in Vancouver, I got to watch The Flowers of War by Zhang Yimou on a (most likely) pirated DVD that my father had. The screener I saw was incredibly dark and high contrast. It also was two seconds out-of-sync during the last hour of the movie. On top of that, the cover said the movie was 97 minutes but it turned out two be 2 and a half hours. I was actually dreading to watch the movie as I have heard mixed things about it. My friend at the Golden Globes said it was essentially a Chinese propaganda film. A Chinese friend laughed at how ridiculous one of the plot points was (I will eventually have to talk about it so SPOILER ALERT ahead).

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Music of the Heart

  • January 19, 2012 12:12 am

I got inspired by my fellow Offender Jerome’s “Around the Horn” and decided to write about the music of the heart. Once upon a time, I fell in love with a bisexual guy in college who was also an advocate of non-monogamous relationships. He was always dating a guy or a girl when we were dating in college. He was my first boyfriend. Between my junior and senior year in college, I listened to New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” like a broken record. I was surprised that cassette tape survived my rewind and play for two years. I was obsessed… or in love the very first time!?

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Killer Chink

  • January 11, 2012 8:33 pm

Serial Killer Charles Ng

After I first met Koji Steven Sakai at a CAPE event in 2007, we started developing a couple of projects together along with my longtime collaborator and film school buddy Stanley Yung. And the very first one we started developing was a drama about a self-hating Asian American man. That feeling or complex that I wanted to confront and explore—self-hatred—is really in all of us, particularly in a North American society primarily driven by identity politics. Especially for a visible ethnic minority, how many of us are confronted with the feeling of discomfort, competitiveness or even hate when we see someone else of the same skin color in an all white environment?

I cannot remember more clearly what my mom said to me when she came home one day after dropping my little sister off to school in Montreal.

“I saw this Chinese lady at school and I asked her if she was Chinese,” said my mom. “And she said, ‘I’m CANADIAN!’”  Read more...

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The Dead and the Beloved

  • January 4, 2012 12:05 am

Mao I before passing

In a cozy loft just south of Market Street shared by my friend M and his husband D, we were all having glasses of sake and beer around the table as the recent addition of the family, Mao II, jumped on the tabletop. M grabbed Mao II and gently combed his hair with his fingers. The black cat purred.

“Do you want to see Mao I?” asked D.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Mao I… is dead.”

“Show him,” said M.

D ran upstairs and returned unfolding a cat skin complete with its claws and head preserved. I almost fell off my chair.  Read more...

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A Funeral, a Baby and a Movie

  • December 28, 2011 12:54 pm

This may sound like the most cliché holiday movie title but that was pretty much my year. My good friend J passed away the past April. It was really the first time that a good friend of my age died. Before J, the only person who was close to me passed away was my grandmother in 1993. Even to this day, which hasn’t been that long, I am still trying to make sense emotionally of the radical discontinuity of J’s death. The day before I spoke to him on the phone and the day after I could not talk to him forever.

On top of all that, the circumstances around his death were unusual. We kind of knew what happened but nothing was confirmed except to the police and his immediate family. A police investigation and arrests were also involved which further complicated the scenario.  Read more...

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The Thing about the Thing

  • December 21, 2011 12:01 am

The Thing 2011

The thing about The Thing is that I love both movies—the 2011 remake and the 1982 John Carpenter classic—but ironically neither of them did well at the box office. Because I’m a horror junkie I see things through different eyes than the average viewer. But the curious thing about The Thing is that even though the 1982 original was considered a cult classic but a box office disappointment, Universal went ahead and remade The Thing anyway in 2010 and it ended up in a similar financial fate.

What do you think?  Read more...

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Nobody Has Done Christmas Better Than Bob Clark

  • December 15, 2011 5:40 pm

It’s that time of the year again, and nobody has done Christmas better than Bob Clark. The late Canadian pop director has made two holiday classics, Black Christmas (1972) and A Christmas Story (1982), one a seminal Christmas horror picture and the other a Christmas comedy. How the heck did he do it? Bob succeeded in making two movies each on the opposite spectrum of genres on the same holiday. Scrooge or Santa Claus, you get to pick that holiday classic!

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Are You the Apple of My Eye?

  • December 6, 2011 11:57 am

(From You Are the Apple of My Eye)

My introduction to Taiwan cinema was in 1995 when I, still in film school, went to the Vancouver International Film Festival to present my “first” feature Flow, essentially a feature compilation of my student shorts made at UCLA. I met directors Yu-Hsun Chen and Chih-yen Yee and watched their respective first features Tropical Fish and The Lonely Hearts’ Club. I also saw Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men Good Women with my newly met friend Rose Kuo who couldn’t stop sobbing next to me. Taiwanese art house cinema was all the rage in the 90s and the average budget for a Taiwanese movie at that time was around USD$300K. Even up until now, the average budget for a Taiwanese movie is about USD$300K with the most recent exception of Doze Niu’s Monga and Giddens Ko’s You Are the Apple of My Eye, both box office smash hits in Taiwan.

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Dinner with Roger and Lydia

  • November 30, 2011 12:05 am

I first heard of Roger Garcia, a pioneer champion of Asian American films, when I was an intern at Visual Communications in 1988. Finally, in the last decade or so, I’ve started meeting him at various film festivals all over the world. Roger and his wife Lydia Tanji began stationing in Hong Kong after his appointment last year as the executive director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the largest festival player in the region. Returning to Hong Kong, I touched base with Roger who warmly invited me to dinner at a tucked away Izakaya in Wanchai, the neighborhood where I grew up as a kid. It was also my first time hanging out with Lydia though we met briefly at the Hawaii International Film Festival a couple years back.

Having stayed in Hong Kong for a few days, I was mostly catching up with friends and family and was desperately seeking some kind of inspiration for a story or a blog with little luck. On top of that, my Macbook was acting up and I had to go to the most dreaded Genius Bar that usually came up with little solution other than replacing the entire computer. Meeting Roger and Lydia definitely changed my luck as I was immediately inspired talking to them about the state of Asian American filmmaking over sake, beer and tasty skewers of meat and vegetables.  Read more...

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Beauty of Asia

  • November 23, 2011 9:39 pm

My filmmaker friend Ringo and I just came back from a screening of Luc Besson’s latest opus The Lady with Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis and we got into a heated debate about the movie and essentially the beauty of cinema and representing Asia. I was quite excited about the screening as I love Luc Besson, Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis… but sitting through the 127 minutes movie about the story of pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi and her professor husband Michael Aris proved slightly underwhelming.

“But you gotta give it credit that it’s an Asian movie trying to be an Oscar contender,” said Ringo. “I like the movie because it’s really trying to tell an untold Asian story to the global audience.”  Read more...

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Adventures as an Asian American Short Filmmaker

  • November 16, 2011 12:05 am

From “Asian American Jesus,” one of the shorts that I screened with

One of the best things about going to a film festival as a short filmmaker is that you don’t have the same pressure and stress as a feature filmmaker who is constantly worried about promotion, publicity and packing your house. I attended the Vancouver Asian Film Festival a couple weeks back and really had a great time hanging out, meeting filmmakers and going to screenings because I was only showing a short film. Being relaxed and chill, I actually made a couple of discoveries at the festival that started off as a festival showing short films by North American Asian filmmakers.

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Vancouver Asian Film Festival at 15

  • November 4, 2011 12:27 am

In 1997, Justin Lin and I premiered Shopping for Fangs in Vancouver at the first Vancouver Asian Film Festival as the closing film. It was ultimately a worthwhile yet sacrificial decision as after being accepted to the Toronto International Film Festival, Fangs was invited to both the Vancouver Asian Film Festival and Vancouver International Film Festival. Vancouver International is a much bigger player in the festival world. But because I promised festival director Barbara Lee that I would play their festival before Vancouver International’s acceptance, I stuck to my words.

In the blink of an eye, here I am 15 years later and I am just about to go up to Vancouver for the festival and see my dad.

Yes, I’m Canadian, mind you!  Read more...

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Speaking Chinglish

  • October 29, 2011 12:49 pm

Let’s face it… I’m not a New Yorker. When I got off the plane, I was already trembling on the Air Train. How would I get to my friend’s place in Chelsea? Well, somehow with the directions from my iPhone I got there. I have rarely had a good experience with New York since college. I got into a fight or broke up with almost every one of my boyfriends there. But I came again because I really needed to see David Henry Hwang’s new play, Chinglish. And my mission for the day was to pick up the opening tickets at the Longacre Theater and go to a hip-hop class. With courage, I did both.

Timely, smart and totally hilarious, Chinglish rewrote New York for me, just like it will rewrite the relationship between China and America and inform and entertain those who have inklings of doing anything in China. Very much like his own smash hit M Butterfly, it’s a comedic critique of the dysfunctional relationship between the East and West. In M Butterfly, it’s sexuality and gender roles. In Chinglish, it’s aptly language and translation.  Read more...

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First Halloween

  • October 26, 2011 12:05 am

I started trick-or-treating at 6 when no one was celebrating Halloween in Hong Kong. No one in Hong Kong really quite knew what Halloween was at that time. I accidentally stumbled upon some make-up kits and greeting cards with a smiling Jack-o’lantern that year in an American store and I asked my mom about Halloween. My mom explained the whole American tradition of trick-or-treating to me and I thought it was a brilliant idea. On my first Halloween night, I put on a pair of fangs, glued some cotton to my face as decaying flesh and put on two bug eyes with plastic tape… I was trying to be a vampire of some sort.

I knocked on the doors of different neighbors in my apartment building on different floors and very few answered. Even if they did, they were totally puzzled at “Trick or treat.” My mom told me to hit up this kid whom I used to play with when I was two, and so I did. His mom opened the door and I said, “Trick or treat.”  Read more...

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Superhero Cinema

  • October 19, 2011 12:05 am

The superhero is very much a modern American invention. As I was contemplating why superheroes worked so well in film, I stumbled across the idea of “superhero culture,” an illuminating essay written by Carolyn Brako who wrote, “America’s preoccupation with super heroes may be a key to understanding that fears and hopes of the most powerful country in the world.”

If you look at every successful American movie, the main character is always a superhero or anti-superhero—whom I’m defining as a character with superhuman power. Besides the obvious slew of superhero movies, seriously every successful movie involves a dominant character who has superpower or superhuman ability. In the Twilight series, it’s Edward the super vampire. In horror movies such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, it’s always about the unkillable killers like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees.  Read more...

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Spaghetti Fear

  • October 12, 2011 12:05 am

From Dario Argento’s Deep Red

By “Spaghetti Fear” I don’t mean the fear of spaghetti but rather “spaghetti horror,” the genre of horror films pioneered by Italian filmmakers such as Mario Bava who made the 1960 cult classic Black Sunday with Barbara Steele. Bava’s films were before my time as my entry into Spaghetti Fear was in the 80s with Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Lamberto Bava (Mario Bava’s son) and Michele Saovi (who began working as Argento’s assistant director). I’m not just trying to catch the Flavah of the week because fear and horror is the Flavah of my life since I ran out of the movie theater scared shitless halfway watching my first horror movie The Manitou at 7.

(Trailer to Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery)  Read more...

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FOB Pride

  • October 5, 2011 12:05 am

A recent viral video about Fox ridiculing USC Asian students with bad accents has stirred up my FOB pride. I daresay I’m probably the only FOB among the Offenders, and I’m proud of that.

How do I feel about the video? Honestly, I’m rather amused and fascinated. Well, there’s a lot of reality in that video. Those students did speak that way. Even as an Asian American FOB, do I identify with those people? I don’t think so and that’s why I’m not particularly offended.  Read more...

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