Azn Persuazn

I can't say I'm into those typically Asian-American things, whatever they may be. At one point, it was going to clubs and dancing to house music (and techno before that). It was playing volleyball. It was hanging out with other Asians. It was correcting non-Asians (or Asians in the sticks) not to say Oriental but to say Asian, even if that meant picking up Indians and Turks along the way. Asian Americans would try to come across as Hong Kong cool. Chow Yun-Fat with sunglasses and cigarette, blasting two guns in both hands, as he fell sidewards, carrying a baby, with doves flying away in a church.

There isn't much good Asian American entertainment. There's Margaret Cho, the comedian, but no particularly well-known Asian American. If you want to have a star vehicle and you want to cast Asian American, who do you pick? Hong Kong stars have to do. Offhand, I can only think of Pat Morita (does George Takei count?).

But where there's a real dearth of talent is in the music industry. Remember, we're talking about Asian Americans. Hong Kong and India has plenty of its own home-grown talent. As much as African Americans have suffered, there are several places they've excelled: sports, music, and even politics. Most of modern American music owes a great deal to African American music from jazz to blues to rap, the contributions are fundamental to modern music.

There are some obscure Asian Americans in the music scene that aren't performing classical music. There's a guy named Jin who goes by "The Emcee". He's a Korean American rapper. Another guy who goes by Johnny Hi-Fi plays music that's reminiscent of Britpop. However, as a group, Asian Americans haven't produced music that's distinctly Asian American.

That may have as much to do with a lack of cultural commonality. It's true African Americans may have come from disperse locations in Africa (though I wonder about that, but my knowledge of slave trade is limited), but slavery created a uniformity in culture as people forgot their specific heritage. Among Asian Americans, there are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian, Cambodian, Laotian, and so forth. Do we all share that much in common?

If anything, the one thing that is shared is being quiet and working hard, the vision of the model minority that was popularly bandied about in the 80s, even as some Asians began to resent the term, especially those who didn't share in academic success for one reason or another. This lead to a lot of doctors and engineers, but few politicians, sportsmen and musicians (although many Asian Americans did learn classical music).

Asian Americans therefore rely on imitating popular culture, as inventing a new genre of music doesn't seem to be in the cards.

Now, one could argue that plenty of white folks have imitated African Americans, from singing styles (many teens now sound "black") to doing hip-hop (say, Eminem). However, there are genres of music that people tend to think as white, such as country music and indie music (though the second is, I'm sure influenced a great deal, just that many of those in indie bands tend to be white).

What this new Asian American style of music will turn out to be, I don't know.

There may be some better luck with films. The most successful Asian American film director is perhaps M. Night Shyamalan and even he never tells Asian American stories. Ang Lee almost doesn't count, although he was educated in the U.S. (he did his film study in NYU, although he was born in Taiwan). Wayne Wang had done a few films, his most notable, Joy Luck Club. But he seems to have disappeared, and in any case, has stopped making Asian American films.

Gregg Araki has edged over from independent pictures to somewhat-less independent
pictures, but has no movies about the Asian American experience. There are films like Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle that star Asians, though no one terribly famous, and the director is presumably white (Danny Leiner?).

There are many small independent Asian American films, but like many genre films, the stories are uneven and often not all that original. For example, although mildly entertaining, Saving Face had both little to say about being Asian American (except the usual pressures from parents to be successful) and even less to say about being lesbian. Even so, just the combination of the two genres make it a rare bird in the aviary of genre films.

The Asian American community is still seeking ground breaking talent, someone like Paul Robeson or Sidney Poitier or Spike Lee, heck, I could settle for Robert Rodriguez.