Back to Asian Americans on Celluloid Timeline
The Asian American Cinema Movement Comes of Age
The effects of the 1965 immigration and the 1975 refugee assistance acts really came to be felt in the 1980s. During that decade, the United States received 2.5 million immigrants from across the Pacific. In southern California, several suburbs, particularly in Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Orange counties, became Asian-majority ethnoburbs. In media, Asian Americans continued to make slow but steady inroads in mainstream film and television. Meanwhile, the Asian American cinema movement, which gathered steam in the 1970s, really came of age in the 1980s.
The decade opened with the first-ever conference of Asian American filmmakers. Held in Berkeley, this convening led to the formation of the National American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), which is now known as the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). Soon after its founding, NAATA became a core member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Minority Consortia, which strove to make PBS more inclusive both in production and onscreen. From 1982 to 1987, NAATA was the driving force behind PBS’s “Silk Screen” series, which was designed to educate Americans about Asian American histories and experiences. This series allowed the work of many Asian American filmmakers, particularly documentarians, to reach non-Asian American audiences.
Among the documentarians who emerged in the 1980s were Loni Ding (see the previous essay), Mira Nair (see So Far from India), Curtis Choy, Steven Okazaki (see Unfinished Business), Arthur Dong, Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña (see Who Killed Vincent Chin?). Asian American filmmakers also started to create feature-length narrative films that get theatrical distribution in that decade. Robert Nakamura and Duane Kubo’s Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980) is arguably the Asian American cinema movement’s first narrative feature. Meanwhile, Wayne Wang directed four three films about Chinese American experiences—Chan Is Missing (1982; see guide), Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), and Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989)—in the 1980s. Other important directors include Peter Wang, who made A Great Wall in 1986, and Okazaki, who made Living on Tokyo Time in 1987.
Here, I introduce two actors who worked in mainstream film and two documentarians that were central to the Asian American cinema movement. Kiều Chinh (b. 1957) was born and raised in Vietnam. At the age of 20, she played the lead in Hồi Chuông Thiên Mụ (The Bells of Thiên Mụ Temple), and established herself as a star in South Vietnam. During the Vietnam War (or American War from the perspective of the Vietnamese), Chinh acted in both Vietnamese films and American war films, such as Operation C.I.A. (1965) with Burt Reynolds. When Saigon fell, she was filming in Singapore. Shortly after she resettled in the United States, she starred in an 1977 episode of M*A*S*H entitled “In Love and War.” The story, written by Alan Alda, was based loosely on Chinh’s experiences. Since them, she has appeared in a steady string of films and television programs. She had a recurring role in ABC’s Vietnam War drama series China Beach (1989-91), and starred as one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, in Joy Luck Club (1993).
Born and raised in Okinawa in 1953, Ruben Aquino is the son of a Filipino father and a Japanese mother. Being good at both art and the sciences, he decided to enroll in the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. When he graduated in 1975, there was a severe recession, and he was unable to find a job as an architect. This led him to be an animation trainee at Farmhouse Films in Honolulu. In 1980, he briefly joined Hanna-Barbera, and then went to Disney, where he worked for over 30 years. Among the characters he developed and animated are Ursula in The Little Mermaid, Maurice in Beauty and the Beast, the adult version of Simba in The Lion King, Li Shang and Fa Li in Mulan, and Pleakly and David Kawena in Lilo & Stitch.
San Francisco-born Curtis Choy created the pioneering Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue (1976) and one of the most important documentaries of the 1980s: The Fall of the I-Hotel (1983). It documents the implementation of urban renewal policies that led to the destruction of the San Francisco’s Little Manila, and the nighttime eviction of 50 manong-generation (first-generation) Filipino Americans from the International Hotel by 300 police officers. The film was too radical for PBS in the 1980s; in fact, it has only screened it once in 1994. Frustrated by distribution problems, he left directing behind, and became the foremost sound recordist and mixer on the Asian American scene. Among his credits are Chan is Missing, Forbidden City U.S.A., The Joy Luck Club, The Debut, Better Luck Tomorrow, and The Slanted Screen. In the early 2000s, Choy returned to directing, and made a string of documentaries, most notably What’s Wrong with Frank Chin? (2005) and Manila Is in the Heart: Time Travels with Al Robles (2008).
Director, author and curator Arthur Dong (b. 1953) has made some of the most influential documentaries on Asian American experiences, Chinese American media representation, and the LGBTQIA+ community’s struggles for safety and equality. His 1989 documentary, Forbidden City, U.S.A., helped to draw attention to the circuit of Chinatown night clubs that flourished from the 1930s to the 1950s. Meanwhile, Hollywood Chinese examines the filmic portrayal of Chinese characters from the 1910s to the 2000s, and includes interviews with 11 of the most important Chinese Americans in film during the past few decades. His most poignant film is perhaps The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor (2015). It tells the tragic story of Dr. Ngor, who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, came to the United States and miraculously won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and then murdered in a Los Angeles Chinatown alley. He is currently working on a book on the Grandview Film Company, the San Francisco- and Hong Kong-based outfit that produced over 100 films from the 1930s to the 1950s.