From my 2007 diary…..What a strange and deeply inspiring summer. I have been living in New York City for just about ten years, and I think it is finally becoming the kind of muse that sends my creative spirit flying. Tonight I drove to Flushing to shoot xenogenesis. Little did I know that a drive to this marvelous Asian community would lead to one of the most unusual epicurean experiences I have ever had — eating authentic Szechuan food. This region of China includes the highly pungent taste of Mala. Eating this invisible, peppery powder in our appetizers was like diving into a pool of ocean water with an electrical socket plugged into the taste buds of your tongue. What a charge!
So back to filmmaking, though in many ways such taste-defined sensations are very tied into the witnessing and thinking that comes with collecting images for our words. It’s all new and all extremely sensory. Tonight I shot in the Sago Bubble Tea Cafe because it seemed like a great place to study the radical shift in life style between generations in the Asian community in this city. Here I was able to see tables of young people gathering to drink a particularly new dessert drink, to eat French fries, to participate in a sense of community that is, to my eye, so different from that of their parents.
This reminds me of the conversation I had with my boss at the college library where I worked. He was a white American, but spoke Mandarin Chinese fluently and has lived in Taiwan for fifteen years.
He mentioned to me once how some Chinese American college kids who barely speak Chinese are in some way more Chinese than Chinese in Taiwan because they are so consciously aware that they are Chinese. I totally understood what he meant. It saddens me when I see Korean American kids who listen to horrendous Korean pop music (that even Koreans living in Korea think is a complete joke) simply because it’s Korean. Why should they feel obliged to listen to such a junk? You don’t see any American with a taste in music listening to backstreet boys!
I blame the American educational systems that beat their kids into knowing their racial and cultural identities. Shouldn’t an individual be defined in terms of his/her character, integrity, intelligence or so many other traits that transcend where they were happen to be born?