Saturday School Podcast

For Episode 3 of our season on troublemakers, we quickly review the history of Asian American male gangster films, before focusing on a pair of Byron Q-directed films that made us think of gangster films in a whole new way.

Bang Bang is a coming-of-age film starring Thai Ngo and David Huynh that is unique because the cast is made up of a combination of actors and gangsters and it also addresses the class differences between teenagers that are drawn to gang life for different reasons. Raskal Love is a documentary that tells the story of Vanna Fut, one of the actors in Bang Bang who became a member of the Tiny Raskal Gang at a young age after his family came to Pomona, CA after escaping the Killing Fields.

As we compare real-life Asian American gangster stories to silver screen ones, we rethink the idea of what a troublemaker is. Also, we realize that we were both in attendance for a climactic scene of Raskal Love and had no idea what we were witnessing at the time.

Part of the reason we thought it'd be fun to do Season 4 of Saturday School on Troublemakers was to highlight some of the bad girls/bad boys of Asian American film, but another reason was to remind ourselves that the Asian American movement itself was born out of a desire to create trouble. So for episode 2, we go back almost 40 years to Curtis Choy's 1976 film essay "Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue," which embodies this spirit -- spitting in the face of reporters, cops, the white gaze, Hollywood, Chinatown tourists, and the general establishment, even calling out fellow Asian Americans in the industry as sell-outs. We reflect on how the goals of Asian America have evolved over the years and jokingly lament that there aren't that many public Asian American "Frank Chin vs. Amy Tan, David Henry Hwang, and Maxine Hong Kingston" feuds anymore.

We're back! Season 4 of Saturday School, we explore Troublemakers in Asian American Film History, inspired by film scholar's Eve Oishi's reference to "bad Asians," aka "badass Asians," in media. We're looking at a spectrum of "trouble," from renegade filmmakers that are combating the model minority myth to avante garde artists that are happily incompatible with anything considered mainstream. We begin with one of our community's OG troublemakers Yoko Ono and trace her influence to performance artists like Patty Chang. In other words, we talk about the high art of cutting someone's clothes off, butts, poop, taking a knife to your melons, eels in your shirt and making out with your parents.

This is going to be a weird season.

This episode, with special guest Lee Ann Kim, was recorded live at the 2017 San Diego Asian Film Festival. Coming off our season on Asian American Music Movies, we talk about animated musicals like Mulan, Moana, and Ni Hao Kai Lan, before moving into Asian American children's programming in general. Plus, a discussion about how we talk to our kids about what it is to be Asian American and how Asian American creatives should think more about creating meaningful content for young people.

Our last episode of our season about Asian American music movies brings us full circle - from episode 1's "Cruisin' J-Town," produced by Visual Communications, co-founded by Robert Nakamura, to this week's episode about the 2009 documentary "A Song For Ourselves," by Robert's son Tad Nakamura, about the political life and music of the late Chris Iijima.

We reflect on how the Asian American movement has evolved in the last fifty years, and how our own individual lives evolve as we learn to balance politics with family and/or other priorities that begin to shift when we get older. But most importantly, Ada tries to make a "Tad Nakamura-thon" a thing.

This week's episode is about Roddy Bogawa's autobiographical documentary "I Was Born, But..." which takes us on a journey from his childhood in Hawaii, to his involvement in the punk rock scene in the '70s, to his time as a filmmaker the early 2000s, when this was made.

Unfortunately, the film is unavailable on DVD or streaming, so in our attempt to convey the spirit of his work to our listeners who may never be able to see it, we found ourselves doing what Roddy did in his film: reflecting on our own musical coming-of-ages and how we remember it.

What started off as us planning to rattle off our favorite music videos turned into an epic history of the Asian American music video form, with much-needed help from our Potluck Podcast braintrust. Impress your friends with your knowledge of Asian American music video, from pre- and early-YouTube to today, with these audio Cliff Notes. We break down the history, from the inspired to the embarrassing, from those videos we got through FTP servers to these modern YouTube videos that rival the production value of anything we saw on MTV's Total Request Live back in the day.

And search YouTube for "Asian American Music Videos Saturday School" for our YouTube playlist of every music video we talk about in this episode!

We're doing something a little different for this week's episode: it'll be a two-part exploration of Asian American music videos. Next week, Brian and Ada will be picking a few of their favorite music videos to share with everyone -- so this week, we talk about what technically makes something an "Asian American music video." Asian American musicians? Asian American music video directors? Asian American actors on camera? And we ask YOU, the listener, to tell us what your favorite Asian American music videos are, so we can be extra prepared for next week's Part 2!

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we revisit the 2006 documentary The Heavenly Kings, by Daniel Wu, about the time the Into the Badlands star was in a Hong Kong boy band with his friends. Sort of. We might have a little too much fun with this episode.

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we talk about Kumu Hina, a 2014 documentary about Hina Wong-Kalu, a hula teacher at an elementary school in Hawaii that aims to preserve the indigenous culture to the younger generations. Kumu Hina, who identifies as a mahu, someone in the middle of male and female, has the opportunity to mentor six-grader Ho'Onani, who also considers herself to be in the "middle," and we watch Ho'Onani not only join the all-male hula class -- but lead her male classmates in their end-of-year performance.

Some of these Asian American films we revisit are hard to find, but Kumu Hina is available to watch on Netflix. So no excuses -- check it out!