…For too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination.
– Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings (49)
It is difficult to get right into it; to discuss my references, artistic choices, theoretical lenses. It feels strange to start there, because of what a vulnerable experience this whole project has been. In many ways, it would feel, I don’t know, wrong, to write up a nice neat artist statement about what I was trying to accomplish. So, I’m not going to do that. Or, I am, eventually, but I have to get some stuff out of the way first, and after. Stick with me.
I read Cathy Park Hong’s book Minor Feelings in preparation for this project and it blew my mind. In a way, I tried to emulate what she did with her book, on a much, much smaller scale. Because the best part about reading her book as an Asian American woman, even more specifically as a Korean American woman, was that I was like, finally, I’ve never read or seen or listened to anything about my real experience before. I felt seen in a way I never really had. And that’s what I’m trying to do with Liberal Arts Land (LAL). To talk about something–the POC/AAPI experience on campus–that hasn’t been given the proper space. I was nervous to approach the topic of fetishization in the pilot because it felt almost unrelatable, too niche an experience. And then I talked to Asian women on campus and all of them had experienced this, being with a white boy only to find out he’s only been with Asian girls. Connecting over this mega-widespread but unvoiced phenomena felt freeing, uniting, but also a little crushing; like, why is this so acceptable? Because it’s not just having a “type”. It never is.
In her essay “Portrait of an Artist,” Hong writes: “From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion” (174). When I read that, I was like, damn. Because that’s how it feels. After I went through puberty, I became the “exotic one”: not just hot, but “the Hot Asian.” And it’s an experience many Asian American girls have. At least, I think it is: I wouldn’t know for sure because we don’t really talk about it. I wanted to make this project for that reason, for the college students who can’t relate to the dominant (white) media surrounding the college experience. Or even just the growing up experience. Sure, that’s changing a little now, slowly, with shows like Dear White People and Sex Lives of College Girls, which were references for the project, but it’s not really enough. I’m not saying I’m going to single handedly diversify the streaming industry. It just feels like we don’t even want to try and talk about the real, tricky, uncomfortable experience of POC on liberal arts campuses, and in the case of the LAL pilot, specifically AAPI students. In Minor Feelings, Hong writes about how Asian America is not a united minority, because we come from so many different places. Even though they say we all look the same. And all our experiences are so different, which is a beautiful thing, and it is also beautiful, and comforting, in the spaces where they overlap.
Tonally, I was inspired by Atlanta, which paved the way for television about/by POC that is dramatic, doesn’t shy away from real, intense topics, but is also somehow comedic at the same time. It was also an inspiration aesthetically–as a series, it’s always pushing the bounds of cinematography. Director of photography Christian Sprenger said of experience shooting the show, “Embrace the imperfections and let those things shape the reality of the show,” which I tried to embrace during the process. Another series that was an influence was The Chair, which also deals with the issues of POC on college campuses, but from the professor’s perspective. Though the students in the series were written as immature and volatile, the series was still able to grapple with race and gender dynamics on a small liberal arts college campus. In terms of the visuals, I pulled a lot of inspiration from old yearbook photos (1970s, 1990s) and collages from now-defunct Rookie Magazine, which cornered the market in early 2000s aesthetics. You can see these influences in things like the animated title sequence by Tori Kim ‘25, as well as the poster by Sam Ripley ‘22.
You may have noticed that I chose not to show the faces of the white boys that Jen has romantic ties to. The reason is simple. First off, they’re not the important part of the story–Jen, her friends, and their experiences as POC on a predominately white campus are. As for the more theoretical reason, I was inspired by Nicholas Mirzoeff and Jack Halberstam’s “Decolonize Media: Tactics, Manifestos, Histories”, in which they write, “Media is such a dominant, powerful, and daunting set of representational apparatus that we cannot simply overturn them all. So we must hijack the spaces they colonize and decolonize the sites that they have infiltrated. Decolonizing is not a metaphor” (121). This quote gets at what I’m trying to do as a whole with this project, with all facets of it–the pilot, the website, the behind the scenes, all of it. To use the terminology of the manifesto, I wanted to hijack the collegiate space in the media and decolonize it actively. Of course, there’s still a lot I can learn and do within the field of decolonizing media, but with this project I simply wanted to take the focus off the white college experience for once. My choice of obscuring the white boys’ faces in the pilot is serving towards this larger purpose. It was an effort to visually decenter the straight, white, male body from the collegiate. It was a filmic risk, it is a jarring way of portraying a character and goes against the very basics of continuity filmmaking, there was (and still is) a chance that it doesn’t work, but I thought it was important to try.
Mirzoeff and Halberstam did not just inspire many of the choices and purpose of the pilot, but of the whole project. At the close of their manifesto, they write the steps that we, the reader, must take to decolonize media. Two that I drew a lot of inspiration from were: “Listen. To the colonized, to the historically underrepresented, to your own body,” and “Collaborate in your research: faculty with students, academics with the communities they serve” (123). These directives pushed me to build a majority POC cast and crew, to connect with them, to highlight not only my experience, but theirs, too. I hoped to bring this to the audience through the “Meet the Cast and Crew” page of the website, because these people I worked with gave so much and they deserve to be celebrated. As far as the choice to create a website for the project, the goal was for it to act as a somewhat decolonized environment for this project to exist within. And of course, the points “Text is not enough. Produce in many forms,” and “Be “producers not only consumers” from the outset of learning” were clear incentives during the making of this project (123).
Now that I have most of the formalities down, it’s hard to know how much I should divulge here, going forward. Do I peel back more layers of the personal, write about how often my lived reality was questioned, how, on set, my respect and authority were constantly and consistently challenged, how disappointed yet unsurprised I was, because not here, at liberal Vassar College, how I was and still am filled with self doubt, but at the same time, immense pride?
I won’t, at least not here. My thesis advisor warned me that this statement, the whole project, is beginning to feel a little me, me, me. I’ll wrap it up now.
So, I had this lived experience that was the genesis for the pilot of LAL, and then Hong sort of invigorated me in pursuing it with her essays. That’s where I started. And I felt good about it, for a while. Until I was going to start shooting, then I was filled with dread and self-doubt–like, will anybody give a shit about this? And then I was instilled with the doubt that I was not Asian enough to be the one at the center of this project. Or that I didn’t look Asian enough, that I was white passing. I had those concerns amplified by white faculty, that I might reconsider myself as the protagonist because of the way that I look. And I certainly am passing, to some people, depends who you ask, if my hair is straight or dyed or if I’m wearing my glasses. Now I was working with this doubt in my mind, saying, you are wrong. Which is maybe true. But here is where I get into that trap of explaining myself. Because, also, this was my experience. Which is what makes this an intensely vulnerable act. This project is wholly and entirely me, there is nowhere to hide, I tried earnestly, gave it my very best shot. And at this time in my life, where everyone wants to be effortless, it’s a really scary thing to admit to. But it’s the truth.
Bibliography
Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. One World, 2021.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, and Halberstam, Jack. “Decolonize Media: Tactics, Manifestos, Histories.” Cinema Journal, vol. 57, no. 4, 2018, pp. 120–123., https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2018.0054.