"High octane kung fu action": Examining racialization in The 2nd Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and Fantasia '98: Toronto Festival

Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 2000 by Michael Ma

The intention of 100% was, according to Koyanagi, "to write three Asian male characters" into a "light-hearted" film about young strong Asians in America. Set in Los Angeles, and following the realist conventions of Hollywood narrative comedy-drama, the film looks at the efforts of contemporary young Asians to resist stereotypes of the (exotic) Oriental. The cast is all-Asian; an attempt, perhaps, to invert ethnic Asian stereotypes, which nevertheless naturalizes the notion that "Asians" inherently desire to socialize together. The film's characters share panAsian sensibilities that bring them together as lifelong friends. In effect, none of the protagonists has friends who are not Asian; only the antagonists are non-Asian. For example, self-important art patrons are cast as East Indian, criminals are white, bad-acting agents are white, and Rastafarians are understood to possess a secret knowledge of life arising out of the purity of their blackness. Thus, a highly racialized narrative is developed where Asians associate and bond with one another in the effort to help each other, and non-Asians are depicted as inherently, and forever, outside of this integrated commonality.

Two other films shown at The 2nd Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, look Sing and How to Be More Chinese, clearly mean to ask who and what is "Chinese." look Sing uses interviews with three Canadian-born Chinese teenagers and one new Hong Kong-Chinese immigrant, while How to Be More Chinese parodies a television infomercial, pretending to sell AsiaTech, a product that will make the client "more Chinese." Despite these different approaches, both films question Asian self-identification. The first explores where the Canadian-born individual places him- or herself in relation to a larger Chinese culture and how internalized racism manifests itself when he or she negotiates the difference between his or her Canadian and Chinese selves. The second film, How to Be More Chinese, while being humorous, none the less tackles the difficult question of biology.

In this ersatz infomercial, the filmmakers set up a before-and-after sequence. The first segment introduces a racially white-European person who wants to become more "Chinese." In the second segment, the same character returns after he [she] has used AsiaTech; but the character in the second segment is represented by an actor who is racially Asian. Clearly, the audience understands that the person in the second segment is not one and the same as in the first segment. Such a change is impossible. There is a moment of ambivalence, however, where the unlikely physical transformation calls into question our unspoken understanding that race is biological and unchangeable. Asianness itself is disrupted.

Within this simulated transformation lies a further, hidden critique of racialized identity and its expression. The actor representing the transformed user of AsiaTech parodies stereotypical Asian behaviour and dress. Now there is a double troubling: is the viewer seeing an "Asian" pretending to be Asian, or an "Asian" pretending to be a "Caucasian" pretending to be Asian? Ethnicity's expression is stood on its head in this theatre of the absurd, where the filmmaker couples a viewer's natural disbelief in an impossible alchemy to his or her acceptance of assumptions as to what constitutes "typical Asian" behaviour, mannerisms and dress. The viewer is left wondering where he or she fits in. Does he or she believe that race is simply and immutably biologic, giving rise to a necessary racialization? Or does he or she believe that expressions and stereotypes of race are arbitrary, themselves giving rise to racialization? Although the mock transformation troubles notions of Asian identity, it also plays upon and reinforces the belief in the immutability of genetic racialized difference. The transformation sets out to mock stereotypes of Asian identity by showing their contingency on a social construction of difference; yet, it inadvertently remains firmly attached to the (veiled) belief that racial difference is nothing more, but also nothing less, than biological and physical difference.