It's the year 2021. Asian Americans have survived the apocalypse, but as we emerge as a community blamed for the deadly virus, are we the villains, are we the misunderstood heroes or are we the robots? To help us figure it out, we're exploring Asian American sci-fi films for our 8th season of Saturday School.

This is not a season about Hollywood sci-fi films with Asian Americans in it. For that, please listen to All The Asians On Star Trek, Marvel and Makeup, Nerds of Color -- anyone but Brian & I, who are laughably ignorant about a lot of mainstream sci-fi.

We're looking at films where Asian Americans were the auteurs, so for the most part, indie films, experimental faire. Stories that imagine alternate versions of Asian America, dare us to break out of our boxes and think of other possibilities.

We start this season talking about techno-Orientalism, how Hollywood sci-fi often portrays Asian spaces without any Asian people. Or if we exist, we are emerging superpowers to defeat. 

As a contrast to typical Hollywood sci-fi films, we begin our new season of Saturday School revisiting Greg Pak's 2003 film Robot Stories, "science fiction from the heart."

Here, robots (and Asian Americans) are not something to fear; instead, something to love. Robots are the babies we are learning to take care of, a source of healing during a tragedy, the hero of the story who just needs a friend, and a way to connect with lost loved ones, even if it's complicated.

Season 8, Ep. 1: Robot Stories

For Saturday School Season 8, we are exploring Asian American sci-fi films. In this episode we explore the genre's prehistory, diving into the robots, Buddha livestreams, and fantastic futures of video artist Nam June Paik. We took a field trip up to SFMOMA, which is presenting a massive retrospective of Paik's work, on display until October 3. 

Paik is considered the pioneer of video art, and is credited with coining the term "electronic superhighway" in 1974, basically predicting the internet. So for episode 2, we get lost in his vision of a technological future. He was all about breaking down barriers between low art and high art, bringing sexuality and shenanigans into classical music, and stitching together the real and the virtual, leading to such oddities as TV cellos, TV bras, TV glasses, TV chairs and TV gardens. As a Korean educated in Japan and Germany before coming to the U.S., he also resisted labels of nationality and proposed through his art a more utopic global vision of the future.

Season 8, Ep. 2: Nam June Paik

This week on Saturday School, we continue our season on Asian American sci-fi with the 1988 film "The Laser Man." What happens when an immigrant actor/director (Peter Wang) who's been one of the faces of burgeoning Asian American cinema in the 1980s (with the seminal indie "Chan is Missing" and "A Great Wall," the first US feature to be shot in China) just wants to make a zany, nonsensical detective parody about killer lasers? 

And he brings together Asian American actors like Marc Hayashi (also of "Chan is Missing"), some famous connections in Hong Kong cinema (Tsui Hark, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Sally Yeh) and up-and-coming American filmmakers like Ernest Dickerson and Christine Vachon)?

The result is something probably too strange and cringe-y for 1988, but arguably hilarious for 2021. Full of illogical hijinks and (we think) made-up Confucius sayings, this is another episode where we tell you about a movie you can't really watch because we want you to know that this happened. In 1988. With much more brazen confidence (to be weird) that we even get to see now in Asian America.

Season 8, Ep. 3: The Laser Man

On Ep. 4 of Saturday School Season 8 (looking at Asian American sci-fi), we're talking about Shu Lea Cheang's 1994 experimental film, Fresh Kill. Shareen (Sarita Choudhury) and Claire (Erin McMurtry) are drawn into a corporate conspiracy when their daughter eats contaminated fish, her head glows green and she disappears. The same evil conglomerate controlling the internet & TV is also making radioactive cat food that is killing cats. But a sushi chef/hacker (Abraham Lim), a poet/dishwasher (José Zúñiga) and Claire's mom (Laurie Carlos), a public access host/activist, are working with them to expose the company.

The film is written by Jessica Hagedorn, the playwright/author known for Dogeaters, and sometimes it feels like theater or spoken-word poetry. Other times it feels like someone with no attention span flipping through channels or TikTok/Instagram stories.

Fresh Kill comes out of a time in 80s/90s New York when artists, activists, poets & filmmakers were trying to blow up categories of gender, sexuality and race. It was a time when casting people of color was called non-traditional casting. 

Another queer Asian American film of that time, Ang Lee's "The Wedding Banquet," is about negotiating with your parents. Fresh Kill negotiates with no one. It's available to watch online as part of the "My Sight is Lined with Visions" retrospective until Jan. 25.

Season 8, Ep. 4: Fresh Kill

We're back to continue Season 8 of Saturday School, where we're exploring the roots of Asian American science fiction films.

This week, we're thinking about movies like "Frankenstein," "Face/Off" or "Eyes Without a Face' -- plastic-surgery-gone-wrong films. So we are revisiting Pamela Tom's 1990 short film "Two Lies." It's from the point of view of a Chinese American teenager and her younger sister. Their mom recently left their dad, and she decides to get eyelid surgery as part of her "new grip on life." She's wearing sunglasses and secluding herself in the bathroom to hide the bandages around her eyes. She's dating a white man who's passionate about "the Orient" and calls her "Lotus Bud." She even talks differently. 

Is it a scientific experiment with horrific consequences, or just a regular procedure? As common as getting braces, their mother insists!

Season 8, Ep. 5: Two Lies

Before "Shang-Chi," before "Ms. Marvel," Asian American film gave us the superhero Lumpia Man. On the latest episode of Saturday School (where this season we're exploring Asian American sci-fi), we revisit "Lumpia" (2003) and its sequel "Lumpia with a Vengeance" (2020).

"Lumpia" was shot in director Patricio Ginelsa's hometown of Daly City with his high school friends. In this comic book movie, narrated by Joy Bisco of "The Debut," the Americanized Filipinos are bullying the Filipino FOBs. But luckily, the FOBs are protected by Lumpia Man, a silent teenager whose weapon is lumpia. 

It's a charming time capsule of NorCal Fil-Am culture in the 90s, with the DJs, house parties, karaoke and K-mart. The home-made film developed enough of a cult following that Ginelsa ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel about decades later. He got the old crew back together, added some trained actors (including Danny Trejo) and built out a larger "Lumpia" cinematic universe with a new generation of characters.

Season 8, Ep. 6: Lumpia and Lumpia with a Vengeance

Throughout this season of Saturday School, we've been exploring the history of Asian American sci-fi films. So far, we've mostly focused on indie films from the 1980s to 2000s that overcame limited budgets and technologies to show what creative genre storytelling about Asian Americans could look like. 

Where was it leading? What would be possible if there was some organized funding around these stories? In 2010, the public TV and web series FutureStates, spearheaded by Karim Ahmad, commissioned filmmakers to create short films that imagined today's social issues in tomorrow's America. 

We're going to spend the next 3 episodes on FutureStates, starting with an interview with director Greg Pak, who was one of many Asian American directors who were asked to participate in the series. 

Greg Pak writes comics for both Marvel and DC - everything from the Hulk, Hercules, Darth Vader, Batman, Superman to Amadeus Cho. But because we are Saturday School, we spend all of our time talking to him about "Robot Stories" - which we started this season with! - and his FutureStates shorts. 

"Mister Green" stars Tim Kang as a government official who has failed to prevent the worst case scenarios of climate change. "Happy Fun Room" stars Cindy Cheung as a traumatized kids' show host trying (unsuccessfully) to warn the children of dangerous robot uprisings outside.

Season 8, Ep. 7: Futurestates (Part 1 with Greg Pak)

On this week’s Saturday School, we’re continuing our exploration of Asian American sci-fi with a second episode on Futurestates, a groundbreaking sci-fi short film series spearheaded by Karim Ahmad that ran from 2010 to 2014 on public television and online.

Before Black Mirror was another anthology series set in the future, Futurestates gave directors – including many notable Asian American filmmakers - opportunities to tell unique stories that imagined the future. Last week, we looked at Greg Pak’s short films, and this week, we delve into Tanuj Chopra’s shorts “Pia” and “Teacher in a Box,” and J.P. Chan’s “Digital Antiquities.”

“Pia” takes place in a futuristic San Francisco where robots are named Pia – and played by Pia Shah. “Teacher in a Box” explores a relationship between a teacher (Rebecca Hazlewood) and a student (Sarika Sanyal) who mostly converse through virtual reality but find reasons to connect in the real world. And “Digital Antiquities,” starring Jo Mei and Corey Hawkins, takes place in a future where CDs are antiquated and a man finds the only store that can help him decode the data his mom left for him after she died.  
Watching these shorts ten years later, many aspects of these stories seem uncannily similar to our current reality.

Season 8, Ep. 8: Futurestates (Part 2)

Where were we going with a Saturday School season delving into the history of Asian American sci-fi? In some ways, all episodes prior were leading up to Jennifer Phang's "Advantageous," a 2015 feature film that started as a 2012 short film in the Futurestates series. 

Often, Asian Americans and other people of color in Hollywood sci-fi represent a post-racial future. But what if in near future, these inequities are not gone but intensified? 

Jacqueline Kim (who co-wrote the feature film expansion with Phang) plays Gwen, the spokesperson of a cosmetics company that wants to replace her with someone more "universal," just as she needs the money to send her daughter Jules (Samantha Kim) to an elite school. 

Gwen, a single mother, believes this is Jules' only shot at a decent future in a world where society is collapsing. So in order to keep her job, she volunteers to be one of the first subjects for a procedure that will transfer her consciousness into a new, younger (less-Asian) body. 

"Advantageous " won an award at Sundance, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and is available to watch on Netflix.

Season 8, Ep. 9: Advantageous (Futurestates Part 3)

We’ve arrived at the last episode of Saturday School Season 8, which explored the history of Asian American sci-fi films! And we end this semester of boundary-pushing imagination with a… documentary! Pailin Wedel’s “Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice” from 2018, which is available to watch on Netflix.

“Hope Frozen” is about a Thai family who decide to have their two-year-old daughter Einz’s body cryogenically preserved in Arizona after she dies of brain cancer. Arguably an Asian American immigration story? 

While to some, it may seem like they're embarking on a fringe pseudoscience -- or alternately, that they're forcing their daughter to be a time traveler --  the film is a quiet mediation on family, love and grief. It's a scientific quest passed along from father to son (who of course is named Matrix) to accelerate, perhaps even invent, the technology to give Einz a second chance at life. She is the youngest cryopreserved patient to date.

One of the reasons this season of sci-fi has been illuminating is because Asian American cinema often values authenticity, a natural reaction from a community that has seen their images distorted in Hollywood. But with recent films like "Everything Everywhere All At Once" and "After Yang," there seems to be a hunger for Asian American stories that may seem impossible or dare to rewrite the future.  

It’s been 6 years since we started Saturday School: Sept 8, 2016 to be exact. The landscape of Asian American cinema has changed a lot since then. Thanks for listening, reading and joining us on this journey!

Season 8, Ep. 10: Hope Frozen

In this week's episode of Saturday School, we go back a little further in time: to 1993 and Ang Lee's second film, The Wedding Banquet. It's a comedy of misunderstandings that lead to a fake wedding to placate Taiwanese parents who desperately want their (closeted gay) son to get married. Brian provides important historical context about how this film influenced not only Asian American cinema, but American independent cinema and Taiwanese cinema. Ada accidentally laughs too hard at Brian's parents' concerns about his love life.

Saturday School is a podcast where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. First season will be about Asian American film comedies. 10 episodes will be released every Saturday at 8am, which is when we were forced to go to Chinese school as kids.s

Season 1, Ep. 3: The Wedding Banquet

We have a very special episode of Saturday School this week, where we have guests! We recorded LIVE at the Comedy Comedy Festival earlier this year, and we invited director Michael Kang and his daughters Klee and Ryatt to talk about 1982's action comedy They Call Me Bruce? -- which was a pivotal film for the older Kang, who first saw the film when he was 12 and said it "changed his life." Kang remembers what it meant to see the Korean American Johnny Yune performing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and talks about what it was like showing the film to his daughters, knowing they wouldn't get many of the decades-old pop culture references. 

Not-so-spoiler alert: Klee and Ryatt got bored really fast and started messing around on the side, and we thought it was quite fitting that we forced the next generation to come to Saturday School and they didn't listen or learn anything. We, on the other hand, learned about the YouTube channel Klee is planning on starting!

Saturday School is a podcast where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. First season will be about Asian American film comedies. 10 episodes will be released every Saturday at 8am, which is when we were forced to go to Chinese school as kids.

Season 1, Ep. 5: They Call Me Bruce? (with Michael Kang + Klee & Ryatt)

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we go back to 1982 and Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing, a film widely regarded as a pioneer of Asian American cinema. But for all it's critical acclaim and prestige, we look at the comedy and discuss why it's still fun to watch today. Ada wonders whether this is how her parents and their friends talked and acted as immigrants back in the 1980s. Brian brings it all back to LL Cool J.

Saturday School is a podcast where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. First season will be about Asian American film comedies. 10 episodes will be released every Saturday at 8am, which is when we were forced to go to Chinese school as kids.

Season 1, Ep. 7: Chan Is Missing

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're talking about the 1999 film Chutney Popcorn by Nisha Ganatra. It's about two sisters -- one who's devastated to learn she can't have children, and the other who contemplates being her surrogate mother. Typical comedic fare.

Brian wonders why unconventional, improvised families are such a popular theme in Asian American film. Ada thinks we're all living in an absurd comedy, even if we -- like the characters in Chutney Popcorn -- think we think we're in a stressful drama. They spend the last three minutes of the podcast thinking very deeply about popcorn.

Saturday School is a podcast where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. First season will be about Asian American film comedies. 10 episodes will be released every Saturday at 8am, which is when we were forced to go to Chinese school as kids.

Season 1, Ep. 9: Chutney Popcorn

This week, we're talking about The Namesake, a 2003 novel by Jhumpa Lahiri that was later adapted into a 2006 feature film by director Mira Nair. The trailer makes it seem like the movie is mostly about the American-born son's character (played by Kal Penn) and his romances, but watching it again 11 years later (and 11 years older), we were floored by how romantic the immigrant parents' relationship is (as played by the incomparable Irrfan Khan and Tabu). Their performances show us that sometimes the ultimate fantasy has less to do with the initial lust and passion we're used to seeing in movies, and more to do with imagining what it'd be like to navigate a new world with a partner, overcome challenges together, raise children together -- and have the love endure, decades later.

Saturday School is a podcast where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. Season 2 explores Asian American romance in film.

Season 2, Ep. 3: The Namesake

We're back! Season 3 of Saturday School will be about Asian American music movies. There weren't enough Asian American musicals to make an entire season about "musicals," but expanding it to "music movies" allows us to include concert movies, films about musicians, and stories that include music in interesting ways. 10 episodes, every Saturday starting today. We bring you Episode 1, recorded from the floor of the UC Irvine library.

Cruisin' J-Town is a 1975 documentary by Duane Kubo, one of the original founders of Visual Communications, the media arts organization that puts on the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival. The film, produced by VC, follows the Japanese American fusion band Hiroshima (saxaphonist Dan Kuramoto, koto player June Okida Kuramoto, and percussionist Johnny Mori) as they reflect on how their music is influenced by their Asian American identity and the civil rights movement of the 1960's.

Season 3, Ep. 1: Cruisin' J - Town

We have a very unique musical for Episode 2 of our 3rd season about Asian American Music Movies. It's a 2001 turntablism musical, based on an album by legendary turntablist DJ QBert. Brian reminisces about growing up in the '90s in Cerritos, where there was a prominent Filipino American DJ scene, while Ada admits she was not cool enough to know anything about the Bay Area hip hop scene, despite growing up there. (She listened to a lot of Britney Spears in the '90s.) Brian compares Wave Twisters to English virtual hip hop group the Gorillaz, while Ada compares Wave Twisters to the Julie Andrews show Julie's Greenroom, with the Jim Henson puppets. Because obviously.

Season 3, Ep. 2: Wave Twisters

This episode is a straight-up lovefest, as Ada and Brian invite Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza to talk about their first film, 2006's Colma: The Musical. This is Ada's third time interviewing them about the same movie, yet she learns so many new things. Richard and H.P. talk West Side Story homages in Colma and try their best not to bash La La Land, but can't help themselves. H.P. talks about watching Flower Drum Song and seeing Asian Americans in a musical for the first time. And Brian says that there still has not been a better American film musical made since Colma came out over a decade ago, so it must be true, cause Brian is never dramatic about these things. 

Season 3 of Saturday School is about Asian American Music Movies.

Season 3, Ep. 3: Colma: The Musical (with Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza)

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!

Season 3, Ep. 6: Kumu Hina

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.

Season 3, Ep. 7: The Heavenly Kings

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.

Season 4, Ep. 3: Bang Bang/Raskal Love

Episode 7 of our season on Troublemakers, and we're looking at the 1997 Rea Tajiri film, Strawberry Fields, which was part of the Class of 1997 "Asian American New Wave," featuring debut works of directors like Justin Lin, Quentin Lee, Eric Nakamura, Michael Aki, Chris Chan Lee, and Rea (the only woman of the group). Strawberry Fields features a firecracker performance by a young Suzy Nakamura, who folks might recognize more recently for her role as Dr. Ken's wife on the ABC sitcom. She plays Irene, a pyromaniac teenager haunted by ghosts of the past. 

Because the film takes place in the '70s, Brian talks about how he loves how Strawberry Fields subverts the 1970s counterculture road trip movie, by reminding us that the open landscapes of America that were home to these Hollywood renegades were also home to Japanese internment camps and other haunted histories. And then because it was shot in the '90s, Ada tries to convince Brian of the similarities between the Strawberry Fields characters and the characters in My So-Called Life. Shout out to all the hard-core My So-Called Life fans that also keep up with important Asian American cinema.

Season 4, Ep. 7: Strawberry Fields

This week's episode, as part of our season on Asian Americans in Asia, we revisit the 2003 documentary "Refugee," by Spencer Nakasako, which follows three Cambodian American young men as they go back to Cambodia for the first time to confront their family histories. Like most of Nakasako's films of the time, the documentary makes use of the subjects' personal video diaries and Nakasako empowers Mike Siv and his friends Paul Maes and David Mark to pick up the camera themselves and film their own stories. 

Mike Siv, who's 24 at the time, has been told his whole life that he and his mother escaped the Khmer Rouge when he was a little kid, leaving his father and brother behind. He only recently found out that his brother doesn't actually know his father, so his assumption that if he had stayed in Cambodia, that he'd have a father, is shattered. So we see what happens when see a Cambodian American, from the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin, brings his very Americanized perspective of what a father should be -- what a son deserves to have from his father -- to war-torn Cambodia. 

And we see that this is just the beginning of a journey: 12 years later, Mike Siv would make his own feature length documentary, 2016's "Daze of Justice," where he follows a group of Cambodian American women back to Cambodia so they can testify at the Khmer Rouge trials.

Season 5, Ep. 3: Refugee

After a few weeks of exploring the grittier, more traumatic side of Asian Americans in Asia, this week's episode of Saturday School is a little more light-hearted and fun. We're revisiting the 2011 documentary "Big in Bollywood," which follows Omi Vaidya (at the time, your typical working but little-known LA actor) who lands the role of a lifetime. But it's not in Hollywood, it's in Bollywood, and he's the main antagonist in the new Aamir Khan film, 2009's "3 Idiots," which would end up breaking records as the highest grossing Indian film of its time. 

Because "Big in Bollywood" is made by Omi Vaidya's American friends who know very little about Indian cinema, it has an outsider perspective and therefore is a good intro to Bollywood. We see the moment Omi's life changes: when he arrives at the red carpet premiere, no one knows who he is, and shortly after, he's being mobbed by fans. It's interesting to think about how his big break requires him to play an American idiot; in fact the filmmakers partially cast him because they thought he spoke Hindi with a laughably bad American accent. But at the same time, it's hard not to be swept up in the underdog story and the whirlwind of Bollywood stardom -- and to imagine how meaningful it'd be to achieve success in your immigrant parents' home country and to be able to share that experience with them. 

Also, Ada can't help berating Brian when she realizes he hasn't seen "3 Idiots" yet, even though she gave him the blu-ray years ago as a gift. He's watched it since the recording of this episode, so the shaming was successful.

Season 5, Ep. 5: Big In Bollywood

Thanks to film programmer, producer, YOMYOMF writer Anderson Le for being our guest on this week's episode of Saturday School.

This semester, we're exploring Asian Americans in Asia, and this week, we're talking about the 2007 film, "The Rebel," directed by Charlie Nguyen starring Johnny Nguyen and Veronica Ngo. Turns out it's much more than a fun martial arts action period film with beautiful people doing high-flying scissor kicks and acrobatic headlocks. 

Anderson tells us about how 10 years ago, a group of Vietnamese Americans from Orange County -- who cut their teeth in Little Saigon's Paris By Night scene -- went back to Vietnam, and, with the success of "The Rebel," transformed an entire film industry that had been primarily state-owned to becoming a booming privatized, commercial industry.

Out of all the various Asian Americans from different countries who have gone back to Asia to work in entertainment, Vietnamese Americans have probably been the most successful. They've been able to consistently knock out mainstream box office hits for the local Vietnamese market. 

Basically, Brian and Ada always learn so much from talking to Anderson, and we're excited that this time, he let us record it so we could share it with you!

Season 5, Ep. 8: The Rebel (with Anderson Le)

This is the 9th (and 2nd to last) episode of our 5th season of Saturday School, and those who've been there with us from the beginning can probably tell that we start to get a little senioritis-y at this point in the semester. 

So in this episode, about Shanghai Calling by Daniel Hsia, we spend about 7 minutes delivering what we promise: a comparison to A Great Wall, as we look at 2 films about Chinese Americans going back to China - one from 1986, the other from 2012 - and talk about what this says about geopolitics during the different time periods. 

And then we spend like 17 minutes straight ranting about Daniel Henney (and his hotness) as a symbol of the evolving possibilities for Asian American actors in Hollywood. Shout-out to Haikus With Hotties.

Season 5, Ep. 9: Shanghai Calling

It's our Season 5 finale of Saturday School, and in some ways, it's all been leading to the most famous Asian American of all time: Bruce Lee. In this episode, we discuss his films "The Big Boss" from 1971 and "Way of the Dragon" from 1972, as a way of highlighting the movies he made in Hong Kong that are specifically about the diaspora experience. "The Big Boss" takes place in Thailand, and "Way of the Dragon" takes place in Rome, Italy.

We talk about Bruce Lee's legendary backstory - born in the US, raised in Hong Kong before moving back to the US, and how it wasn't until he went back to Hong Kong that he became a big star internationally (and Hollywood REALLY came a-knocking). We try to examine which parts of these films we can claim as "Asian American," knowing that everyone tries to claim Bruce Lee and that most scholarship about him has been about his Chinese-ness or global Hong Kong-ness. We also talk about Chuck Norris' chest hair. So much chest hair. 

And this leads us all to the grand master plan we had for our 2018-2019 "school year" all along, which is that this season, we're talking about Asian Americans in Asia, and next semester, we'll be flipping it. Asians on Asian America, with all the stereotypes, expectations and desires that audiences and filmmakers in Asia have of Asian Americans. Will be fun!

Season 5, Ep. 10: The Big Boss and Way of the Dragon

Season 6 of Saturday School (where we explore Asian films about Asian America) kicks off with us inviting one of our favorite people to talk about one of our favorite actors. Journalist Angilee Shah thought we were joking when we asked her to join us to discuss the 2003 film "Kal Ho Naa Ho," because 15 years of friendship hasn't taught her that we don't joke around about these things. 

"Kal Ho Naa Ho" is about an Indian American family in Jackson Heights, New York who are struggling, a family friend who arrives from India on a mission to help them get their lives back on track, and a love that lasts multiple lifetimes.  

We talk about Angilee's complicated relationship with Bollywood, its history of storylines about NRI characters whose lives are made better by rediscovering India and female characters whose lives are made better by falling in love with Shah Rukh Khan. We also dissect the America-flag-filled dance number "Pretty Woman," a remix of the Roy Orbinson song, to understand the stereotypically multicultural way Indians may have viewed America in the mid-2000s.

Season 6, Ep. 1: Kal Ho Naa Ho (with Angilee Shah)

We recorded the latest episode of Saturday School a while ago, but fitting that we’re posting it when I’m actually in Taiwan! This season, we’re exploring Asian films about Asian America, and this week, we’re looking at the 1970 Taiwanese film "Home Sweet Home," which gives a glimpse into why Taiwanese people of a certain generation would have wanted to come to America (masters and doctorate degrees) and their decisions to stay in America vs. come back to Taiwan.

 

Even though neither of us were around in 1970s Taiwan, luckily this topic is something Brian has been researching for a decade. This film is mentioned in his new book, “Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” as are statistics like: In 1965, only 5% of Taiwanese people going abroad were coming back, so “Home Sweet Home” was part of a Taiwanese government propaganda push to convince its people that if they went abroad, they needed to return to help build the nation. By 1975, 25% were coming back.

 

We take the listener through a lot of the film in this episode, because it’s hard to find in the US. It's amusing to us to see the characters talking about “a Western scent” some of these Taiwanese Americans exude. It's also funny that part of being Westernized involves becoming more sexually liberated/impure – a stereotype that we still see 50 years later in this year’s Netflix series "A Taiwanese Tale of Two Cities." And we bring it all back to Ang Lee, because that’s what all Taiwanese Americans are required to do when discussing Taiwanese Americanness.

Season 6, Ep. 2: Home Sweet Home

This week's episode of Saturday School continues our Season 6 theme if exploring Asian films about Asian America, and we're looking at the 1978 Japanese film Take Me Away! (Furimukeba Ai), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi and starring both on-screen and off-screen couple Momoe Yamaguchi and Tomokazu Miura. It's a love story so sweeping that they are taken away to San Francisco, a city of love and escapism that rivals Paris in the 1970s Japanese cinematic world.

We see a distinct difference between this hopelessly romantic melodrama from Asia versus Asian American films being made during this time. (Curtis Choy's 1976 "Dupont Guy," which we covered a couple seasons ago, comes to mind as a film around the same time, set in the exact same place.) Whereas films by Asian Americans during the 70s are inherently tied up with a frustration with oppression, difficulties of assimilation and a fight for civil liberties, "Take Me Away!" is more about Japanese global cosmopolitianism, and these characters, while they have heart-wrenching secrets, are cool, comfortable and breeze through the world like only extremely good looking people can. America is a place where they can find true freedom, true love and their true selves. 

To Asian Americans with any sense of history, this definitely feels like ridiculous fantasy, but looking at it years later, it's a fun alternate reality to imagine. You get the 1970s Japanese American immigrant bad boy, who's ruling the disco clubs, and basically worth overriding any sort of practical decision-making pertaining to love because I mean, this guy... THIS GUY can sing and play the guitar. To quote Brian Hu, he might be trouble if you're thinking about the rules of what makes a better partner, but shirtlessly he's the better choice.

Season 6, Ep. 3: Take Me Away!

This week's Saturday School is about the 1987 Mabel Cheung-directed film "An Autumn's Tale," starring Chow Yun-fat and Cherie Chung. We revisit a period in the '80s after the British have made a deal to hand over Hong Kong to China in 1997, there is a fear of of losing freedoms, a wave of emigration and a curiosity about what it'd be like to be an overseas Chinese. 

"An Autumn's Tale" is about Hong Kong woman named Jennifer who follows her boyfriend to New York to study, only to learn that he's found a more "liberal minded" Chinese American woman and thinks she should broaden her horizons. Her family has arranged for her to stay with someone who's a rumored to be a stand-up guy, the leader of the community, and it turns out it's Chow Yun-fat, a rambuctious working-class drinker and gambler with a soft side. 

Many Hong Kong films set in America at this time are martial arts action movies depicting it as the wild, wild West. "An Autumn's Tale" also shows New York's Chinatown as a grimy, slightly dangerous place, but one with the possibility of romance, especially if there's a handy fellow immigrant around to help you navigate it.

Season 6, Ep. 4: An Autumn's Tale

This week's episode of Saturday School continues our semester of tear-jerking romances... just kidding, our semester on Asian films about Asian Americans, and we've progressed semi-chronologically to the 1990s in the Philippines with Lea Salonga.
 
1995's "Sana Maulit Muli" stars Lea Salonga and Aga Muhlach as a young couple who hope to start the next stage of their lives in America in pursuit of a better economic future. But she gets a visa first and is tearfully convinced by her boyfriend to go without him. He'll join her soon, he promises. And never forget how much he loves her, he says.

Does she forget? Or is it that even if she's certain of his love, love is not enough if they're stuck on separate continents, pre-Skype? And when the complications of immigration causes a relationship to reach its breaking point, can they ever go back to the way it used to be? 

In some ways, it's a universal tale about a long distance relationship and what happens when power dynamics in a relationship shift. But this is also a very specific story about Overseas Filipino Workers, the pressures to succeed in America to provide for your family, the struggles to get and retain a visa, and what happens when sacrifices you make for your partner become too soul-crushing, but "yesterday, tomorrow and today, you'll be the only one I love." This 90s classic was digitally restored and re-mastered in 2015 for its 20th anniversary, so it looks beautiful and, unlike some of the more obscure films we talk about, this one is easily accessible on iTunes or Amazon Prime. So take advantage!

Season 6, Ep. 5: Sana Maulit Muli

In this week’s Saturday School, we break our sixth season streak of epic, emotional and honorable love stories, and as we hit the turn of the century, we look at “Asian films about Asian Americans” from an entirely different, warped mirror. We’re talking about 1999’s “Gen X Cops” and 2000’s “Gen Y Cops,” which is like a who’s who of Asian American/Canadian/Australian actors who briefly ruled the Hong Kong film industry, when the powers-that-be there were thirsting for new talent and caught some ABC fever.

You got Daniel Wu, Maggie Q, Nicholas Tse, Stephen Fung, Edison Chen, Jaymee Ong, Terrence Yin -- and post-“Clueless,” pre-“Anchorman” Paul Rudd (“the dark days of Paul Rudd”) with bleached blond hair playing an FBI agent that says things like “You're the one going to the bamboo Alcatraz!”

But back to the ABCs: Their Cantonese isn’t great. Their English-language acting is only debatably better. But they’re hot, they don’t give a fuck, and that’s kind of exactly what Hong Kong needed for this new type of hero leading high-octane action flicks with explosions, evil foreign adversaries (like Paul Rudd), nonsensical plot twists AND ROBOTS.

History showed that this archetype of an Asian American too-cool-for-school sexually-liberated renegade, a la Edison Chen, wasn’t going to represent the future of the Hong Kong film industry. And probably for good reason, because Asian Americans from the other side of the ocean might have found it all a little bit embarrassing. But looking back, for a brief moment, Asian Americans were ruling the box office in Hong Kong. How did they pull it off? Did they totally improvise their own English lines because nobody behind the camera could tell them otherwise? Probably. And it was kind of glorious.

Season 6, Ep. 6: Gen X Cops and Gen Y Cops

Our final episode of Saturday School's sixth semester, where we explore Asian films about Asian America, is about the 2010 Karan Johar film "My Name Is Khan," which brings us full circle to the first episode of the season, where we explored Bollywood's earlier portrayal of Indian America in "Kal Ho Naa Ho."

Over the last decade, no one ever thinks to ask Brian and I, or our special guests Rowena Aquino and Winghei Kwok (who we worked with at Asia Pacific Arts), if we have touched Shah Rukh Khan. Which is probably a good thing cause turns out if we were asked, the story of how we touched his jacket, his backpack, over and over again when he was going through a crowd, in character, trying to tell the president of the United States impersonator "My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist" would take a very long time - and we would sound a little bit like crazy people. 

But here, we tell you our story about getting racially profiled and then escorted onto a Bollywood set at UCLA, because they needed the crowd at the rally to look like America. In Bollywood's America circa 2009, they had a need for East and Southeast Asian extras, and they found a few snooping around campus early one morning after hearing that SRK would be there. 

This is kind of our love letter to Asian American entertainment journalism and fandom. But after freaking out and giggling through half the episode, we also think about "My Name Is Khan" and how it intersected with Asian American film history. 

This film, that tackles Islamophobia in America head-on, could never have been made in the U.S. Definitely not by a Hollywood studio, and independent Asian America, especially at the time, didn't have the resources or SRK-Kajol-level star power to dream about attempting something of this scope.

But at the same time, Asian Americans would probably be more likely to cringe at the idea of taking topic like post-9/11 Islamophobia, combining it with a story with a man with Asperger's, putting him on a search to find President George W. Bush after a 9/11 hate crime creates a chasm between lovers, dropping him midst of Hurricane Katrina (of course), and having it all end with the unwavering belief that love conquers all.

It's been a blast covering Asian films about Asian America this season. It's a reminder that it's not just Asian Americans or even Americans that tell stories about us. The motherland still thinks of us, and while their filmmakers might sometimes make distorted versions of our realities, setting their stories abroad also sometimes allows them to tackle local issues in a way that might be hard for them to address in a film set at home.

Season 6, Ep. 10: My Name Is Khan (with Rowena Aquino and Winghei Kwok)

Welcome back to Saturday School! This is our 7th season, and this semester, we'll be exploring Asian American interracial cinema. When we signed off last season, coronavirus had just taken hold and the nation had erupted with protests for George Floyd,  Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter. 

As racial tensions escalated, it had many Asian Americans grappling with questions like: What is our place in this? How can we help? How are we complicit? What can we do moving forward? And for us, thinking about our podcast, are there ways that Asian American film can cross racial lines to show that Asian Americans don't exist in racial silos and need to confront interracial issues? 

As with most things, if we go back into the vault, we realize that there is a long history of Asian American interracial cinema, including some films in the spirit of social activism and solidarity.

This semester, we start with Christine Choy. She's most known for co-directing the seminal documentary "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" Before that, she co-directed the 1984 documentary "Mississippi Triangle," which looks at the intersections between the white, Black and Chinese communities in the Mississippi Delta from the late 1800s to the 1980s. 

The directorial team consisted of a Chinese American woman (Choy), a Black man (Worth Long) and a white man (Allan Siegel), and they all interview their own communities (brilliant), so there is some eyebrow-raising truth-telling going on. Some of it feels dated, while other parts feel uncomfortably current. But by deeming Asian Americans as part of the triangle, Choy carves out space for us to have our own voice and agency, and not just be a wedge group that's silenced or pitted against other groups. 

10 films, 10 weeks. Join us in our exploration.

Season 7, Ep. 1: Mississippi Triangle

Wake up! Saturday School is a podcast where Brian Hu (@husbrian) and Ada Tseng (@adatseng) teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. New episodes released Saturdays at 8am, when all your friends are still in bed watching cartoons. It'll be a blast from the past, as they dig up some of their favorite works they've come across covering Asian American arts & entertainment over the years -- and discover other gems for the first time. Saturday School is a proud founding member of Potluck, a collective of podcasts featuring unique stories and voices from the Asian American community. Sign up for our newsletter below for lecture notes!

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