A Postcolonial Reading of the "Asian Presence" in North American Films

Abstract

During the mid 1980s I taught writing for a year at a university in central China. Since then I have had a strong personal interest in reading literature and viewing films set in China and in the Chinese-Canadian and Chinese-American communities of North America. During my time in China I also visited Tibet and have studied many books and films about Tibet as well. My obsession with literature and movies about Asian cultures might have remained a private passion, but in 1987 in the province of Ontario, where I taught high school English, a new curriculum document mandated the teaching of multicultural literature. I was thrilled at the opportunity to introduce my students to the works of Joy Kogawa, Yukio Mishima, Amy Tan, Nien Cheng, and a multitude of other fine writers who had not previously been included in high school literature classes (Greenlaw, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, 1998a, 1998b, 2000). But my first challenge was to find ways to help the students visualize the settings of the stories which these writers told. Thus I began to consider how films could help my students to develop their understanding of the places and people they were studying. But for every wonderful film such as The Joy Luck Club, with its rich depiction of the lives of two generations of Chinese-American women, there were dozens of films which contained eurocentric misrepresentations of the many cultural communities of Asian countries and their diasporas.