Film Review: My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha

Abstract

Reviewed by: My America . . . or Honk if You Love Buddha Russell Leong My America... or Honk if You Love Buddha. Director/Producer: Renee Tajima-Peña. (1997). 87 minutes, 16 mm color. Writing about the state of Asian American filmmaking in 1991, Renee Tajima-Peña — director, film critic, and writer — commented: “Twenty years ago, Asian American cinema was borne out of a lucid and pragmatic social and political ideal. Along the way, we may have bought into the conventional wisdom, relegating our place in America to the marginalized and ghettoized, and positioning our cultural products accordingly. It may now be time to look back, in order to start looking at the state of Asian Americaness in a new way, in the new world.” 1 Where and what Tajima-Peña left off in this essay, she continues and finishes in her riveting new film, My America . . . or Honk if You Love Buddha, the award-winning, Sundance road movie/memoir, produced by Quynh Thai. Beyond the accolades it has received from film critics, the film aptly synthesizes her political and personal views of what it means to be an Asian in America in the 1990s. Note that I did not say “Asian American,” because throughout the film, Tajima-Peña attempts to both deconstruct and reconstruct that term in new, alternate ways through humor, irony, and visual and aural juxtaposition. Case in point: over a close-up of Mr. Choi’s fortune cookie machines in New York, Tajima-Peña juxtaposes a White voice-over commenting on the mental, sexual, and reproductive capabilities of Asians, in comparison to Blacks and Whites. Another telling example: the Filipina Burtanog sisters consider themselves Southerners first, and probably “Asian American” would be way down the list, after Filipino. Precise identities certainly cannot be divulged from the term [End Page 117] “Asian American” anymore. Indeed, as Ms. Yang, a Hmong resettled in Duluth, is showing us her hand-stitched quilt and pointing out the journey from Laos to the United States, we realize that Asian, America, and Asian America are processes that may or may not converge, depending on factors such as class, gender, education, nativity, and region. For Tajima-Peña, the filmmaker, armed with education, camera, crew, funding, and curiosity and intrepidness, My America converges upon the bigger questions around immigration, race and racism, and cultural identity that she has the luxury to explore through filming herself and others. Though billed as a road movie, My America, is an attempt to informally touch upon issues of nativity and immigration (native-born Tajima-Peña and new Hmong immigrants), class and consciousness (Chinese American debutantes, young Korean American rappers), activists and art (civil rights and Black power activists Yuri and Bill Kochiyama, and the actor Victor Wong) as well as to stylistically fuse elements of the Beat Generation, the Civil Rights Movement, and Asian American filmmaking through music and documentary technique. Interestingly, though Tajima-Peña is the ostensible narrative thread through the physical journey from Chicago to New Orleans, from New York City to Duluth, from Seattle to Los Angeles, she utilizes a Chinese American male — the seventy-year-old actor Victor Wong, born and raised in San Francisco Chinatown, as her “guru/trickster/historian.” Why? — because the often irreverent Wong fits the bill. His life and beliefs span the pre-World War II generation, the beat generation of Jack Kerouac and his own interracial marriages, and his acting and photojournalism career. He is unlike his Chinatown establishment father, yet, ironically, his own grandchildren resemble that same strict father. In the film, through the New Orleans Burtanog sisters, eighth-generation Louisianan Filipans, we are reminded that the Filipinos were here before other Asian groups, descendants of Manila sailors in the galleon trade. Nonetheless, Tajima-Peña’s film remains both stylistically and ideologically framed and grounded within the context of Chinese and Japanese history, especially that of the second generation. Activists Yuri and Bill Kochiyama, Victor Wong, footage of her own family in the internment camps, and Chicago and California during the 1960s and 1970s are given both a large percentage of voice and visual footage. The film itself is dedicated to Bill...