CVK
(Thanks to Phil C for this tip!) Jeff Yang just wrote a great Asian Pop column for SFGate.com titled “The Man Show.” He shares his ruminations on Asian American identity, love, sex, and masculinity, interspersed with quotes from his interview with Eric Byler (pictured) about his new film Americanese. It’s definitely worth reading in its entirety but as always, excerpts are below. There’s lots of interesting stuff about Eric’s experiences as a Hapa (first not being white enough in Virginia, and then moving to Hawaii at age 12 and feeling insecure about not being Asian enough) but I thought the most interesting parts of the column were about defining Asian American masculinity:

Raymond represents Byler’s benchmark for masculinity — one defined by his adolescence in majority-Asian Hawaii. “In Hawaii, Asian culture isn’t under assault, it’s the standard,” he says. “So I never thought that an Asian brand of masculinity was insufficient. A lot of the men I looked up to growing up were Japanese and Chinese Americans. It’s actually been a big part of my journey, my quest as an artist and a person — to be acknowledged as an Asian American man.”…

There’s a certain subset of my Asian American brothers whose outlook on life can only be called bitter. The thing they’re bitter about is quite simple: According to them, white men are “stealing” all the Asian women, and “sellout” Asian women prefer dating white guys instead of, say, them. This area of discussion is as treacherous a cultural minefield as exists in the Asian American community, and “Americanese” does not hesitate to lob hand grenades into that minefield…

That bitter little pill is somewhere within every Asian guy, suggests Byler. It’s the product of our society’s false expectations of manhood, of media stereotypes reinforced by repetition, of all the real disappointments and rejections and petty acts of racism that accrue to us in our journeys through life. The difference is in the way we deal. Some of us spit. Some of us seethe. Some of us absorb and digest.

By the way, congratulations are in order as Americanese just cleaned up at the SXSW Film Conference and Festival, winning the narrative audience award and a special jury prize for outstanding ensemble cast. Nice job, Eric! I for one can’t wait to watch it. Here’s the official site for Americanese.