By Glenn Dunks
Some facts will be long remembered.
Others won't be much remembered.
And then will be forgotten.
These are words spoken at the end of Rithy Panh’s stark 2011 documentary Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell. Not a happy film by any stretch, but these words at least partially explain why we need documentaries about the traumas of the past and why we should watch them.
I thought of this quote when I sat down to write about the new five-part PBS documentary series Asian Americans. Every five-minute stretch of this remarkable series comes with a story or anecdote or remembrance that could be lost to the greater history. It all but stunned me. Every episode ought to be a veritable blueprint to smart Hollywood producers and entrepreneurial independent film financiers.
Episode one begins unexpectedly—the first of many such surprising revelations—with the 1904 World’s Fair with Antero Cabera, an Igorot man from the Philippines who American forces brought back following the Philippine-American War (okay, not so unexpected) and put on anthropological display to show off as a sign of white superiority. The series evolves then through the Chinese immigrants who came in search of gold and wound up working on the cross-country railway, landmark citizenship and voting court cases, the struggle for education, the Japanese ‘nisei generation’ through World War II and internments, the careers of actors Philip Ahn and Anna May Wong, politics in Hawaii, the Vietnam and Korean wars, and on through to the L.A. riots, September 11, and advances in technology and social justice made by recent generations of more recent times.
The direction-production team of Grace Lee and Renee Tajima-Peña (whose Oscar nominated Who Killed Vincent Chen? from 1987 is lost to the digital age despite being its own important story and one that features in episode five) have made an enviable collage of over 100 years of Asian-American history, some segments of which it is only natural get short-changed by the narrative. Nonetheless, as narrated by Daniel Dae Kim and Tamlyn Tomita and made in the same reserved form as Ken Burns’ own PBS series, Asian Americans wisely finds many ways to weave the many strands of the Asian diaspora into its five-hour runtime.
Airing through Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, it’s only appropriate. I would have gladly watched five more hours and dug even deeper into some of the thornier and more peculiar ways Asian people and culture have become entwined with that of the United States’. If nobody is trying to make a film or miniseries out of episode two’s Uno family saga (one brother in a family of eight moved to Japan and began a war propagandist while the others fought on the side of the Americans) then that is just unacceptable. And while the Ryan Murphy-produced Hollywood series on Netflix may be giving Anna Mae Wong a revisionist Oscar (Louise Rainer took the part in The Big Earth, winning her second Oscar while in yellow-face as Wong was denied the role), that her life and career hasn’t been given the big screen treatment is a crying shame.
The series pairs well, too, with Yi Chen’s First Vote, which had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Asia Pacific Film Festival in March. The hour-long documentary finds a fascinating shard in the contemporary political landscape for Asian Americans in battleground states of the 2018 midterm elections. As many find their allegiances towards President Trump and in particular his stance against ‘illegal’ immigration as well as his business success, others see the contemporary conservative fascism of he and his Republican colleagues as a continued reflection of the country’s open and violent racism they too have experienced.
Yi follows Chinese American politicians swept up in the alt-right movement, educators and activists on the other side, all while grappling with the concept of a new citizen having a say in American politics for the first time. It's an interesting navigation that needed the extended runtime of a full feature—First Vote is only an hour long—to really dig into the beliefs of its subjects and explore the ways that conservative politics is seen as a means of fitting in as a minority in Middle America.
Emmy chances: I would like to think Asian Americans has a chance in the documentary series category, but it's probably getting harder and harder for these less flashy titles to get cited without a name like Ken Burns attached.
Release: Asian Americans is currently streaming on PBS. First Vote will hopefully find its way to more virtual festivals and streaming through 2020/21.