CROSS-CULTURAL CREATIVITY - HAYDENFILMS CELEBRATES ASIAN-AMERICAN AND PACIFIC ISLANDER MONTH

HFI veteran member Cesare Manansala reflects on how AAPI cinematic legends forever shaped both his artistic juices and cultural pride

By Cesareo Manansala

May is Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Being HFI’s sole AAPI member, I can happily recall my first experience watching a true Asian-American actor unleash utter greatness on screen.?

The film was Enter The Dragon, the now-legendary 1973 martial arts thriller starring the late Bruce Lee (1940 - 1973). I was approximately 7 to 8 years of age. My father Len, an ardent film lover whose cinematic tastes had rubbed off on me considerably, worshiped Lee as a young man himself. Enter The Dragon was playing on our TV, and he motioned me over to the living room as it played. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was this Chinese man with a muscular body built to ripped perfection, shouting shrill battle cries as he destroyed enemies left and right using his powerful prowess in Kung Fu. A great emotional occurrence happened to me the day I first saw Enter The Dragon. Like Lee, I’m of Asian-American heritage. I was born in Quezon City, a neighborhood of Manila, Philippines. Bruce Lee was Chinese, whose birthplace was in San Francisco. Despite our differing ethnicities and points of origin, I shared the cultural distinction of being Asian-American with that of the “Little Dragon.” To me, Lee was a dual idol of cultural pride and artistic inspiration. His warrior vibes were too strong for me or my vivid imagination to ignore. As a young boy, I knew I had to become a storyteller myself, and Bruce Lee lit that spark for me.

A strong sense of personal cross-cultural creativity was born.

Soon, my tastes in the cinema naturally matured beyond just martial arts films. It dawned on me that, as cool as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and their “chop-socky” luminaries are, there are other great AAPI contributors to other genres who are badly overdue for recognition. Essentially, there is more to Asian cinema than just martial arts flicks alone, which I discovered much to my own pleasant surprise.

I remember another fond youthful cinematic memory, this time with my mother Susan, also a cinephile, as we both viewed the 1961 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song. This colorful picture has the strong distinction of being the first Hollywood feature film of having a majority Asian-American cast. It involved the lives of young Asian-American immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Much like Enter The Dragon, Flower Drum Song struck a heavy resonance within me. Being from a working class AAPI immigrant family similar to the film’s protagonists, I can strongly identify with some of their social struggles. Of course, being only a pre-teen upon viewing this film for the first time, I couldn’t relate to the characters of Linda Low (Nancy Kwan) and Mei Li (Miyoshi Umeki) and their quests to find true love; I was too young to grasp the concept. But I could relate to the characters’ respective hardship in maintaining their heritage amidst being surrounded by Americans. Balancing cultural identities can be rough on some immigrants, and Linda and Mei’s social challenges hit quite close to home for me. Thankfully, though, I was at least able to appreciate the characters’ struggles as part of the integral storytelling process known as drama. The complications that ensue for our two heroes told my young self that the complex situations are necessary in order for the characters to grow and advance, thereby making the story more effective. In the case of Flower Drum Song, it was the plight of the Asian-American immigrant that helped build the art of drama within me. It wouldn’t be the last film of its kind to do so.

As the decades rolled by, I would find more effective Asian and Pacific Islander-centric films that weren’t limited to Hollywood productions. I discovered the iconic Samurai pictures of Akira Kurosawa with The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. India’s premier filmmaker Satyajit Ray had his Dickenseque stories of hardship and pain through his Apu Trilogy films. John Woo reinvigorated the action fan within me through his “Heroic Bloodshed” films The Killer and Hard-Boiled. And, from my homeland of the Philippines, I was introduced to socially-conscious Filipino auteur Lino Brocka with his 1970s masterpieces Insiang and Manila In The Claws of Light.??

As an aspiring writer myself, I will shamelessly admit that these film-viewing experiences helped build the foundation of my own personal creativity. Whether the genre involves high-octane martial arts fight scenes or intense emotional melodrama, they helped greatly in providing the inspiration I required for my own works. I urge all up-and-coming storytellers, especially fellow AAPIs, to explore the very best of Asian and Pacific Islander cinema, either Hollywood-made or abroad, which will help expand your creative horizons, as well as potentially enhance your cultural pride. I took upon such an expansion myself, and have been proud of this decision since.