Movie recommendation: The Grace Lee Project
It can be easy to think that Asian Americans don't experience racism. After all, they have lower poverty rates, higher rates of education, and higher average household income than other racial or ethnic minorities. They're successful, ergo they don't experience prejudice, right?
Wrong.
As long as there have been Asian Americans, there has been racism and discrimination against them. They are often thought of as a so-called 'model minority,' but that's a damaging phrase in many ways. First, it perpetuates a myth that they are universally successful at achieving the American Dream. But statistics don't really bear that out. And this myth glosses over ethnic differences and promotes an idea that all Asians are the same. Second, that's a hell of a lot of pressure to place on real individual human beings! Many folks, including South Asians, find it stifling and impossible to live up to.
Filmmaker Grace Lee addresses these two issues in her highly entertaining and very thought-provoking documentary, The Grace Lee Project. It's a political film, but not in an overbearing, bash-you-over-the-head-with-a-message, Michael Moore kind of way. What Lee does is explore the ideas of sameness and stereotypes by ruminating on the strangely high incidence of the name Grace Lee among Asian Americans, seeking out those who share her name, and making sense of their stories in the context of US culture and of her own experience.
Warning! Spoilers after the fold
Lee shows us the lives of many Grace Lees, including...
- a young artist attending high school in Cupertino, CA
- a broadcast news reporter in Hawaii
- a future missionary at a young Christian leaders camp
- an anti-racist activist, working mostly with African Americans, in Detroit
- a lesbian rights activist in Korea who eventually chooses to return to the closet to avoid shaming her family
- a pastor's wife who gives an earnest pro-virginity sex talk to her youth group
From the stories told by the various Graces, we learn that the two most common origins of their name are movie star/real-life princess Grace Kelly and the religious notion of grace (specifically the Christian one). Without ever uttering the word "imperialism" or any other overtly radical terminology, Lee asks good questions about why Chinese and Korean folks would name their daughters after a blonde starlet or a Christian concept.
Lee also shows how the stereotypes of Asian girls play out in the lives of the Graces. Everyone describes them as nice, polite, quiet, intelligent, high-achieving... and few people who've known a Grace Lee are in contact with her now. "How can she be so outstanding, yet so forgettable?" asks Lee. She goes to look for atypical Graces and finds one who set her high school on fire. Guess why? Because she couldn't take the constant pressure to be perfect. Some Graces do succeed in decisively breaking the mold; my two favorites were powerful and beloved community activist Grace Lee Boggs and a less well-known Grace Lee who risked her own life to help a dear friend and her children escape an abusive relationship. But even the Grace Lees who fit the mold on the surface rail against the stereotype and remind us that they're all different in their own ways.
Fundamentally what I like about this film is that it interrogates damaging stereotypes and social/cultural practices in the context of individual lives, so we see what they cost. I think that's the way change starts - when we see how something negatively impacts the lives of people we care about (even if it's only for the hour and a half that we're sitting in the theater), we start to ask questions about that something. And we can only do that when people are willing to go public So kudos to all the Grace Lees for sharing their stories, and to Grace Lee the filmmaker for producing a funny, thoughtful, compelling movie.