In Juli Kang’s musical, two artists find love by belting it out
By Kai Ma
Photograph by Eric Sueyoshi
It’s an undeniable fact. Koreans love to sing.
Which is why the best karaoke bars are nestled in Koreatown. Why Korean Christians can spend hours, if not days, praising the Lord. And why, among various social circles in South Korea, singing is simply the only way to introduce oneself.
Filmmaker Juli Kang is familiar with the Korean predisposition to belting it out. “I moved to Korea during college,” she says, “and every group I met was like, ‘Introduce yourself through a song!’ And I was in this group in L.A. that would just get together to sing. And at church, too, we’d sing. Singing is just a part of who I am, and a part of Korean culture.”
Kang is the director of Damn the Past!, a campy 29-minute musical about self-acceptance and the pursuit of happiness.
“The message is that you don’t have to be like everybody else to have good things happen, or to be able to fall in love,” says Kang, 37. “I wanted people to feel hopeful. To know that they’re perfect just the way they are.”
The Korean characters, played by a pan-Asian cast, include Mario Lee (Jun Hee Lee), a pseudo-mute grease monkey who can only express himself through song, and Gloria Kim (Annie Katsura Rollins), who as a dancer on the brink of insanity, is the literal, contemporary version of a “maniac on the floor.” Gloria’s mother, a character inspired by the melodramatic, fainting matriarchs of Korean soap operas, is somewhat of a villain, pressuring her daughter to forgo shaking her booty and tie the knot instead.
Sure, they sound like a bunch of kooks, but both Mario and Gloria epitomize more than the creative and socially stigmatized. They represent anyone who wishes to pursue one’s dreams, despite the obstacles. Despite being different.
In short, Mario and Gloria represent us.
And indeed, they — along with every other character — illustrate various parts of the director’s psyche.
“Language barriers and immigrant life have much to do with not being able to express ourselves,” says Kang, who emigrated from South Korea with her family in 1974. “I was so shy because my first language was Korean. But, it’s difficult for anybody to be expressive, or to be brave enough to do so. That’s universal. I relate to each character — even the mom because I get crazy, too!”
But the mute songbird Mario was really inspired by Kang’s father, a man who could only fully express himself through song. “He’s shy,” says Kang. “Being an immigrant makes it harder to come out of your shell.” With friends, Kang’s parents would croon Korean folk songs on a family karaoke set — even crying mid-verse because they missed the home they left.
“It moved me because usually, my dad was not talkative,” recalls Kang. “But in song, he was able to express the depth of his emotion.”
Kang’s parents — whose first date in Korea was watching The Sound of Music — always had the voices of Julie Andrews and Gene Kelly blasting on the tube. “Musicals were on all the time,” says Kang, who now lives in West Hollywood. “The entire family was into it.”
Schooled at Wesleyan and UCLA, Kang, whose favorite musical is Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), a 1964 French film directed by Jacques Demy, also works at the Sundance Institute. She’s produced a documentary about youth in Philadelphia, and is the director of narrative films, Princess Fever and The Liberation of Everyday Life. Completed in 2007, Damn the Past! has been screened at several festivals and received the UCLA Directors Spotlight and Student Awards for Excellence in Visual Design and Originality.
With a composer, Kang drew from the catchy tunes of Pavement, the Kinks and Outkast to produce the songs. It was a good opportunity for Kang to flex her melodic muscles. Since 16, she’s played guitar and written her own songs. The former deejay also jams with her brother in an indie rock band, but uses the word “band” loosely. “I’ve played out three times in my entire life,” she says. “But it’s always super-fun.”
The cast of 20 singer-dancer actors was filmed in several pockets of Los Angeles, including Altadena, the location of Mario’s employer, the Miracle Auto Repair Shop. When the real owner of the shop informed Kang that he charged $10,000 for the space to be shot, she told him that the scene involved dancing girls.
“And he was like, ‘Dancing girls? Are they cute? OK!’ So, he gave us a huge discount,” Kang says.
Drawing from her own life, the film confronts several aspects of the immigrant and Korean American experience. First off, there’s the intense pressure to wed: “It’s so emphasized in our culture that once you hit a certain age, you have to be married.” Then, there’s the expectation to land the Ivy League: “Korean parents are obsessed with their kids being Harvard graduates and rich doctors. Guilt holds us back when we can’t deliver what they want.” And interestingly enough, by creating a ‘50s-inspired American backdrop — with an Asian version of Danny Zuko, to boot — Kang pays homage to her South Korean roots: “In the ‘50s, Korea started modernizing and it was also a time of war. My parents were young, and started thinking about coming to America. It was an idealistic time … when everything was possible.”
Embracing possibilities is a mantra that the musical pounds over the head. Which the director admits isn’t always the easiest thing to do. “I was a history major,” she says. “I’m definitely the type of person who dwells on the past. So, this is a message to myself too: Get over it, move on and be hopeful about the future.”
Rich with color, choreography and two young artists who zoom through town on a scooter, Kang’s jazzy musical tackles the quest for love: love for oneself, love for family and, yes, love for the crazy, hot heroine who does a mean pirouette. And during these recessionary times, don’t we all need to take flight from reality — through a 29-minute love song, at least?
“Musicals offer a good way to escape,” Kang says. “They’re so emotional, colorful, fantastical. It’s like a dreamworld, and that’s why I make movies anyway: to make my dreams come true.”
Exploring the complex relationship between Korean mothers- and daughters-in-law
By Shingyung Oh
Illustration by Kyungduk Kim
About a month after my brother got married, I saw a side of my mother I had never seen before.
It started when my brother and his new wife visited our house after their honeymoon. While they were there, everything seemed fine. We hung out, had dinner with the requisite fruit and coffee afterwards, watched a little TV. Then my brother and his wife left with bags full of leftovers and other dishes my mother made especially for the newlyweds.
But after they left, the grumbling started. Why did she sit on the couch all evening? Why didn’t she do the dishes? Why am I serving her? Why can’t she get her own cream and sugar? Who does she think she is, a guest? Is she going to keep coming over expecting to be served?
Whoa. What happened to my usually reasonable and generous mother?
As I recall the evening, Mom gave no indication that she wanted my sister-in-law (let’s call her Ann) to help. If anything, Ann barely had a chance to pitch in since my sister and I, our mother’s lifelong sous-chefs, flanked my mother pretty much the entire time. Ann did seem to hover a bit initially, as if she wanted to help, but my guess is that she wasn’t sure how to do so and wasn’t very comfortable in the kitchen in the first place. The three Oh women did nothing to draw her into our cooking circle. If anything, we bumped and shooed her out of our way.
I listened to my mom complain and then asked her why she didn’t ask Ann to help. She responded, “I shouldn’t have to ask.”
Hmm. That didn’t sound very reasonable to me. I explained to my mother that asking Ann to help would be more merciful than waiting for her to figure out how to inject herself into the chaos of our kitchen. And perhaps Ann and my mom had different notions of what was expected of a daughter-in-law, especially since we now live in the United States.
Ever so hesitantly, Mom asked, “Really, you think I should say something?” I reassured her that she should.
Unfortunately, their next visit was more or less the same. My mother did try to ask Ann to help out here and there. While Ann complied, she whisked herself away immediately after chopping her one carrot, showing that she really wasn’t into the spirit of the occasion. After a couple of tries, Mom gave up and stopped asking. Again this time, the couple left our house with bags full of leftovers.
When the complaining started, I interrupted and said, “Mom, if you want her to help, you should just take charge and direct!”
She responded, “But she’s not my daughter. I can’t tell her what to do. Besides, how am I supposed to do my part if she doesn’t do hers?”
And then I understood. My mother, with her big heart, wanted to be a generous mother and mother-in-law. She went out of her way to prepare multiple dishes for my brother and his new wife, not just for this one meal, but for several meals to come. In the framework of the traditional Korean hierarchy, where mothers are relegated to the role of a household cook, my mom wanted it to be clear — for all to see — that she wasn’t doing it because she had to, but because she wanted to.
And she needed Ann’s help to do that. She wanted Ann to make clear that she understood that my mother was not serving her. How helpful Ann was in the kitchen was beside the point. It was a matter of signaling an acceptance of my mother’s social status, which in turn allowed my mom the space to be generous. As my mother saw it, Ann was failing to do her part in this delicate dance, the one dance my mother believed was theirs to assume.
For the next few years, I watched my mother struggle with her part, veering between trying tentatively to live up to the role of the dominant Korean mother-in-law she often saw played out on Korean dramas and then reverting to her role of playing the magnanimous mother-in-law, only to rebuke herself for being overly generous whenever she felt slighted. She often called to solicit my input on how she should handle this or that situation as she struggled to interpret her social role in our American context. She often ended our calls by resolving, “I’m going to try to be a better mother-in-law from now on.”
I began to see just how short the end of the stick is for Korean women of my mom’s generation. How suppressed their social power must be that it finds its clearest expression in the kitchen, that the trivialities of preparing a meal can dictate the course of their lifelong relationships with other women. I am reminded of the stories I read of the many wives of Fundamentalist Mormons who fight over the pecking order in using the laundry machine.
Whenever I hear complaints about mean Korean mothers-in-law, I feel a little pained. I know how extreme some Korean mothers can be because I’ve met quite a few of those (like my high school friend’s mom who demanded to know our SAT scores and grades every time we visited), but I would hate for our moms to be buried under yet another stereotype. I wish I could help Korean mothers- and daughters-in-law understand the social and cultural context of what the other is trying to communicate, what often isn’t reduced to words. I want to explain why identifying cultural differences on a superficial level isn’t the same as understanding the depth and power of such beliefs and values.
After all, who knows when it will be my turn to take up this dance, and I’ll be looking for someone to help me find my rhythm to this evolving beat.
Shinyung Oh is an attorney and writer based in San Francisco. visit her blog at www.shinyungoh.blogspot.com.
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Featured Event
One of the the biggest Asian cinema events to hit Southern California opens on May 10. The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, presented by Visual Communications, features the latest works by established and emerging filmmakers, along with seminars, panel discussions and symposiums on topics relevant to Asian Pacific cinema.
Opening Night features “Shanghai Calling,” directed by Daniel Hsia and starring Korean American Daniel Henney, who plays a Chinese American expat lawyer navigating his way through the mean streets of Shanghai (the picture above also indicates he is a raisin smuggler). But does he take off his shirt? Go watch the movie to find out! read more
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