A Journey Into Asian America

I went looking for it the other day, but I couldn’t find it amid the piles that pass for my files. No matter. I remember it pretty well: a 1993 Time magazine cover story. It computer-morphed the faces of 14 American men and women of varying ethnic and racial characteristics through several generations of virtual intermarriage until everyone--Nordic to Negroid--arrived at one caffe latte human Look.

At the time, a year or so after the riots, the story cheered me, its juggernaut genetics accomplishing what psychology can’t: overcoming our differences by eliminating them. To hate the Look would one day entail hating looking in the mirror. It was the pigment promise of the Gregor Mendel charts we crafted in biology class, fruit flies and sweet peas and people, dominant and recessive, brown eyes beat blue, the paper/scissors/rock game of genes.

But the thought left me downcast. Is the Unihuman the only way we can abide one another? Already we approach a tepid cultural homogeneity, speaking in the same anchorman accents, eating the same fast food, reading the same bestsellers. Are we truly not man enough--species enough--to handle our differences?

Even if the Look became the Norm, what if we are fated by genetic imperative ever to suss out our differences and trump them? Yuppies/trailer trash; dark-skinned blacks/light; Japanese/Koreans. Paper/scissors/rock.

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The burden for ethnic artists is that audiences desperate for the operating rules of race may seize on any work, any remark, as a magic bullet: Oh, that’s how you want us to think. As a documentary filmmaker--Oscar nomination, Sundance, all that--Renee Tajima-Pena knows the exasperation. Here she’s made this witty, picaresque road picture documentary, “My America . . . or Honk If You Love Buddha,” and some people want it to be the Rosetta Stone for Asian America. Sometimes she feels constrained to insist, “I’m not hitting people over the head with ‘THIS IS RACE IN AMERICA--Y’ALL BETTER SHAPE UP!’ ”

Her grandfather was a Japanese man who left San Francisco for L.A. one day before the 1906 quake because some yobs chased him down the street shouting “Chink!” Years later, his granddaughter played out this they-all-look-alike notion in her dense, nuanced documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (Chin was a Chinese American student beaten to death in Detroit by two jobless auto workers who believed him to be Japanese.)

So here’s “My America,” with more trenchant wit than a weeknight at a comedy club. She’s bold enough to do what I never could: She starts her search within her own family, goofy home movies and all. (“We do take a lot of pictures. You go to a family dinner and there are three people taking pictures of the guacamole.”) She made the film to ask others questions she grew up asking herself: What do Asians come here for: the red, white and blue of liberty and all that or the freedom to make as much long green as you can?

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Until they can find a house on the eastside, they still live in her husband’s place in West L.A., another layered kulturtorte neighborhood of Japanese nurseries and paleta vendors, almost as poly-everything as the Altadena neighborhood where she spent her teenage years picketing things, including the Community Redevelopment Agency, which her husband, Armando Pena, now works for. The Tajimas barbecued, PTA’d, vacationed in a Ford Fairlane like everyone else, but of course they were not. (“So, where are you from?” “Chicago.” “No, I mean, where were you born?” “Chicago.”) Renee was radicalized the day a teacher said her class project about her family’s years in a World War II internment camp was fantasizing, that such things did not happen in America.

Years later, arguing with a fellow filmmaker over internment-camp films, she remembers declaring with some dudgeon: “Well, it’s my history.” The white male American answered, logically: “It’s my history, too.” Freeze-frame, open-mouthed moment. Once, the PC canon demanded that women, minorities, gays have nothing to do with the other canon of dead white European males, but “my search for Asian America led me back to people like Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, the idea of equality . . . it is about America and we are Americans.”

Not to give anything away, but by the end of her film journey, Tajima-Pena has decided that the question is “not how people become real Americans, but how America has become its people.”

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Renee Tajima-Pena has that same issue of time magazine squirreled away in a back room. She recalled it when she married a Latino, then boomeranged to the thought that “I’m diluting 2,000 years of ethnic blood. Then I think: ‘Nah. I’ve been to Asia. We have no problem.’ ”

The next century’s angst may be about something else--class, most likely. Maybe race will become a cultural phenom. She fretted that the film’s jokes were too Asian American, too West Coast, but “the culture has changed so much, everybody got the jokes.” Paper/scissors/punchline--a start.