The lie that compelled me to speak the truth
Essay by award-winning filmmaker and Coffee Party co-founder Eric Byler written for the 2011 San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. Eric's directing credits include 9500 Liberty (co-directed with Annabel Park), Charlotte Sometimes, TRE, and Americanese.
I first attended the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival (SFAAFF) in 1997. During the premiere of Chris Chan Lee’s Yellow, I vividly recall Angie Suh’s portrayal of a teenager coerced by her mother into a living-room piano recital. When she hit an imperfect note, Angie paused, gloomily, for the sound of her mother’s disapproval, then resumed as if this was part of the song. The audience roared with laughter, as if to say, “That is so true!”
Truth. This is the reason we become artists: to express the truth as we see it, and to allow others to experience it in a way that is illuminating and empowering. My visit to San Francisco in 1997 transformed me because it crystallized the purpose with which I create, a purpose shared by every Asian Pacific American artist I have met. We are compelled to speak the truth.
The lie, of course, is that we are not really American. It is perpetuated by misrepresentations and omissions in popular media formats that have a much greater reach than the tools we can easily afford. Despite this disadvantage, our burning desire to speak the truth has allowed us to respond with poetry, theater, performance art, visual art, books, novels, films, blogs, comics, and games. This symphony of political expression — this decades-long pursuit of truth — has shown that common cause creates more meaningful bonds and more powerful actions than common ancestry can, or should, create.
In art and in politics, it is truth that transcends. No one knows this better than an artist of color. And, in this era of political upheaval and unprecedented communications innovation, there is no excuse to hide our truths from the world. That’s why this year’s film festival is devoted to calling you out.
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When I made my first feature film, Charlotte Sometimes, I still saw art and politics as separate entities. I didn’t like it when politics crept into art. I felt that artistic efforts that focus on someone else’s work — whether to emulate or to denounce it — can never be as true as the voices we find when looking inward. Thus my artistic process subverted stereotypes by ignoring them, freeing me, and those who collaborated with me, to pursue the truth no matter where it led us. During a Q&A in 2003, a man refused to accept my assurance that I had no political agenda in making Charlotte Sometimes. The exchange dragged on, and as the audience grew anxious, I summoned these words: “The only political agenda I had in making this film was to say the time has come when our films no longer need to have a political agenda.” I got an ovation for that, but I realize now he was more right than I. In seeking to create a film that avoided politics, I had made a film that embodied it. Truth. Truth is the reason we engage in politics: to express the truth as we see it, and to allow others to experience it in a way that is illuminating and empowering. In the summer of 2006, I came across a YouTube video on Phil Yu’s indispensable blog. In it, a Senator from Virginia ridiculed an American-born South Asian man as part of a campaign speech, pointing at him and saying, “Let’s have a round of applause to welcome ‘Macaca’ to America, and the real world of Virginia.” It was the purest possible expression of the lie that compelled me to speak the truth. Days later, Annabel Park and I arrived in Virginia to begin work on a counter-narrative, one that would include multiple forms of expression in many languages. We called ourselves “Real Virginians for Webb,” and our efforts gave voice to people of all races who believed that America cannot be defined by race or skin color. America is defined by values and ideals, and we exemplified them in our message and our volunteerism. A new Senator was elected that November thanks to a wave of artful activism, including YouTube videos we created to help Virginia respond to a lie with truth. Since then, Annabel and I have been pioneers in the field of netroots activism, using video essays, interactive web documentaries, and other emerging technologies to encourage civic engagement. One of these projects became the award-winning documentary 9500 Liberty, exploring all of the above in the context of anti-immigrant electioneering. We are constantly expanding our repertoire as new innovations provide new opportunities for truth to prevail. I believe one of the gravest threats we face as a country is the ever-increasing consolidation of wealth and power into a tiny fraction of society — powerful enough to create media empires, purchase populist movements, and dominate political discourse with distracting misinformation and divisive rhetoric. There is little we can do to stop this. But a countervailing force is a convergence of new media tools and new voices enriching civic discourse. I’m speaking to young people, artists, innovators, people of color, and others who are prepared to utilize social networking and digital media to spread the truth. I’m speaking to you, not only because you are the ones who are likely to read this, but also because you are the best hope we have to preserve and protect our republic. I mean that. |
In early 2010, Annabel and I began our seventh collaboration, Coffee Party USA. Our goal is to use film, grassroots organizing, and emerging web technologies to build a diverse, trans-partisan movement that will challenge corporate interests, reduce their influence on our policies and our elections, and restore the right of self-governance to the People. We know this will be an extraordinary challenge. But we also know that We the People, galvanized by the pursuit of truth, can do extraordinary things. In our years surrounded by and supported by in the APA arts community, we’ve experienced moments of collective recognition like the one I witnessed at this film festival all those year ago — moments in which an image or a phase speaks to a truth within all of us. No one knows more about these moments, or how to create them, than artists of color. That’s why I wrote this essay to call you out.
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Read Eric Byler's most recent essay Transpartisan is not a synonym for "neutral"
Read Eric Byler's 2003 essay "Race, sex, and the Charlotte Sometimes controversy."
See Eric's May 28, 2011 speech about professional wrestling & Citizens United
