Renee Tajima-Pena, director of tonight's Hopkins Center featured documentary "My America (...or Honk if You Love Buddha)" said that rather than attempting to create a specific message with her work, she hopes that the film will encourage viewers to think critically about both sides of a controversial issue.
"I usually make a film because I am really pissed off about something," she said, adding that in the process she often ends up learning just how complex and ambiguous most issues really are.
The film, inspired in part by the peripatetic legacy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," takes Tajima-Pena on a physical and metaphoric journal around the country searching for what it means to be Asian American.
There is no overarching theme to the film; Tajima-Pena allows each of the Asian Americans to tell their own unique story. The title, taken from a bumper sticker, is indicative of the film's eclectic nature.
Another of Tajima-Pena's films, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" was nominated for an Academy Award. The documentary deals with the brutal murder of a Chinese-American by a Chrysler foreman incensed by the perceived Japanese business stealing-phenomenon in the U.S. automotive industry, which incited the first criminal civil right prosecution involving an Asian American in history.
Tajima-Pena recalled that many sources, especially the killer himself, were reticent to trust her during the making of "Vincent Chin" because of her status as an Asian American -- "as if being impartial and objective was some sort of biological, racial code."
Despite initial misgivings, however, Tajima-Pena has received wide acclaim for her multimedia acumen.
The filmmaker said she realized her calling as an investigative journalist the day she presented an oral report on the Japanese interment camps to her 6th grade class. Her teacher refused to believe the tales of horror which Tajima-Pena had gained from interviews with her mother and grandparents, and forced her to sit down, telling the class that "that could never happen in America."
"That day I really understood the danger of the truth," Tajima-Pena said.
Yet that was not an isolated incident; the filmmaker recalls that racism pervaded her youth.
After college graduation, while her fellow white Harvard classmates landed excellent jobs in the film and television industry, employers refused to look past her ethnic background.
"I couldn't even get an unpaid internship," she remembered.
Although racism continues -- Tajima-Pena recalls hearing racial slurs and general anti-Chinese sentiment being expressed on a prominent radio program after last month's spy plane incident -- she has learned to rise above the bigotry.
Indeed, she told The Dartmouth that her career in filmmaking has helped her come to terms with her own ethnic identity.
"After living my entire life thinking I was on the margin -- I was an outsider -- I realized that this was really my country," she said of the making of "My America."
According to Tajima-Pena, one of the most profound statements regarding race relations and the current status of Asian Americans in was related to her by a fellow journalist: "Where stereotypes are fixed, people are always in motion."
And although the role of the Asian American has been defined and redefined over the past several decades, Tajima-Pena said that the biggest challenge is yet to come.
"The real question for now is, as our presence and strength in numbers is growing, are we going to become new exploiters or are we going to live up to the legacy of fighting for equality and justice," she said.
