The Asian reporter., June 17, 2019, Page 13, Image 13

U.S.A.
June 17, 2019
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 13
In Asian-led Always Be My Maybe, ethnicity is secondary
ALWAYS BE MY MAYBE. This undated image
shows Randall Park and Ali Wong in a scene from the
movie Always Be My Maybe. The newly released
Netflix movie is an Asian-American rom-com with a
twist: ethnicity isn’t central to the plot. (Photo courtesy
of Netflix)
By Terry Tang
The Associated Press
T
he newly released Netflix movie
Always Be My Maybe, is an
Asian-American rom-com with a
twist: ethnicity isn’t central to the plot.
It’s just stand-up comedian and actress
Ali Wong and “Fresh Off the Boat” actor
Randall Park playing best friends and
soulmates who happen to be Asian, which
may be the most refreshing part of all.
“It wasn’t the type of thing where we sat
down and said before we wrote it, ‘OK, we
got to represent and make sure we’re
making the perfect Asian-American
movie,’” Park told The Associated Press.
“It was more like, ‘Let’s make a really
heartfelt and really funny romantic
comedy, a movie that we’d really love to
see.’”
In the flick, best friends Sasha (Wong)
and Marcus (Park), who grew up next door
to each other in San Francisco, lose touch
after a night of passion. They are reunited
15 years later when Sasha, now a celebrity
chef, temporarily moves back home to
launch a new restaurant.
Meanwhile, Marcus works for his
father’s air conditioning company while
playing in a band. Despite both of them
being in relationships and having opposite
lifestyles, it’s clear the more-than-friends
feelings are still there.
Like Crazy Rich Asians, the film
showcases an all-Asian ensemble and it’s
romantic and funny. But that’s where the
similarities end.
Wong, Park, and Michael Golamco, who
met doing theater at the University of
California, Los Angeles, in the late ’90s,
co-wrote the screenplay that has more in
common with When Harry Met Sally than
Crazy Rich Asians.
While the cast is Asian American,
there’s no prominent east-meets-west
culture clash storyline like in Crazy Rich
Asians.
Park, who plays a sweet-natured father
of three on TV’s “Fresh Off the Boat,” has
always wanted to play a romantic lead.
“I never really got afforded the chance by
the industry. So it was the type of thing
‘Well, I guess I got to write it,’” said Park,
who is Korean American.
First-time movie director Nahnatchka
Khan, who is also the creator of “Fresh Off
the Boat,” said it was thrilling to watch
him embrace playing a romantic leading
man.
“He just pulls off the emotion,” Khan
said. “I think everybody has seen him be
really funny in all of his TV and movie
work. But to have him kind of carry this
movie on his shoulders, you feel for him
and you’re rooting for him.”
Wong, who is Vietnamese and Chinese
American, is courted by two other
characters played by Keanu Reeves, who is
part Chinese and Native Hawaiian, and
Daniel Dae Kim, who is Korean American.
To see men of Asian descent playing the
rivals is significant because those roles
could have easily been cast with non-
Asian-American actors.
“What I find interesting about this
particular film is that the three main
romantic rivals ... they’re all playing
different types of Asian-American men,”
said Keith Chow, creator of online pop
culture website The Nerds of Color.
The characters are seen doing activities
commonly associated with Asians, like
eating dim sum or going to a Korean spa.
But, there are also subtler nods to Asian
culture, like people taking off their shoes
when they enter homes.
The filmmakers strived for authenticity,
like using a working dim sum restaurant
and its servers in a scene.
“It just made the experience even
better,” Park said.
Unlike previous mainstream rom-coms
that take place in San Francisco, a lot of
the bars and restaurant scenes have
plenty of Asian extras in the background.
That was something Khan was always
conscious of.
“On the monitors, I would always look at
each frame and just make sure the crowd
felt real, it felt authentic,” Khan said.
It was also integral to Park in scenes
where Marcus performs with his band
Hello Peril. After college, he performed in a
largely Asian-American band like in the
movie.
“Because of that, Asian Americans came
to our shows,” Park said. “Just by nature,
the community comes out to support and
that’s reflected in those scenes and in
reality.”
Chow said he hopes the film will
continue to normalize stories focused on
Asians so that they are not seen as “niche.”
And so Asian Americans will not feel
pressure that movies or TV shows have to
be hits so that someone else’s project can
get made.
“‘Give me the confidence of a mediocre
white man,’” said Chow, cribbing a popular
tweet from writer Sarah Hagi.
He added: “That’s the dream you don’t
have to make the greatest work of art of all
time just to get on a network.”
Park, whose TV show has been renewed
for a sixth season, thinks the window for
opportunities for Asian-led stories has
widened over the last few years.
“While I’ve been in this business, there’s
always been a belief that there wasn’t an
audience for these types of stories or these
types of stories weren’t relatable to a wider
audience. I think at this point we’ve proven
that they are,” Park said. “That’s a big
step. We still have a long way to go and
hopefully we’ll get there.”
Terry Tang is a member of The
AP’s race and ethnicity team.
Oklahoma base set for migrant site was WWII internment camp
By Adam Kealoha Causey
The Associated Press
O
KLAHOMA CITY — A U.S. Army
base in Oklahoma that the federal
government says will temporarily
house children crossing the border without
their parents was used during World War
II as a Japanese internment camp.
Historical data from the National Park
Service and private organizations show
Fort Sill was among at least 14 Army and
Department
of
Justice
facilities
nationwide where Japanese Americans
and Japanese immigrants were interred.
The Army’s War Relocation Authority held
about 120,000 Japanese and Japanese
Americans in “relocation centers” during
the war with Japan.
Tom Ikeda, executive director of Den-
sho, an organization that documents the
history of the United States’ internment of
Japanese people, referred to Fort Sill as “a
place layered in trauma.” He pointed to its
use as a boarding school for Native Ameri-
can children and as a prisoner-of-war
camp for Apache tribal members.
“Sites like this need to be permanently
closed, not recycled to inflict more harm,”
Ikeda said in a statement. “We need to stay
vigilant and we need to be showing up at
these places in protest. No one showed up
for Japanese Americans during World War
II, but we can and we must break that
pattern now.”
The Obama administration also used
Fort Sill to house unaccompanied migrant
children during a migration surge in 2014.
Ikeda’s perspective echoed calls last
year from state and federal leaders and
locals who objected to the Trump admin-
istration looking into housing immigrant
children near the site of a former
internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas.
Those plans were scrapped. The Office of
Refugee Resettlement, overseen by the
Department of Health and Human
Services, said it plans to house up to 1,400
migrant children at Fort Sill, near Lawton,
Oklahoma, about 90 miles southwest of
Oklahoma City.
An e-mailed request for comment from
the department was not returned. In a
letter dated June 12, Health and Human
Services secretary Alex Azar and acting
Homeland Security secretary Kevin
McAleenan asked congress to appropriate
$4.5 billion in emergency funding
requested to “address the immediate
humanitarian crisis at our southern
border.”
Record numbers of unaccompanied
children have been arriving at the border,
largely from Guatemala, Honduras, and El
Salvador. In May, border agents
apprehended 11,507 children travelling
alone. The Office of Refugee Resettlement
has come under fire for the death of two
children who went through the agency’s
network of shelters and is facing lawsuits
over the treatment of teens in its care. The
office has said it must set up new facilities
to accommodate new arrivals or risk
running out of beds.
Fort Sill spokesman Darrell Ames said
the post’s information indicates that
following America’s entry into World War
II, the government directed the base to
build internment camps for Japanese
Americans, but nothing in the record
reflects the camps were actually occupied
by Japanese Americans. Instead, the
camps were used by prisoners of war from
Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Officials at the Fort Sill National
Historic Landmark & Museum said they
have no information about the base’s use
as an internment or prisoner-of-war camp
because that part of its history is not part
of its mission statement.
CONFINEMENT & ETHNICITY. Fort Sill
is seen in this partial map of confinement sites in the
western U.S. associated with the incarceration of Jap-
anese Americans during World War II. (Image from
the book, Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview
of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites,
National Park Service, 1999)
Shawn Iwaoka, who works in collections
at the Japanese American National
Museum in Los Angeles, said confusion
abounds because camps were referred to
by different names, including “relocation
centers” or “detention camps,” and because
the camp at Fort Sill was much smaller
than camps such as Manzanar in
California, which housed thousands of
people. The museum’s collection includes
letters a man detained at Fort Sill wrote to
his wife at another camp in California with
a pre-preprinted label that said “internee
of war.”
“The euphemisms were rampant to kind
of soften what they really were. The
museum’s position is that they should be
called concentration camps,” Iwaoka said.
“They were going into people’s homes and
forcing them to leave their property.”
It’s unclear exactly when the camp at
Fort Sill opened, but an encyclopedia
Densho publishes shows it closed in June
1942, almost seven months after the
Japanese bombed the American fleet in
Pearl Harbor, Hawai‘i. That pushed the
U.S. into war and led the government to
open internment camps.
Densho’s records and the book
Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview
of World War II Japanese American
Relocation Sites, included on the National
Park Service website, show from 359 to
more than 700 people were interred at Fort
Sill, including three German nationals. A
guard shot a Japanese man to death while
he was distraught and trying to escape.
The Densho Encyclopedia says detainees
lived in tents and that summer tempera-
tures climbed to 100º Fahrenheit.
Associated Press writers Tim Talley in Oklahoma
City and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, contributed to this report.
Three charged with
plot to send stolen
California plants to Asia
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three South
Korean citizens have been charged with
trying to illegally export thousands of
plants poached from remote Northern
California state parks.
Prosecutors say the three, who include a
Vista nursery operator, pulled thousands
of Dudleya plants worth more than
$600,000 from coastal park areas,
intending to ship them to South Korea.
The succulents are prized in Asia but
take years to grow in nurseries.
Authorities said that last year, they
seized more than 3,700 plants that the de-
fendants allegedly planned to ship
through a commercial exporter in
Compton.
The three were charged with conspiracy
and attempting to export plants taken in
violation of state law. Each could face up to
10 years in federal prison if convicted.
One person is in custody and two are
fugitives.