My America (...Or Honk if You Love Buddha)

When Renee Tajima-Peña's grandfather arrived in San Francisco from Japan in 1906, he was given a cold American unwelcome. He decided to leave the city just in time (it turns out) to miss the great earthquake which leveled S.F. Later, during WWII, Tajima-Peña's father entered the armed forces, while her mother entered a Japanese concentration camp ("mom was spending her teenage years behind barbed wire.") By the time the filmmaker's family moved from Chicago back to California in 1966, the times they were a'changin' indeed. Thirty year later, in this Kerouac-inspired road trip, Tajima-Peña gets her motor running, heads out on the highway, looking for contemporary Asian-America (and whatever comes her way). Interviewees include S.F. Chinatown's Beatnik-cum-actor Victor Wong (The Last Emperor among many other films; in his family, Victor, who decisively stepped out of the Chinese box, was known as "the Wong who went wrong"), the capitalist driven Mr. Choi ("Horatio Alger on amphetamines") who's bent on cornering the fortune cookie market; the Park Brothers, Korean-American rappers who rap out a number which pointedly challenges the "bigger brains, smaller genitalia" theory concerning Asian-American males; activists Bill and Yuri Kochiyama, who lost a son during the civil rights fight down South in the '60s; and a Los Angeles lesbian who protests against anti-immigration legislation (the infamous Prop. 187) and worries about coming out to her parents. My America (...or honk if you love Buddha), which won a 1997 audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, is far more entertaining than it is in any way sociologically insightful (the disparities which exist--on many levels--between the various interviewees far outweigh any racial similarities). Still, many filmmakers today set out to make personal odyssey films which end up being less filling than an episode of Ally McBeal: what Tajima-Peña's tale lacks in scholarly value, it more than makes up for in time well spent with interesting Americans, regardless of the hyphen. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)