Anita Chang

Anita Chang is an artist who works with various media forms, including film, digital video, photography, installation and the web. She was born to parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan in the 1960’s, fleeing a dictatorship. She grew up in Akron, Ohio and Massachusetts. Chang received her BA in American Studies and English at Tufts University, an MFA in Cinema at San Francisco State University and her doctorate in Film and Digital Media from University of California at Santa Cruz. She has worked as a community activist, an urban youth counselor, civil rights investigator, and education director for a non-profit San Francisco-based media literacy organization. Chang has taught film and media studies at universities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, in Taiwan and Nepal. She is currently an assistant professor in the Dept. of Communication at California State University, East Bay.

http://anitachangworks.com/

CL: So the film 62 Years was very personal, in the same way that your film Mommy What’s Wrong? was also very personal, since they’re both about your family. Was it difficult to put something that personal and vulnerable out for the world to see?

AC: For Mommy What’s Wrong?, that was part of the San Francisco State MFA Program, and the assignment was to make a movie that defies all the conventions of first year production, so it was all about experimentation. I wanted to do something that was personal, that would confront my mother's depression growing up. It was a kind of art therapy for me at that time. And I thought, what would it mean to use film or filmmaking as a way of healing? I was looking through all this super 8 footage, and all the images are really happy, of our family during vacation. And I was like, “this isn’t the way I remember growing up.” So I took these images of my mother and just tried to investigate, like, what was she thinking at that moment? We were all so clueless, but she was going through so much. And with the interview I had with her, the things she told me were things I never knew.

It wasn’t a work that I thought I would show, it was just for me. I didn’t have an audience in mind, it was for my family, for us to watch together. My dad saw it with my mother and he was shocked. He said, “I didn’t know any of this about you.” It was almost as though this film allowed this group therapy to happen. I think this kind of silence is a deep conditioning that happens in a lot of Asian and Asian American families. In an interview some years ago, I had mentioned that silence is very valued in many Asian cultures, but in American culture if you’re silent then in some ways you self-marginalize yourself, because this is a culture of the loudest person gets heard. And so I think my mom felt her perspective was valued, and that my father was able to hear her. I was so surprised that the film was so popular and relatable.

CL: It was definitely relatable. It really speaks to a lot of people in the Asian community.

AC: When you work with family in a movie, there’s a little bit of permissible “exploitation” that happens, in that you as the filmmaker are also implicated in the family dynamics. With 62 Years, I actually almost gave up because I, in part, didn’t want to upset my family members because everyone was saying different things about my grandmother. They had their own imagination and desires about my grandmother's life. And I felt like I needed to do her some service. I think making a movie about family is actually, in a lot of ways, harder. And the way I measure the success of a family subject movie is when no one wants to kill you, and no one wants to, you know, stop being your relative.

CL: Do you feel that Asian American women have a complex relationship with feminism?

AC: When you say Asian American women, I think when we say Asian American, we also have to be just really cautious how we use that term. Like does this include Pacific Islanders as well as Middle Eastern women or South Asian women, right? But I do, yeah. I mean, I would say that there is a complex relationship with feminism because of these intersectional identities, and we can't pull them apart and look at them in isolated ways. For example, my mother, who escaped Taiwan because of possible persecution. And then, you know, she was the first generation to go to college. And then she also didn't marry till very late, so she was kind of compelled and forced to marry in some way. And you hear in the film Mommy What’s Wrong?, she says the best thing that ever happened in her life was this job that she got. It wasn't me and my brother! (laughs)

So it is very complicated. And that's why I think one woman's idea of feminism doesn't have to be someone else's idea. There are all different kinds of feminisms that we can embrace.

My mom’s side of the family thinks they’re Pingpu indigenous. There’s all these kinds of cultural practices that exist in her family. They’re matriarchal, they value all the girls and don’t put the boys above the girls. My dad’s side is the opposite. His dad is Hakka, and they are patriarchal. So they have huge clashes. So these differences exist, even within families, in Asian cultures. There's so much unspoken about one's identity in Taiwan because of the more than 350 years history of colonialism.

CL: So you touched on your filmmaking process, but do you have anything else to say about what you consider to be the most important component of your works?

AC: I think the most important component would be the relationships that I build and cultivate with the people that are in my films. And my collaborators. And then also how those relationships, like my mother and I, change as a result of a movie. That’s in terms of making, but I love editing; that’s one of my favorite parts. For me, it's putting the script together that’s the longest, and then usually it takes me two weeks to edit. Once you have a really good script, and you know where all your material is, you have everything down to the seconds.