What I found endlessly fascinating about MAUS was Spiegelman’s reflexive storytelling structure. This did not merely extend to a reflexivity of the act of authoring the comic, but reflexive of the act of digging into the past, the act of remembering, but most importantly, the act of subjectively interpreting the past within the context of the present—which is essentially what history is. Spiegelman could have chosen to represent his father’s story strictly from a detached, third-person perspective, but that would have spared it of the utter complexity afforded by the meta-structure of his father non-chronological dropping into and out of the past, which is representative of the workings of memory, as well as his complete inability to deal with his relationship to his father in the present, much less the past. This issue of documenting on film my family history through my grandma’s story—she is my only surviving grandparent who also helped raise me—has been a harrowing task that I have been involved in for the past 6 years. Naturally, my document would take the form of a documentary film and I think I would have to go about it through the clouded lens of my own inability to understand. In that sense, I think the resulting film would speak to my own act of digging, as well as drift between past and present—with the present constantly moving through my experience in China and towards my grandmother’s impending death.
Since 2005, I have been documenting my grandmother on video. It started out as a filmed interview assignment for a documentary film production course I was taking at UCLA. In the resulting 5-minute video piece, what started out as a didactic episode where my grandma broke down the radical components of the Chinese character for “restraint” or “yielding”—the character is comprised of the character “knife tip” over the character for “heart”—to teach me that the act of exercising restraint was like pressing a knife tip into your heart quickly escalated to an bout of emotionality triggered by a phone call from my mother about how I need to be more compassionate towards my own mother. By “teaching” me the composition of the Chinese character—arguably the foundation of ancient Chinese culture which revolves around the written word—my grandma touched upon traditional Chinese concepts of how “to comport oneself as a human in relation to others.” This represented the past, and then a phone call brought her from macro concept of ancient Chinese history to the micro-sphere of the relationship between my grandmother, my mother, and I. Her emotional outburst said a lot about the meaning of family to a little old Chinese lady and for me, spoke about how older values are at risk of defaulting within modern-day relationships or when these relationships occur across cultures.
Years later, when I started filming my grandmother again, on a return visit to California—I had been living for the past 3 years in Beijing, China—I dug up old outtakes of that first video project with my grandmother. In one instance, she had actually prepared notes for telling me about her past. She sat there giving me her rendition of an “official history” of her life, and my voice behind the camera was painfully impatient. In another scene, I decide to try and teach my grandma English since it was her lifelong gripe that I had never had the patience to teach her. Looking back on the video footage, I was horrified at my sharpness, my impatience, my worldliness and my inability to listen or to understand.
The year I viewed those outtakes, I came back to Cupertino, CA with the express purpose of entering my grandma’s world, slowing myself down to her pace of living. I spent two months in her studio apartment at the Sunny View Retirement Home and I slowed my pace to match hers. This effort resulted in a feature-length film about my grandma’s losing control over her hoarded clothing collection and also my grandmother, mother and my slowly coming to terms with Grandma’s aging process. Later, I completed a third film project on my grandmother, a short black comedy documentary about my grandma’s misadventures with her three elegant, middle-aged overseas Chinese daughters trying to buy grandma’s burial shroud in mainland China. Still, these projects received criticism because of my leaving out of my grandmother’s biographical background—her experience during the Japanese Occupation of China and her experience fleeing to Taiwan on the Eve of the Communist Liberation of China. And so I struggled deeply, trying to find a way to understand her history—but I had language barriers—I couldn’t understand the Chinese that was used to describe these historical events and historical locations—and I hadn’t done the requisite historical research.
Once I knew I was planning to leave China, I took a month-long trip with my video camera to China’s Hunan Province, the place of my grandma’s birth, to meet her surviving relatives—her nieces and nephews—and spent all my time documenting the prideful way in which they wanted to represent our family history from before my grandma left China through the terrible experiences of the family under the hands of the Communists—and some of which came as a direct result of my grandma’s status. I got some historical information, but mostly was overwhelmed with how they wanted to represent our family to me in my status as an American-born relative. Since returning to California, my grandma has been ill with kidney failure. My aunt from Taiwan has come recently to try and forcefully place my grandmother on dialysis and now there are issues that I am filming about what grandma’s true will is—and the complexity and cultural propriety of asking an elderly Chinese woman whether or not she wants the choice to live or die—all of which I am faithfully documenting. These are all asides, all digressions from an ever-elusive, detached, third-person perspective of my family history, so I think that inevitably the film that I will make one day about my family history will bear much in common with Spiegelman’s efforts in MAUS. It will involve this search, the fundamental inadequacy of a person of a latter generation to enter into the life experience of one who went before and the complexity of the present acting on one’s interpretation of the past.
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