 This is Think Tech Hawaii, and we're going to talk to Crystal. Crystal Kwak, who has been a tremendous host on Think Tech. This is about a movie that she made. It's a very important discussion in our time. The Chinese experience is different in different places across the country. And it's certainly different in a Black neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia. And it's different when you talk to different generations. Crystal's grandmother grew up in Georgia. Crystal grew up on the West Coast. She became a celebrity in Hong Kong, met her husband there, and spent some quality time with their kids in Hong Kong. And then they came to Hawaii. After a stint as a very popular, if not provocatively popular, Think Tech host, she took a graduate degree at UH Shumanoa, just finished a doctorate in performance studies, and asked her what that is. She joins us today to tell us about a film she's made, a documentary, Blurring the Color Line, which is to be shown later in May, May 25th, on America Reframed, the World Channel. In that film, we learn about life in Augusta, her grandmother's grocery store there. We hear about the connection between the grocery store and the surrounding Black community in Augusta. We find out why Crystal made this film, the lessons and messages that she hopes to share with us about it. Maybe we'll also find out what her next film might be. Welcome to the show, Crystal. It's so wonderful to have you here. It's been a long hiatus, and now we're here again. So I'm so excited. You weren't kidding. You went to UH Shumanoa to take a doctorate, and you took a doctorate. Why not? Why not? When you got nothing to do in Hawaii, just go and get a doctorate. And you did it. I mean, I think in record time, too, it was generally a few years ago. Six years. That was not record time. That's way more painful than having three babies. So tell me, tell me, what was it like at UH Shumanoa? How was performance studies? How did that go? What is it? I'm going to put it in a nutshell. Performance studies is basically kind of like cultural studies, but it's like using theatrical terms like the roles we play and performance language to talk about how things become, how things become. Look at the politics, how the staging of the political riots at the Capitol is very performative. So I think you would get it in that term. Performance studies is really kind of a study of how things come to be. And so I used that lens to do my film. My film was part of my dissertation, and I kind of interrogate how a documentary performs. There are a lot of politics of framing, right, Jay? Even like right here, like what's cut out? What do we keep in? So it's really kind of examining the politics of how we choose to select what's kept in and what's not. So historically, there's a lot of stuff that's not in what we think we know based on history. So my film, speaking to my film about my grandmother growing up in the south in Augusta, Georgia during Jim Crow, is that was not recorded in history. So nobody thinks, oh, what, they were Asians in the south back then? So I had to dig into a lot of information to really kind of unveil these secrets and why they were kind of silenced. Why were there no histories about us back then? You know, we've been in the States for many, many years, and it's very kind of reductive our history. So that's part of my process in doing this film. A couple of thoughts about that. Number one is performances are everywhere. I always thought lawyers, for example, would go to court and perform in front of a jury or a judge. They'd better get their act together, literally act. Another thing I want to tell you about performance about lawyers is there's the front, right? There's the outside, the lens that you want people to see, that mask. Then you've got stuff behind that you don't show people, but what you're really thinking, right? So there's a lot of performance in every career. Especially politics these days. How did your grandmother get from China to Augusta? It was actually her mother. So it was my great-grandmother who went from China and then they went to, you know, the whole immigration flood to San Francisco in the early 1900s. So it was in about the 20s. That's when they were in San Francisco, but they actually uprooted from San Francisco to Georgia because at that time there were opportunities, you know, after slavery, the plantation life kind of died out. And, you know, white people didn't want to do business with black people, to be honest. And so they had this niche market. The Chinese, of course, being opportunists go, oh, okay, I'll go, you know, I don't mind. So they opened up stores right in the smack in the middle of the black neighborhoods, and many of them came. You know, they brought their uncles and aunts and sisters and brothers and everyone. So there was a very robust Chinese community in this small town of Augusta. Before the masters was famous, Augusta had a lot of Chinese we didn't know about, you know, and they had grocery stores like on every block. These were not Chinese grocery stores in terms of the food, right? Right. To that point, my great grandmother, of course, being kind of business minded also bought Chinese products in when they ordered their food. So like soy sauce and rice and all that, she would do a side business and sell that to the Chinese community who were already. So in the film, which is opening May 25th, I can hardly wait to see it. Gee, it has a lot of awards to it, Crystal. Don't be too modest about this award winning film. You covered this, you cover it. Did you go there? Did you go there with your camera at a microphone? Oh, yeah, this took me five years to make this film. I went there several times over the last few years. And then, of course, COVID hit. And so the last two years of my production, I had to find creative ways to put it together. And thus, when you see the film, there are a lot of animated sequences. So I used animation to kind of draw the past to life and to kind of fill in the visuals because nobody wants to see a bunch of talking heads the whole time, right? As much as think tech is wonderful to talk like this for historical purposes. It's really nice to be able to flesh out things that we didn't have. We don't have enough archival photos. So how do we bring to life? And I'm really interested in intimate histories. Let me just distinguish that, Jay, because a lot of times history, a lot of old historical documentaries tend to be from top down. It's all those dry, boring photos with that kind of boring narrative. I don't do that. You know my style, I don't do that. I rather find out about their secret dates and how they kind of snuck out and defied their family structures. But through those stories, I really strongly believe that those tell a deeper history. They reveal a much more interesting history that we don't learn in history books, right? Let's take a look at some of the photos that you have. Very important image. And it was not my family. It was a community member. But this established the relationship between the Chinese and Black community. A lot of times the Chinese storekeeper would hire Black Aaron boys or, you know, they would help out at the store. But just think of, look at the framing, talking about politics of framing. The Black boys were sitting in the back, right? And the storekeepers were in front. I think it's very performative. It's very revealing of the relationship at the time. Let's see another one. I'm not sure. I don't have any archival photos because it was very limited. We saw that one already. That's my grandmother on the left and her oldest sister on the right. Again, that was just really the time. It was kind of so special, right? Give us a year on that, Crystal. Probably late 30s because she ran away in 1939. What a story. She was probably about 16 there. Yeah. But they were so dressed. So this is my Aunt Lorraine who was one of the youngest and surviving sisters of the Lum family. And I had visited her to ask her the stories about her life, dating and sneaking out and understanding the hierarchy of that time. And she was so, oh my God, when you hear her voice, you'll be like, what is this crazy Southern accents from these Chinese looking people? What's that all about? They spoke Cantonese. So from Hong Kong, they learned their parents made them speak Chinese, but that was Cantonese. Yes. So they had to learn how to write and read Chinese. Yeah, on the side, that was part of their self-isolating life. So there was one grocery store left in the whole neighborhood and I went to visit it. And this was one of the regular customers there. And I had a nice conversation with him. It was kind of funny. I brought my uncle in at that time and he spoke to him and goes, oh, do you remember so-and-so? Yeah, I remember him. So there was this really interesting, enduring relationship between the storekeepers and their customers back in the days. They really had a relationship. As much as they self-isolated, I think that there was some genuine kind of, I wouldn't go so far to say friendships because I don't think it was really equal. There was a power dynamics, right? The Chinese were still the storekeepers. And I think the Black neighbors recognized that. They know. They needed each other, but still, there was a little bit of a power play. The tension a little bit, because that, you know, speaking to today's tensions, it goes back to that. Why did the Asians kind of slip into this place that was white adjacent, like I said, and they were never considered Black? And how did that play out to create these tensions between the two communities? But the tension between the Blacks and the Chinese would not nearly as great as the tension between the Whites and the Black. And I guess the question is, how much tension was there between the Chinese and the White? Yeah, well, that's a subtle one, right? Because in my family, they were allowed to go to white schools. So they live in the Black neighborhood. They would travel outside to go to white schools and they come back and live in the Black neighborhood, which says it all, that they were accepted, but they were not completely accepted, right? And there's a scene that's very troubling in the film where I interviewed these white churchgoers and I asked them how they felt about the Chinese living and growing up in, you know, in this kind of obscure space. And she would say, oh, we just love them, you know, they're just wonderful. And we still love them today. And, you know, by saying that, they're basically saying, oh, yeah, we're great, not like who? The others. So they utter the Black community, right? You don't realize when they say that, they're actually saying, yeah, oh, yeah, the Chinese were okay. We take them in, but we don't take Black people in. Great question. Are these Chinese families still there? Yes. No, they're quite a few. Yeah, somewhere. A lot of them moved to San Francisco to move back out there where they married out, but there is still, you know, a handful of them who are still there. Yeah, it's quite interesting. So when you went back, you actually interviewed people with a camera and the movie has these clips of interviews you made with, oh, I have to see it. I have to see it. Oh, no, lots of precious material that is not archived from before. And it also, it complicates the narrative. We know the history as a very Black and white narrative. We always think of the Black and white tensions, but we don't think about, you know, through, and it's on America reframed on the world channel, which I think America reframed says it all. We're reframing. I'm trying to reframe things. How do we look at things from an Asian American perspective into this whole kind of racial history that our country is built off, right? You know, there are a lot of subtle problematic placements of people because of this white power that created the central power, and we all had to play our roles in it. Reframed is such an interesting term. What do you take that to mean in this context, America reframed? I think it means to disrupt dominant narratives, is to bring voice to stories that aren't normally heard. So why are they untold? Why are they silenced in history? I'm a big, you know, me, I'm like a big feminist speaker. So I reframe my lens based on a woman's perspective. So I gave more privilege to like the women's stories. I intentionally did that, right? Because they're historically been silenced. Nobody cares to ask these old ladies what their life was like when they were young. But they loved to talk about their past. And what does that reveal about the past through their stories, through their oral histories, right? So I think it's fascinating to reframe history through the Chinese American lens. And through your lens. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's through my lens. Actually, it is. A big part of it is my journey. It's not so much an outsider's view. It's me not growing up in the South, but trying to understand these racial tensions. What an education I must have been for you. I mean, it's not only that you knew something was out there that could be needed to be reframed, that there was, you know, a dynamic over color in this, in this aspect of the South. But you went there and touched it. You felt it. You asked about it. You must have learned a lot. What did you learn? Okay, well, I don't want to spoil the film, but I do have to say so spoiler alert for anybody who wants to like watch it all surprising. But in my process, the biggest surprise was the fact that I have black cousins. You met them. I went to Mississippi to find them because nobody talked about them with me growing up. Nobody mentioned this one aunt of mine who married a black man from Mississippi. And again, you know how it is with Asians, they like put everything under the rug. Anything that they think is like shameful. You don't talk about it. So it really, like I had to dig deep. And I found them and there I have these wonderful cousins that I now keep in touch with. And my daughter managed to see her and meet her and her kids. And so they're all part of the film. So I look forward to everyone having a chance to see this unfold. What about we should take a look at the trailer now? Yes, we can. That would be great. Should we do that now? Yep. Okay. Ask your quick question. In the segregated South, buses were separated, black people in the back, white in the front. Where do you think the Asians sat? My grandma, Pearl, she moved with her family to Augusta, Georgia in 1927, where they ran a grocery store in the black neighborhood. What did it mean to grow up Chinese in a black and white space? Now when I was growing up with expression, we had the Chinese grocery store in every corner. You know, the laws at that time were so limited, but not applying to the Chinese. Segregation was nothing more than a pseudo way of carrying on slavery. How did they end up in the black neighborhood? They are still people of color. It can only go so high. And at school, there are mostly white kids? Did you feel, did you feel like that? No meaning at all. The Chinese, you know, there's some of them that they don't want nothing to do with the blacks, but they get, they want their money, you know. They played the blacks against the Chinese like the Chinese were a little better than the blacks, and the whites were a little better than the Chinese. That's the way it went. Black people in Augusta are tired of being told that there is no racial problem here. Now the nation knows that Augusta has a problem. The whole city was burned. They target the Chinese stores and the white business. Well, you know, during the riot, those that got burned down are the ones that didn't treat the blacks good. How are we going to move forward if we don't address the past? Yeah, blurringthecutaline.com. I was going to ask you, it's funny that we should come together on this. I was going to ask you whether you were making a political statement in this film. Race is a big political issue. Race in the south is a big political issue. But you told me during the break there were race riots in what, Augusta? Yes, it was a huge one in 1970. I don't like politics, right, Jay? And I didn't want to go there. I really didn't. But as I was making this film, it went from personal to political as things do. Because of course, Black Lives Matter happens during the process of my making of the film. And so it kind of, I felt compelled to address this. Like, how does my story about the Chinese in the segregated south speak to these tensions we have today? And shortly after the Black Lives Matter movement, we had the anti-Asian hate violence, all within this very similar time when I was trying to weave the film together. And so they were all relevant because I'm dealing with Black history. I'm dealing with Asian American immigrant history. I'm dealing with anti-Blackness and also the tensions between the two communities. And so it had to be political in a sense because if we look at history, we really kind of get a deeper look at, wow, maybe a little bit of this tension has to do with our past and how we played our roles towards this white power and why so many Black people feel like Asian people don't like them or why we have these fears that we have these perpetuating narratives, right? Asians are very racist ourselves. I want to first to say that. And we have these uncomfortable narratives that really perpetuate that anti-Black racism, which was bothering me. And I needed to address that. It's like, why do Asians look down on Black people, right? And how does that affect the anti-Asian violence? It's just like, there's so many things. And the violence wasn't by the Black community. It was by the white community also, but media turns it into something that's Afro-Asian. And speaking to the riots, it's a really crucial moment that really had a showdown because the Chinese stores were all throughout the Black neighborhood. So when they had this huge riot and they came in and like the LA riots and all the other big ones, they went and destroyed all the stores, right? In LA, it was the Korean stores, but in Augusta, Chinese, same thing. They tried to destroy all of them. But I found two families where they had such honest and wonderful relationships with their Black neighbors that the Black writers did not touch their stores. So they went around it. So it shows, relationships matter. What you do, what goes around comes around, if you're going to treat your neighbor like an enemy, they're going to come back to you, right? If you treat them like a human being, they're going to respect you back. And I feel like we have these issues today. We keep creating these kind of like anti-anything to keep our own safe space. And it's very problematic because we don't care to learn each other's histories. We just keep to ourselves and perpetuate those narratives. So I felt like a bigger part of my film had to address anti-Blackness, especially from the Asian side, because I saw it in my family. I saw these kind of derogatory ways of looking at the Black community, and I needed to address that. And so I think it's an important conversation today. And also there are wonderful relationships between the two communities. So it's nuanced, right? It's complicated. It's not one thing or the other. So we need to kind of look at all the different little elements that kind of bring this complexities to life. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is a new way of looking at it or an element that we really haven't heard in the media. And I don't know if there's any literature on it. You know, you are breaking ground here, actually, Crystal. Yeah, a breaking barrier. I really do feel that it was so hard to do my research when I was doing my dissertation because there hasn't been much written up about it. There are a few, you know, a handful of things, but people don't think about resituating the lens again. You know, we're so consumed with the larger structures that tell us how to think about things, that we need to look outside of it. Yeah, about community. I'm going to use this one term, Jay, if I may, cross-pollinating. I think it's a really important term because, you know, in the live, especially in Hawaii, we are all cross-pollinating, right? We're all a mixture of different things. We're not just like pure Chinese, pure Hawaiian, pure white. There's this mix, but we thrive with that mix. We're entangled in this messiness that really creates wonderful human beings, and we should embrace that. This is really important, I tell you. I was just going to say that poster, that tiny little girl there. She was in Augusta when I went to screen a couple of months ago. And Deanna Brown, who was James Brown's daughter, she was a panelist with me to discuss the past because James Brown was an errand boy at one of the Chinese grocery stores. And she met that lady, Dorothy, little Dorothy, and she was like emotionally entrenched because it connected her father to her by seeing this lady, Dorothy, who had that store where James Brown had helped do groceries back in the days. I mean, talk about connected histories. It's really quite wonderful to see the connections. When you think of a community, a neighborhood, the grocery store is kind of the center. It's where people meet each other, where they transact their transactions that are critically important to their life at home. And so it becomes a meeting place, a gathering place. I'm so glad you said that because I want to end with that. Going back to the performance studies that you asked me in the beginning is I feel like the grocery store was a Jim Crow stage. If we're going to use theatrical terms, it was a stage the foundation was white supremacy. But the actors in my film were black and Chinese. They have the voices. They are the main characters in my play. And it's the entanglement of their encounters. They're both wonderful and tense encounters, but mostly wonderful back then. They really had, they didn't have issues like they do now, not like those kinds of violences. So a lot of them had really wonderful stories to share. And I hope you all have a chance to watch it when it comes out on PBS platforms, including YouTube, it's going to be streaming on the American Reframe series on the World Channel starting May 25th. So I think it's national. And so hopefully everybody will get a chance to watch it. It's going to be streaming for free for about a month. And then, yeah, we'll see if we get any good feedback. Well, I'd like to put in the poster and some publicity on ThinkTech about it and the thought that people here in Hawaii would love to know about this, would want to know about this. I think racial history is really important to talk about, Jay. And it applies to Hawaii too. But think about the colonial history we have here, the race relations and tensions here. It's all kind of relevant to think about how we come together and talk power struggles and hierarchies in these spaces. Yeah, diversity is a big problem, but it's a strongest strength. I love that. Contaminated diversity. That's what I learned in school. I love that term. So this must motivate you. You've been truly successful in this movie. And I just wonder if you have thoughts about the next one based on, you know, something in your life or something in the community. Well, you're going to love this, Jay, because one of the inspirations of my next project had to do with a show that I did on your show years ago is on the Honolulu prostitution. Remember that one? That's one of our most popular shows of all time, by the way. Maybe we should show it again because we don't know about that era. And of course, I'm going to take my female lens into that world and think about what it was like, you know, in that era to be in the brothel industry when it was regulated and legalized, right? It was a great show. It really was and still is. It has an enormous number of views to it. And it's a great idea to do more of it. So I'm looking forward to that. And I'm delighted with all the things you've done and are doing. Well, thank you for the space, Jay. Really appreciate it. And I always enjoy talking to you. So we'll do more crystal clock filmmaker doctor. I'm going to call her doctor crystal clock from now on. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.