Research log – Week 3
I watched the film My America… or Honk If You Love Buddha by director Renee Tajima-Peña. Tajima-Peña is a Japanese American woman who grew up in Chicago, before moving to San Francisco (just in time for the Summer of Love). She goes on a road trip across the US to interview different APIA groups, to try to get a feel of what their identity means to them. It was a really great movie, that provided a lot of intriguing insights on how different APIA people and groups perceive their own identities. I was hoping to get a better feel of one APIA group in the Midwest, and I’m thinking that I’ll more specifically focus on Japanese Americans in Chicago (especially if I can’t find anything closer to Indiana or a Midwestern suburban setting), due to the information that I gained from Tajima-Peña, and the fact that I have some family roots in Chicago/Illinois as well. She brings up how in the Midwest setting, her and her family had to become comfortable with feeling invisible. This was an idea I’ve been thinking about implementing into my project, and have even found an article or two that discusses this invisibility and isolation in the Midwest. I’m still trying to piece it all together at this point, especially how invisibility could fit into my narrative, when I haven’t shared that experience of invisibility or isolation on the same level as a marginalized group. I still also need to find one or two more forms of pop culture that deal with this topic. I’m still not entirely sure where I’ll end up, but I’m hoping that I can start to make sense of something more concrete by next week.