Across a Different Table: Strange and Familiar Encounters in Asian American Cinema

The 2008 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival presented three narrative films, Never Forever, Pretty to Think So, and West 32nd, with suggestively similar interests. Namely, all three films focus on “horizontal” (rather than intergenerational) conflicts between characters distinguished by class, legal status, and migration history but connected by ethnic or racial identifications. This article argues that the films, individually and collectively, participate in ongoing deliberations about the borders of Asian America by juxtaposing and organizing distinct models of conceiving Asian American identity. In particular, the films suggest the limitations of privileging certain formations of Asian America over others by both dramatizing and embodying their uneasy coexistence. Tensions between minority, immigrant, and diasporic positions become evident not only through their plots, characterizations, and stylistic elements but also in their complex production and distribution histories. The films together highlight the necessity of attending to the difficult questions of ethnic and racial identification and material inequity that are manifest when the various narratives of affiliation and difference espoused by each model encounter one another.