Saturday School Podcast

This is our last episode of the second season, and we're ending it with a real life epic romance, told in the 2014 documentary Limited Partnership. It's the story of a Filipino American named Richard Adams; an Australian without a green card named Tony Sullivan; and their four-decade-long fight to stay together in America, despite the US government not recognizing their legal 1975 marriage as a "b...

"Falling in love at 18 is magic. Falling in love at 65 is a miracle." This week, we're talking about 1988's The Wash, starring Mako, Nobu McCarthy and Sab Shimono. It's the most excited Brian and Ada have ever been about discovering one of the greatest Asian American romance films ever made, and they had to go to college library basements to find it. Mako and Nobu play a recently-separated married...

On this week's Saturday School, Brian admits that Mississippi Masala contains two types of storylines that he usually hates in Asian American film, but in this case, he's 100% on board. Related, Ada and Brian forget this is supposed to be an Asian American pop culture history podcast and probably spend too much time talking about Denzel Washington. So if listeners want to skip "class" this week an...

This week, we go way back in history, almost 100 years ago to 1919 and a silent film called The Dragon Painter, starring Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki. Hayakawa was a star rivaling Charlie Chaplin in the Silent Era, and after being tired of the villainous Japanese roles that were written for him in Hollywood, he created his own production company to make his own movies. The Dragon Painte...

You may know Steven Okazaki as an Academy Award-winning documentarian who's made very serious films about Japanese atomic bomb survivors (White Light/Black Rain, The Mushroom Club) or the Japanese American internment camps during WWII (Unfinished Business, Days of Waiting). But in the late 1970s, he was also part of a San Francisco punk-rock music group called The Maids, and in 1987, he made a wac...

On this week's episode, we have a special guest: musician Goh Nakamura joins us to talk about the films Surrogate Valentine and its sequel Daylight Savings, directed by Dave Boyle. In both movies, Goh plays a version of himself as he travels around the country on a music tour. Several women enter his life, including Lynn Chen playing his high school crush, Ayako Fujitani as an ex-girlfriend, and J...

This week's episode is about Bertha Bay-Sa Pan's Almost Perfect from 2011, a romantic comedy starring Kelly Hu and Ivan Shaw. We've talked about how uncommon it is to have a fully-fleshed-out love story between two Asian American characters in film -- and how it's even rarer it is for those couples to actually have chemistry past a few simple meet-cute moments, only because so many elements have t...

This week, we're talking about The Namesake, a 2003 novel by Jhumpa Lahiri that was later adapted into a 2006 feature film by director Mira Nair. The trailer makes it seem like the movie is mostly about the American-born son's character (played by Kal Penn) and his romances, but watching it again 11 years later (and 11 years older), we were floored by how romantic the immigrant parents' relationsh...

In Episode 2 of our season of love, we revisit the 1998 documentary Kelly Loves Tony by Spencer Nakasako. Kelly and Tony, whose families are lu Mien refugees from Laos, live in Oakland, CA, and they've just graduated from high school. She's a good girl (straight A student), he's a bad boy (he used to be in a gang), they're in love, and they have a baby on the way. Kelly Loves Tony was made through...

Welcome back to Saturday School, the podcast where Brian Hu and Ada Tseng teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history! This season is all about "Asian Americans in Love," as we explore memorable Asian American onscreen romances in film that paved the way for the Jessica+Louises, Dev+Rachels and Glenn+Maggies of today. We begin with the Samuel Fuller film, The Crimson Kim...

It's the last episode of the first season of our Saturday School podcast, aka the last "class" of our "semester" on Asian American comedy. We end with the 1998 film Shopping for Fangs, directed by Justin Lin and Quentin Lee, starring an ensemble cast including John Cho, Radmar Agana Jao, Jeanne Chinn, Lela Lee, and Clint Jung. Brian finds comedy in the way the first-time directors play with genres...

The one where class is canceled, Ada pretends it's because we all need a break for self-care, and Brian has been listening to too much "Yo, Is This Racist?" See you next week! Saturday School is a podcast where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. First season will be about Asian American film comedies. 10 episodes will be released every Saturday at 8am, which...

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're talking about the 1999 film Chutney Popcorn by Nisha Ganatra. It's about two sisters -- one who's devastated to learn she can't have children, and the other who contemplates being her surrogate mother. Typical comedic fare. Brian wonders why unconventional, improvised families are such a popular theme in Asian American film. Ada thinks we're all li...

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're talking about the 1999 film Catfish in Black Bean Sauce, a cross-cultural comedy written/directed/starring Chi Muoi Lo about a family of Vietnamese refugee kids adopted by African American parents. Brian really appreciates the film 17 years later as a rare Vietnamese American comedy film in the midst of moving dramas about tragedy -- but understand...

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we go back to 1982 and Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing, a film widely regarded as a pioneer of Asian American cinema. But for all it's critical acclaim and prestige, we look at the comedy and discuss why it's still fun to watch today. Ada wonders whether this is how her parents and their friends talked and acted as immigrants back in the 1980s. Brian brings...

This week, we're talking about 2009's Fruit Fly, a comedy musical by H.P. Mendoza starring L.A. Renigan as Maribel, a performance artist living in San Francisco, making new friends and finding her way. Brian learns that H.P. Mendoza comedies can make you laugh one minute and want to drink your sorrows away the next. Ada looks back nostalgically on her gay clubbing days and appreciates that no one...

We have a very special episode of Saturday School this week, where we have guests! We recorded LIVE at the Comedy Comedy Festival earlier this year, and we invited director Michael Kang and his daughters Klee and Ryatt to talk about 1982's action comedy They Call Me Bruce? -- which was a pivotal film for the older Kang, who first saw the film when he was 12 and said it "changed his life." Kang rem...

Episode 4 of Saturday School is about a special film called Loins of Punjab Presents, a mockumentary about a Bollywood Idol singing competition in New Jersey. Ada learns that Brian likes any film with the word "loins" in it. (You're welcome, aspiring filmmakers submitting to the San Diego Asian Film Festival, for the free advice.) Brian throws his full support behind the gay bhangra singer who goe...

In this week's episode of Saturday School, we go back a little further in time: to 1993 and Ang Lee's second film, The Wedding Banquet. It's a comedy of misunderstandings that lead to a fake wedding to placate Taiwanese parents who desperately want their (closeted gay) son to get married. Brian provides important historical context about how this film influenced not only Asian American cinema, but...

Get ready for Episode 2! You better have done your homework, which was to watch Jessica Yu's Ping Pong Playa from 2007, starring Jimmy Tsai. This week, Ada learns that Ping Pong Playa is about more than the comedy of grown men wearing short shorts, but also the humor of Asian American men who overcompensate in attempts to prove their masculinity in a society that often desexualizes them. Brian lea...

This is the official launch of our new podcast Saturday School, where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. First season will be about Asian American film comedies, and starting today, 10 episodes will be released every Saturday at 8am, which is when we were forced to go to Chinese school as kids. There are so many cultural classics worth bringing out of the va...