Season 5, Ep. 1: A Great Wall

Saturday School - our podcast where we force your unwilling children to learn Asian American pop culture history - is back for Season 5, and this semester, we are exploring films that involve Asian Americans in Asia. We start with a 1957 episode of a TV documentary show called "Bold Journey," where the legendary Chinese American silent film star Anna May Wong shares footage she took when she visited China in the 1930s, and we talk about how Asian Americans are often called upon to explain Asia to American audiences - and sometimes we're excellent cultural translators, while other times, we're quite clueless ourselves. Then we revisit 1986's "A Great Wall," directed by Peter Wang. (Not to be confused with the 2016 Zhang Yimou monster film "The Great Wall," starring Matt Damon.) "A Great Wall" is reportedly the first American film shot in China, and it's about a middle-aged Chinese American man from San Francisco visiting Beijing for the first time since he left at age 10. There's both confusion and intrigue as his Chinese American family meets his older sister's Chinese family. Some see the overseas Chinese as a threat, while others see them as Western saviors, and it's all wrapped up in a warm-hearted cross-cultural comedy.