Imaginary Worlds - Growing Up Avatar-American

Episode Date: February 8, 2017

Sam Kaden Lai takes the wheel of this episode of Imaginary Worlds to tell the story of how Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel series on Nickelodeon, The Legend of Korra, redefined the Asian-American experience for him and his friends -- even though there is no America in either series. With Mamatha Challa, Emily Tetri, Viet Hung, Elaine Wang, and Nhu Nyugen.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, everybody. Before I begin the show today, I want to let you know that I'm going to be having a live show on Sunday, February 12th at the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You don't need to buy tickets to show up. It's part of an arts festival called Work by Work, and I'm going to be doing my presentation from 4 to 5 o'clock in the salon area, which is in the back of the lobby. In fact, there's going to be podcasts from other networks that night doing different shows. So it's going to be fun. All right, here's the show. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Now, when I started this podcast, I always wanted to get to the point where I could bring on other voices who could tell stories that I can't, because I'm always going to be stuck in my perspective, either as a middle-aged white man, or just in terms of what I like and what speaks to me. And I'm often reminded

of that when I talk with my wife, Serena, who's Chinese-American. And I would talk about as a kid how I could easily imagine myself as all these different characters from Star Wars to Ghostbusters. imagine myself as all these different characters from Star Wars to Ghostbusters. And she would tell me how she was so starved for any kind of media representation that she used to watch reruns of this cringeworthy cartoon from the early 60s called Hashimoto Mouse. Excuse bad manners, please. His letter from Imperial Palace. So I was really interested when Sam Caden Lye contacted me on Facebook. He told me about what the series Avatar the Last Airbender meant for him. And some of what Sam told me about Avatar the Last Airbender and his reactions to it touched on similar issues that I explored in my episode about Ghost in the Shell.

But a lot of his insights really surprised me. So I invited Sam on the show to help steer this episode. So, Sam, welcome. Hey, what's up, Eric? Okay, so you're actually not here in Brooklyn. You're in Ireland. You're in college there? I actually just graduated really, really recently. But I studied creative process, which is kind of useless. But it's basically creative writing plus a bunch of multimedia stuff.

So how old were you? I mean, you're going to make me feel really old, but how old were you when you first started watching Avatar? 11 or 12, maybe younger. Right. So this is interesting. Because 2005, when the show came out, I had just left working in animation and I had moved to New York

and I was delving into public radio. So I knew the show was on. I knew it had a really good word of mouth, but I just, I didn't watch it. So when you contacted me, I went back and started watching the first season. And it is amazing, but I'm still looking at it as a guy

who used to work in animation. So I'm thinking about like the storyboarding and like the character design. So I'm curious, tell me about your reaction as a kid watching it and what you've discovered since. Okay, so this story starts at Halloween, and not any particular Halloween, just any Halloween. Like Halloween's always like a weird time for me. And now I always feel like I have to keep in mind my color. And I'm always thinking like, well, who are the people of color I could dress up as? So this is my friend Mamatha. She's a med student in Chicago.

We were just commiserating about this yearly dilemma we both face. And if I'm not going to be a person of color, I'm going to be like an animal or like an inanimate object like BB-8 or something. I don't feel like comfortable dressing up as like a white character at this point like think if i just if i just put on harry potter glasses and drew the lightning bolt which i have like i'm not harry potter i'm asian harry potter yeah exactly and everyone would say that or you're like you're like cho chang and harry potter's like long lost son like that would be what people would say to. Or you're like, you're like Cho Chang and Harry Potter's like long lost son.

Like that would be what people would say to you. Okay. To my credit, I didn't just dress up as Harry Potter. I dressed up as alternate universe, Slytherin, Harry Potter. But that's not the point. The point is we're both huge fantasy fans. But a lot of the times being a non-white fan

in a genre that's like, let's be honest, all about this glorious mythological european heritage it's hard to feel like you fit in which is why this show felt like it came out of nowhere water earth fire air long ago the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. It's Avatar The Last Airbender. They're like, it's really good for a kids' show. It's not really a kids' show.

By the way, these are friends of Sam's. We're going to hear more from them later. Oh my God, I have to watch this show. And so then I watched it and then made everybody that I love watch it also. It's a show that has fans with Harry Potter levels of devotion and especially among a certain demographic. It's a very specific thing that Asian Americans love this show. Because while the show was unique and beautiful in a way that appealed to everyone. It wasn't the same old like dragons and castles kind of thing. The world of the show especially appealed to me.

Who produced this? Because this is basically for me. This is for us. So what is it about this world that's got me and so many other Asian Americans obsessed? Could it be that there's something uniquely Asian American about it? And could it even go so far as to say it's the most asian-american show ever the most asian-american show ever but i mean we're the creators of the show asian or asian-american no so the creators we call them brike they're real it's their ship name their real names are michael dante di martino and brian konitzko. Well, hold on. So ship name like fans in a show when they really want two characters to get together, they'll merge their names together?

Yeah, because we love them together. So actually, I don't know their specific heritage, but people tell me that they refer to themselves as white guys who are just really influenced by Asian culture. It's funny because, I mean, that scenario usually doesn't end very well. No, no, it doesn't. That's why this show had to get something really right. It's kind of hard to explain. It's a complicated show.

Yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, give it a shot. What you have to know is there's four nations, right? There's the Fire Nation, the Water Tribe, the Earth Kingdom, and the Air nomad. So within each nation there's also these people called the benders and they're the people that have the ability to control the elements of their people. Air bending! It lets me control the air currents around my glider and fly. You know last time I checked humans can't fly! Check again! But there's one person who can bend all four elements, and that's the Avatar.

And it's actually this reincarnated spirit being, which in the case of this show is Aang. And he's just this 12-year-old kid that has to stop a war. So I know there's nothing distinctly Asian American about what I just described, but the kids talk and interact like Americans. Take this fever dream of an episode, The Beach. Okay, look, if you want a boy to like you, just look at him and smile a lot and laugh at everything he says, even if it's not funny.

Well, that sounds really shallow and stupid. Let's try it. Okay. So there's flirting, volleyball, a house party, and popular kids. But it's all happening under these Japanese pagoda-looking buildings. And all the flyers have Chinese letters on them and the food. It's the kind of food I grew up with. Chopped vegetables in bamboo steamers,

pork buns, fish with the head still on it. And the food is just there on tables and establishing shots, characters picking at it with chopsticks. See, Asian food in American contexts is all of my most visceral memories. And I wasn't the only one flipping out here I'm talking to Elaine a writer and an actress in Houston do you remember that scene where Aang is like helping to reconcile these two groups that are fighting as they're crossing a canyon but like he's like

really obsessed with egg custards so hungry is that egg custard in that tart? And he's like, oh my gosh, an egg custard! And then he eats it. Like, I remember just being like, that's my food! Yeah, I was obsessed with egg custards when I was a kid too. Like, I was obsessed with egg custards and my mom would make- I was obsessed with egg custards. Egg custards are such a specific thing to love. You know, this is a fantasy world. The team behind the show could have just easily made something up, but they didn't.

They chose an egg custard, and it was like a message for me. Like, they saw my childhood, and they just plucked out this one memory. That's what feels so good about this show. It's both Asian and American, but doesn't rely on these general impressions about what that means. This show is meticulous and careful and tender with those details. Someone cared. Someone did their research. Nor is this more evident than in the effort the creators put into choreographing fight scenes. Remember those benders in each nation that can control elements? Well, each style of bending, so like waterbending or Well, each style of bending is a style of martial arts, and what it looks like on the

screen is these characters doing kung fu while rocks and whips of water are flying around. It's beautiful, and it's an awesome thing to watch. And I think it's because you're not just watching a bunch of cartoon characters wax on wax off. Here, check this out. It's from a behind-the-scenes segment Nickelodeon made. Earthbending is based on the movements of the Hungar style of kung fu, a style known for its strong stances and its rooting to the ground. Earthbenders, they step, a stone jumps up out of the ground, they smack it, and wham, it goes flying.

They had multiple martial arts experts choreographing fight scenes, recording them for reference, and then handing them to artists and animators to replicate frame for frame. And what's more, none of the bending styles are purely for show. They're tied to each nation's cultural and spiritual tradition. And this is how it works with every detail of the show. Just stuff like the way food looks, glistening different colors, all that. The types of streets that they have.

Lighting is specific to these places. This is Emily. She worked as a background painter on Legend of Korra. It's the sequel series to Last Airbender. Well, it's just over the course of the show, I built up a huge folder of reference images. And then when I went to Korea, I just shot a ton of reference pictures. Like when you're painting like lighting and stuff, it's weirdly important to have like been in the place. That's right. She's talking about making

it all truly Asian down to the way light falls on things. I think everyone cared very deeply about making something that felt authentically Asian. Like there's so many Asian people who worked on the show. Now the show doesn't exactly replicate my world. It certainly isn't an accurate representation of Asia. But as Elaine pointed out to me, that's not what fantasy worlds do. Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, whatever whatever they have all this liberty to like take england and then make a whole world out of it that doesn't have to be a one-to-one parallel to england right um and so yeah with avatar it's kind of like they've taken like all this asian culture and

then they've they've kind of signposted so it's like kind of similar but like they took it and they were allowed to create a whole world basically what they're doing here is conflating a lot of different cultures. And normally I hate that, but that's not the way it is with Avatar. The mixing doesn't bother me and it didn't bother anyone I talked to. Here's Viet. He's a writer who lives in New England. It didn't trouble me very much watching the show because I feel like I'm a hybrid. I'm also, you know, on the border growing up, you know, as a Vietnamese American, I understand like mashups and remixes and all these things. In America, Asian cultures have mixed and collided. My parents are from Taiwan, but I grew up watching anime and eating Korean food at my best friend's house.

So I think what Avatar gets right here is it has this hybrid Asian identity. Yeah, but it has multiple mashups. Here's Vyad again. There's all this spirituality that permeates the entire show, you know, balance of your chi and balance within your, you know, your role in the world, your place in the world, balance between like human civilization and nature. And I was like, I totally know about all of this and I get it right off the bat and you do not have to explain anything to me. The monks always taught me that all life is sacred.

Even the life of the tiniest spider fly caught in its own web. Yes, all life is sacred. I know, I'm even a vegetarian. I've always tried to solve my problems by being quick or clever. And I've only had to use violence for necessary defense. And I've certainly never used it to take a life. I was like, wow, I can't believe this is on a mainstream American show. That's actually one of the thoughts that I had.

I remember telling a friend after I watched this, I was like, how did they slip Buddhism like into a like a children's show? Like who allowed that to happen? My friend Neil, who grew up in a Buddhist household, even told me Avatar got them to start going to their local temple. I would be lying if it wasn't in some small part because Avatar The Last Airbender and Korra made like Buddhism cool again for me. You know, it's not that like Buddhism isn't everywhere else as well. It's referenced in other things, but it's like, you know, Zen potato chips is not an empowering, you know, thing. I think this is part of something bigger. Avidar gets at a different kind of Asian American story too. The stories of diaspora, about growing up in an immigrant family, experiencing another world and another life from

a distance. And this is where I have to admit that when I've said Asian American, I actually mean second or third generation, because our parents, the immigrants themselves, they don't see the show the way we do. I realized this during my conversation with Mamatha. We were talking about Indian influences on the show. I mean, the name Avatar in itself, though, is like Avatar is an Indian word. I mean, that word holds a lot of significance in Hindu Indian culture specifically. So just the core of the fact that the show is based on that concept, this idea of a demigod being reborn to save humanity is something I grew up with my whole life and like growing up in a Hindu household. And I remember the first time I talked to my parents about watching Avatar The Last Airbender and my mom was like, oh,

Avatar, it's called Avatar. Like, what's it about? Of course, once I explained the show to her, she was like, okay. She didn't really get it. She was like, okay, that sounds cool, I guess. I feel like that is one of those quintessentially Asian American experiences where you get excited about something that you think you understand from your heritage. And to the parents like you're

totally missing the point but to you it's like it's like oh yeah this is me yeah exactly exactly i found that a lot of avatar fans like the show as a kid but they love it as an adult maybe that's because as adults we're getting to the point where we finally want to understand our parents and the world that they came from. Avatar is this lovingly, carefully packaged version of that world. It's diluted and scrambled, but it's done in a way that we can begin to understand, or at least begin to deal with. This was especially true for Viet, who saw his own family's journey through Aang's. Aang's story is explicitly linked to, I think, the refugee immigrant narrative.

Here's a spoiler if you haven't seen the show. The subtitle of the first series is hinting at this awful revelation you get in the first couple of episodes. Aang, the Avatar kid, really is the last airbender. The Fire Nation launched a genocide that wiped out all of the Air Normands. Eng alone manages to escape before the attack. He escapes on the back of his flying bison, Appa.

He got on Appa and sailed out into the ocean or sky in a storm, and then he never saw his family again. And that's very much the narrative of the Vietnamese diaspora. My parents basically did the same thing. They each got on individual rafts and sailed out into the sea, knowing full well that they would never see their country, their parents, their family members, their homeland again. Ng disappears for 100 years before he's found frozen in iceberg. When he emerges, the war is still happening. He wakes up and everyone's literally gone.

Everyone's dead. And he left them all behind. Aang, I know you're upset. And I know how hard it is to lose the people you love. I went through the same thing when I lost my mom. Monk Gyatso and the other airbenders may be gone, but you still have a family. Sokka and I, we're your family now.

That's something that really, really spoke to me, I remember. And that basically got me hooked on the show too, because I was like, this is about loss of home and like the trauma all this trauma that he's experiencing and trying to work out and now he's trying to find him he's homeless and trying to find a place for himself in this world it's possible that the last airbender and Cora are ways through which we process trauma the trauma of our parents and our grandparents in Asia. In Airbender, it's the brutal toll of this never-ending war, and all the ethnic cleansing wrapped up in it. In Legend of Korra, which follows the Avatar after Aang, it's all the growing pains of modernity, industrialization,

revolutions, class warfare. Our parents and grandparents lived through Japanese occupation, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or they survived Hiroshima or escaped the Cambodian Genocide. The world of Avatar is a refraction of those experiences, and it's processed through the lens of a children's story. So in this way, we learn of the ugliest violence at a distance, but we never escape the full and deep impact that it's had on our lives, and on the lives of everyone we love.

If that's not an Asian American experience, I don't know what is. Wow. Well, all right, you've convinced me. Except now I'm not so sure. Wait, wait, not sure what? What do you mean? Well, okay, so it turns out there are holes in my theory. But they actually get at something way deeper. Interesting. Okay, well, let's take a break. We have to take an ad break, but I want to hear more about that.

For those of us who love podcasts, they seem to be everywhere in all we talk about. But it is still a growing industry. So all this month, we hosts at Panoply are asking you to tell a friend about a podcast that you know that they will love. You can do it in real life or social media. And if they don't even know how to download a podcast, please show them. Tell us what you recommended by using the hashtag tripod. That's T-R-Y-P-O-D. And thanks for spreading the word. P-R-Y-P-O-D. And thanks for spreading the word. All right, let's get back to Sam Caden Lai and his exploration of Avatar The Last Airbender

and its sequel series, The Legend of Korra. Elaine was the first to point out holes in my big Avatar is the best Asian-American story theory. Two of the voice actors are actually like Asian-American because even I think Iroh was even replaced at one point. I think probably because the actor died, I think. But yeah, yeah. But yeah, I think the guy that replaced him was a white dude.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people I talked to pointed this out. And I agree. It does sting that the show got so much right, but couldn't also put more Asian American actors on the map. In that sense, the show isn't perfect. But Elaine had another point that kind of caught me off guard. When I talk to people sometimes and they're like,

oh, I love Asian American cinema. I was like, okay, what Asian American cinema do you love? And they're like, I love Gong Li. I love, like, and they start listening to all these Hong Kong films, right? And I'm like, no, no, no, you're not listening. I'm saying Asian American, you're talking Asian. And a lot of people don't even see that, right? And I'm like, the difference, and I'm like like not that those aren't great films or these aren't

great actors but like you have to keep in mind that when they they make those films over there they're not like oh we're going to talk about the Asian experience they're just writing about the experience because they are the majority there right like they they're not like that's why I don't think Avatar can count as like one of the best Asian American stories because the world they take place in isn't a world where they are a minority, if that makes sense. She's right. In the show, no one ethnic group is a minority. But the more I talk with people, the absence of that minority element is exactly what I loved about the show. To explain this, we need to backtrack a bit. Remember when I was saying about how no one in the show comments on how weird or gross all the food is?

That's not completely true. There is this one time. Aang and his companions are partaking in some water tribe food. Sokka and Katara, who are from the water tribe, are loving it. No way. Stewed sea prunes? Help yourself. Dad could eat a whole barrel of these things.

Aang isn't a fan. This is another scene straight out of my life. One that a lot of Asian Americans are familiar with. You bring your food to school and everyone gags and holds their nose. It's one of the first ways you realize you're different. And it's the beginning of an ever mounting sense of shame in your own identity. And it's the beginning of an ever-mounting sense of shame in your own identity. But in this scene, that shame is totally missing. Aang actually tries to hide that he's not into their food instead of lording it over them. Because in the Avatar universe, no one is a foreigner.

No one's culture is inferior. It's just different. It's kind of the point of Aang's whole quest. He's trying to stop the Fire Nation from colonizing the rest of the world. I'll let Mammotha lay it out. Yeah, Avatar presents a world of what it's like to be Asian without the context of white people. Like there's no, which is incredible. Maybe why I found this show, maybe why so many of us found this show so appealing without realizing that was what was going on. The more I think about it, the more it

makes sense. There's so much to love about being Asian American, but it all gets swallowed up in the shame and the racism. To America, Asia is a motif. It's infinitely less than a culture, never a world in and of itself. We're a category of salad or an existential threat to your way of life, never just ourselves. And when the world tells you the same thing a thousand times, you start to believe it. You think maybe people are saying it because it's true. Maybe you really don't belong, that you don't deserve a story, that you don't deserve a world. What does it look like when someone tells you that you do?

Well, it looks like this. This is our last stop. The very last scene of the last series, Legend of Korra. Or rather, it's our reactions to it. So, what now? Back to the dance floor? I'm kind of all danced out. Honestly, after everything that's happened the past few months I could use a vacation

Let's do it Let's go on a vacation just the two of us Anywhere you want Really? Okay I've always wanted to see what the spirit world's like Sounds perfect I just like literally just started screaming and like rolling around the floor.

Like if anyone had walked in, it would have been really concerning because I was freaking out so hard. Because it was so affirming. It was one of the most affirming things that's ever happened in my entire life. Yeah, I mean, it was affirming of my gayness. And at the same time, it was confirming of my race. And at the same time, it was confirming of my race. Like being a queer woman of color represented on media like that in a way that was so positive and really beautifully done was just like the best thing that's ever happened to me. Life has actually been downhill since then.

So what happens in this scene exactly? Okay, so it's two young women, Korra on the left. She's Avatar after Aang. Kick-ass female lead. And then beside her on the right is Asami. And she's one of her best friends, a total boss in her own right. By the way, Korra is dark-skinned. Asami is very visibly East Asian.

And they're walking towards this column of light. It's a portal to another world. And they stop. They smile at each other and then they hold hands and face each other. But yeah, Kurosami is real. And Kurosami, you're doing the shipper thing, right? Where you're combining their names. Yeah, the show went out on a note of interracial lesbian romance.

But wait a second. I mean, have the showrunners confirmed that? Yeah, they confirmed it. And yeah, that was their intention all along. Yeah. I mean, this gets to a question I've been thinking about, which is what should other creative people learn from Avatar? Because I mean, as we've talked about, the creators of The Last Airbender and Korra are

really different from the characters we're representing. And I mean, the real answer, obviously, is to have more people of color behind the scenes in Hollywood, but that's happening really slowly. So just looking at the example of these two shows, what did they get right and what can other people learn from that? Well, this is about representation, right? The way people talk about it is that it's just like identity politics. People of color demanding this. Minorities decide that this is offensive and everyone's walking on eggshells and there's so many rules. But like, if that's what you think representation is, then our reactions to this five second scene really don't make sense. Right. So I think we need to stop thinking about

representation in terms of rules and think about it like relationships. So you mean like, if you're trying to represent a group instead of relating to them, then you're basically placing them in the position of the other. Yeah. And that's going to be complicated, of course. But like people make mistakes in relationships and it's about communicating and being cautious and sensitive and humble. But it's also really simple because that's how all healthy relationships function. Because relationships are hard. And when they're bad, they can be absolutely destructive. But when you put the work in, everything can change.

All right. Well, thank you, Sam. Cool. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Who are we special thanks to this week? Okay. I want to thank Mamata Chawla, Emily Tatri, Viet Hung, Elaine Wang, and Yon Nguyen. I also want to thank Alex Grant, Seiko Shastri, and Marissa Lee for talking to me.

Marissa is one of the founders of racebending.com, which really launched the recent movement for AA representation. And it was all because of Avatar. So you should check them out. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Emalinski. My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

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