Why?

So this graduate student working on a thesis about ethnic pageants contacted me about the film.   She watched it this is her response:

Hello Ms. Shapiro--

I have finally had a chance to watch your video and it is fantastic!

I appreciated the different (and competing) narratives. Thank you so

much for sending it to me. I will definitely be citing it in my

dissertation (I just don't know how just yet). I found the focus on

race particularly interesting. Was that really obvious when you were

filming or was that a focus that's important to you personally (It is

really important for me)? Could I ask why you decided to do a piece

on Miss Chinatown? Of all the newsworthy things to cover, what did

you find important enough so that you spent so much time on it?

I replied:

Glad you enjoyed the film. It definitely evolved in ways I never expected. In fact, when I started to make the film it was not about Miss Chinatown! I was making a broader film about Asian American women and I went to the pageant because I grew up with my parents going to all the pageants, and I simply was curious about them. Also I had met Kristina the performance artist and saw her act and thought it would be funny to meet the real Miss Chinatowns. To be honest, I thought I was going to go there and hear a lot of airheads say a lot of stupid things. Instead, I got really interested in them. Here they are, competing to be this icon of womanhood, of assimilation and success, and really they were just girls trying to figure out how to handle this confusing transition to womanhood.

They helped me to realize, that I was so afraid of being seen as a Miss Chinatown - demure, people (and parent) pleasing, like a china doll - that it was affecting my self image. In other words, I was so afraid of the stereotype, I let it control who I let myself be. I was rejecting a part of myself out of fear of being stereotyped. And I found that when I brought them down to earth, when I accepted them, I finally accepting a part of who I am. I am Chinese, I am a woman, I am dealing with many of the same issues that they are - body image, racial tensions, honesty, communication, etc.

So this had such a big impact on me, that I realized I had to focus the entire film on them, and it took me a while to decide this, and it was quite a painful decision because by then I had run out of money, and I realized I had to go back and shoot followup video myself, and then thankfully my editor said he would help me learn how to edit. That's why I went back 3 years later to shoot the follow up. Miraculously that was the year that Priscilla got pregnant and the 1st time in Miss Chinatown LA history that a half black half chinese contestant competed.

The race thing happened accidentally - it just happened to be what happened to Priscilla - I certainly had no control over that but a definite interest. So when I stumbled on her story I knew I wanted to follow it.