If You Catch My Drift: Empathy in the Everyday
Asian/American Transits #2—NEW YORK x JOHN ZHAO
Welcome to the second installment of Asian/American Transits, a monthly spotlight on transnational artists and creatives of the Asian diaspora. You can catch up on my profile of Shanghai-based writer and editor Juli Min here if you missed it before. This time, we travel from Shanghai to New York and move from the literary into the cinematic.
John Zhao is a Chinese-Korean American screenwriter, video editor, and sometimes film director. Born in northeast China, raised in Germany and the United States, he has been based in New York City since 2009.
Where did you grow up? How did this environment affect your sense of cultural identity?
I grew up in the rural areas and developing suburbs of Michigan and Virginia. Looking back, I’m glad I saw American life through those lenses rather than a metropolitan perspective. My parents grew up in fairly agricultural parts of China, so there’s a kind of pace, tone, and approach to life that seemed in tune with their sensibilities and allowed me to connect with that of what we left behind in some invisible way.
Childhood was about finding ways to entertain myself with very little. Sneaking into community swimming pools, setting things on fire, making artwork, and amusing my classmates and friends with my artwork was my currency.
When my English was still poor, I could still communicate and earn respect with other kids through creativity. It was like my shield. I skipped second grade because the principal thought I was intelligent and creative even though I could barely read a book.
Can you describe how you came to your current creative practice? Who or what have been your biggest inspirations or influences?
I’m focused on filmmaking right now. The first film I saw on the big screen was Steven Spielberg’s Hook when I was five years old. We were living in Germany, and though I did not understand German or English, I understood everything going on in this film.
It’s also just a very visually potent movie, full of adventure and joy. I remember it not narratively so much as the physical sensation I had in the theater. It rewired my brain and flooded my entire body with all sorts of endorphins and dopamine.
I still love that film to this day. It told me that you can communicate through images and sounds and movement, and that there was a world out there waiting for me to start some kind of adventure.
I started sneaking out my dad’s camcorder a few days after seeing that film: recreating the scenes, playing all the roles, and so on because we couldn’t afford to just keep going back to see Hook in theaters.
I’d say John Cassavetes and Werner Herzog were my biggest influences as a young adult, both as people and filmmakers. They also beckoned me to go on an adventure, but most importantly, told me the best adventure is the one you invent yourself.
When did you move to New York? Has the experience of living here shaped your creative, personal, or social sensibilities?
I moved to New York City in the winter of 2009. We were still reeling from the recession. Jobs were scarce. So I didn’t want to stay in a smaller city anymore. I hadn’t gone to school in New York, nor did I know anyone. Very isolated and alone. There were entire weeks where I didn’t talk to anyone. My first sublet was with a woman who told me she was a photographer. I realized once I moved in she didn’t own any cameras. She would photoshop the same family photo—I don’t know whose family, but the same image over and over again, rearranging the people. She burst into my room naked at 3 am once to show me the results. So I packed up and left.
I slept in random places and had even more random jobs. Once I was assembling gold-plated fountain pens for these Japanese guys. I decided early on I was probably not fit for being “part of society” in this city, so I would try to explore all the lesser known neighborhoods in every borough as much as possible and just be sort of a wanderer. Very soon these explorations led me to create my first films, which I self-financed from odd jobs and just doing whatever I could to pull together people and resources. My early attempts at filmmaking were basically executive produced by Craigslist. I never released those works. They were my self-taught film education, and a test to see if I had the willpower. For a long stretch I stepped away from making films and just lived life, observed people, worked professionally. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to finish new screenplays that I’m excited about.
I look back on these first three or four years in NYC as my best, even though at the time it seemed the most unhinged and difficult. It was romantic and everything seemed possible. I was pretty wild, but also very hard working. I remember waking up the next day at a house party once in the Bronx. I was on the floor sandwiched between two beautiful girls and a dwarf guy that I’d been talking to all night was using my thigh as a pillow. Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror” was playing on loop. I walked out into the streets, it was snowing, and there was a street fight happening between two chubby kids. One of them had a bloody nose, lots of blood was dripping everywhere in the snow. I hopped on a bus and went back to the loft I was crashing in and made myself a cup of coffee before going to work. That night when I got home I was ripe and full of energy to write something, probably a screenplay. That’s what New York was and is to me. Those kinds of jarring, sensory experiences, compacted into a 24-hour period if you’re lucky enough to stumble upon them.
Do you have any favorite places to visit in Asia? Would you live here someday?
I’d like to spend time in Yanbian, home to the most populous (but dwindling) Korean-Chinese population, since my family lived there. I suspect that’s where my gravitational pull and inner compass come from. But I don’t understand it on an intellectual or conscious level. So I’d like to do that someday. Otherwise as far as living goes, I’m an American now and I accept that. There’s plenty of America to explore and create in and fix, I think. I’m open to opportunities to spend time in Asia, but I’m not the type to be nostalgic for a place I never spent my formative years in or need it to feel any way about my identity. I don’t know, the Earth just seems like a good place to keep walking through, place after place, if you’re lucky enough to insert yourself somewhere new once in a while.
What significance do you see in finding, making, and/or nurturing community connections between Asia and America, broadly speaking?
I haven't done anything to connect communities between Asia and America yet. I think there are plenty of intelligent people in that realm who are finding ways to do so politically, socially, and culturally, via institutions or education or finances or otherwise. I just don’t feel qualified to be in that realm quite yet. So if anything, I’m interested in magnifying and sharing the spiritual, psychological, and emotional bridges that are less tangible but equally as valid, to me, for the crossing. I helped the woman who runs my favorite dumpling shop in Chinatown out of a misunderstanding that almost led her restaurant to receive a B rating by the food department. It was just a language barrier; I happened to be there at the time and was able to translate. The guy thought her fire hydrants were expired or something. I think it’s in the small things. Empathy. I think people get ahead of themselves these days, when they don’t even have the decency to hold the door open for an elderly person or talk to a stranger who looks lonely on the street. If you catch my drift.
You can get a taste of John’s narrative sensibilities through his experimental short film Farewell My Porcupine above. Check out his personal website here or connect with him on Instagram @captainfunkycooljohn. And stay tuned for the jetlag fever dreams in his forthcoming project Midnite Rainbow, a few pages of which are featured above!