Eat it So You Will Know the Taste

Eat it so you will know the taste…my mother would say to me.

Good Kimchi is the taste of ingredients getting acquainted with one another and transforming into a completely new thing. My mother stirs the thick red, hot mystery sauce in a rhythmic motion as she chants the list of ingredients and cooking methods. It doesn't work when you write it down. You have to learn to sing the song. I'm still eating.

Henry, the Sailor Man

Gray Beard Sandwich

Wherever water flows, birds follow and where the birds go, the humans follow. In February I arrive at the seventh annual Salton Sea International Bird Festival. The idea of being with an international group of birdwatchers intrigues me. At 5:30am, with a DV camera and Minidisc recorder, I make my way to the chartered bus. I feel as though the power of technology weighs down my arms until I see all the other birders in line for coffee and donuts. Most of the people are in their sixties and they are wearing chest harnesses for their hi-zoom binoculars and carrying tripods for their spotting scopes and cameras. I am undoubtedly the youngest and the most ill equipped birder in line.

On the bus, I sit between an older gentleman with a big gray beard from the Owens River Valley and another man with a big gray beard from British Columbia, Canada. Every once in a while, their bodies animate as they draw their scopes to their eyes to see the long awaited birds. "White-faced ibis to your right!" "Peregrine Falcon one o'clock on the electric pole!" The bus sways as people crowd sides to get a better view. The sun's warm rays turn the violet fields to gold, unmasking the shadowy figures working in the fields. Flocks of birds cover the sky like a scrim refracting the sunlight on their wings. Their cries and songs clash into a cacophany that echoes against the morning dew.

Here we are on a bus, driving through the Imperial Valley at the crack of dawn with our viewing devices, looking at birds with great scrutiny, observing their movements, their physical attributes and their behaviors. Our lenses fragmenting the landscape and duplicating it endlessly in search of the perfect framed image.

The Land of Lead and Honey

Off California Highway 111, at the southeastern tip of the Salton Sea, technicolor shapes and textures rise out of a bleak desert landscape. After driving an hour southeast from Palm Springs, the development starts to thin out. Movement is imperceptible in the elusive miles of dry, barren land. Passing through the small town of Niland to reach the first concrete slab of an RV settlement called “Slab City,” a former military base, to discover “Salvation Mountain” is a salvation.

It’s the middle of August and the thermostat shoots to an unrelenting 114 degrees. My skin sizzles and I struggle to breathe through the heavy smells of the overripe Salton Sea and Leonard’s paint fumes. A sign that looks like it was made out of playdoh introduces the site with the words ‘God never fails.’ These words of hope have sustained Leonard Knight, creator of this psychedelic Eden, for the past seventeen years. I expect to find a ticket booth, or a tour guide but there is no one in sight. But as I reach the site the dirt road turns to pale shades of blue, with what look like heavy coatings of latex paint. I think it is meant to represent a sea, and nearby I see a small boat partially buried into the ground, its top floating in the putrid air.

Salvation Mountain rises thirty feet, a mere hill in contrast to a real mountain range behind it. The Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range is where US military jets practice bombing with high velocity heavy missiles. Occasionally the inventions of man will gaze at each other as the jets navigate around Leonard’s mountain. Knight builds his vision of paradise out of whatever he could find; window caulking, bales of hay, tires and windshields. He then covers it entirely with layers of bright paint. As I climb up the peak, the ground feels spongy. I feel like I’m walking on a brightly colored cake frosted with flowers, trees, birds, American flags, waterfalls and biblical verses. Paint fumes smell toxic, though, and my body slowly gets coated in a fine mist of dust. At the summit a cross contains words that read ‘God is Love,’ written in puffy raised letters. Below a big red heart says “Jesus, I’m a sinner please come upon my body and into my heart.” The
glass-like sea in front of me, the dry mountains behind me, and the road I came in on are all startlingly austere and desolate in comparison.

Environmentalists and county supervisors proclaimed Leonard’s mountain a “toxic nightmare,” and tried to take it down. It is ironic that bombs are allowed to explode out here but a painted mountain is somehow considered more toxic for the environment.

There is something about the bubbly words, “God is Love,” that echo the Beatles song, “All You Need Is Love,” combined with the religious fervor of Howard Finster and the all-embracing spirituality of the early 70s. Leonard neurotically covers every surface in biblical scripture and imagery. He is obviously crazy about Jesus and comes from the tradition of long-haired Jesus freaks with their fingers raised high saying, “One way to change the world. Jesus is the way. ” Some would describe Leonard’s work as “outsider,” “folk” or “self taught” art, art that is essentially “pure” in its expression because it is produced by an untrained artist that has no relation to the “high art” world. There is a distinction between Leonard’s cartoonish Eden with flowing blue water, abundant evergreen and candy coated pinks and reds that raise innocent and youthful sentiment and the imagery used to promote the reclamation of the West in the early 1900s. Both cherish an idea of purity but for very different ends.

While gazing out to see if there is any sign of life, I hear some clamoring at the base of the mountain and see a tall thin figure waving at me. Leonard, the infamous seventy-four year old man, is still working away at his dream. “Welcome to Salvation Mountain! Feel free to take a look around,” he shouts. His congeniality takes me by surprise since I feel like I just trespassed on his mountain without permission. He is dressed in a long sleeve plaid shirt, black pants speckled with paint and a white hat. His face is toasted brown. The lines on his face accentuate his smile. His skin clings tightly around his mouth as he talks and reveals a set of white teeth that looked too big for his mouth.

Leonard’s voyage began with an idea that floated in the sky in the form of a hot air balloon. Only he wanted the balloon to be four times bigger than a standard hot air balloon with the words, “God is Love” sewn across it. He wanted to float in this balloon across America and share the freedom and happiness he had found in this message. It took him six years to make the balloon and when he was ready to take off from Nebraska, the wind was too strong. He never made it off the ground. So he packed up his balloon in the back of his truck and went from city to city to find a place to display the balloon. It was in Niland that he found a welcoming spot near “slab city” for his showcase.

The desert was the perfect tabular-rasa, monochromatic with an endless feeling of space. Niland is also one of the few places where people like Leonard, eccentric and independent could make a place for himself. Unfortunately, he discovered that his balloon had rotted out. This was a disheartening setback, but Leonard found salvation on this mesa, which he then christened, “Salvation Mountain.”

Leonard gives me a tour of the newest addition to the mountain, an igloo-like structure. The armature that helps supports its hay-bale dome looks like a tree. Its trunk is formed out of stacked tires, painted over with dirt and grass, and its branches are real pieces branches grafted onto the cylinder of tires. The branches stabilize the individual bales of hay, acting like ribs in a Gothic Cathedral. Windshields inserted into the ceiling admit light. His days pass without regiments. There are no clocks in the desert. No deadlines. His mountain attracts visitors and his community is at slab city. Only the unbearable heat during the day which slows things down, but then again, what’s the hurry. Leonard is free to work as he pleases out here and that is the beauty of living in an austere place.

From this phantasmagoria, I get the impression that Leonard’s vision encompasses more than a museum of Jesus worship. His art is a large component. Watching him, I see that his eyes scan over his creation, detecting flaws or incompleteness, more work to be done. He points to the exposed mesa and explains to me that the whole mountain is made from the earth from the site. He dug into the mesa, collected soil, and then added water and hay to create clay. The soil has a high selenium content so when the clay dries, it almost crystallizes. With the clay he forms the flowers, trees, and birds that adorn his landscape. It is beautiful and amazing to hear this man talk about a dream and see him build it in the middle of nowhere and out of an apparent desert wasteland.

The backside of the mountain exposes a dirt mesa. Buckets of paint and brushes are hidden behind the cross. Salvation Mountain is a mythical mountain, facing one direction, the highway and its passing travelers. Leonard wants his creation to stand apart from the landscape. Why else such excess and grandiosity? But I appreciate Salvation Mountain’s megalomania because it is imperfect. If Leonard tries for the ideal, pure and innocent promised land, his methods reveal artifice and representation. There is an element of hope in Salvation Mountain that isn’t so much about its Christian ideology, but about the potential of an individual to create a unique sense of place.

Everyday, Leonard refines and fixes parts of his creation. The desert sun washes out color, and when it rains paint peels off. Leonard's mountain at one point collapsed and he had to start all over again, but he proclaims that even the accidents make him better at what he does. It takes hard work to build something for other people to appreciate and enjoy but that is what brings people like Leonard and the snowbirds to slab city. They find freedom and inspiration in a place that is difficult to locate, a place that is not easily definable, a place that might seem to some to exist outside civic law, where the imagination floods the limits of idealism.

Boogie Nights

I grew up in SF’s Japantown on Post Street, an urban palimpsest reflecting numerous fragmented stories of people who came through and made their mark in time. Some stories lay hidden beneath new pavement and buildings. A single Victorian house with a barbershop stands tucked between two 60’s pseudo Japanese buildings. It used to belong to a Black family who settled there during the Japanese Internment period, when Harlem West was booming down the street at Bop City. The barbershop is right next to the Korea House restaurant and nightclub that my parents own and where my mother and father first met in 1969. At the entrance of the restaurant, the sun-baked pictures of entrees in the light box are cracking and some of them have fallen out of place.

To the right of the light box are two large wooden doors with brass hardware reminiscent of old Korean chests. Gumdrop knobs circle a butterfly shaped disc from which two large heavy rings dangle. I have always loved tugging on these rings and feeling the weight of the wooden doors as I lean back with all of my weight. The doors suspend open for a moment, just enough time for me to walk through and as the door shuts, a gust of wind saturated with the smell of aged oak rushes against my back, tossing my hair in all directions. A carpeted staircase on the right leads up to the restaurant and on the left, is an entranceway into the nightclub.

The centerpiece of the restaurant is a large wooden shelf painted to resemble a Greek column. It is filled with an eclectic array of bric-a-brac that my dad had collected over the years: a porcelain Samuel Adams, a bowling pin, turkey shaped bottles, and his most prized possession, a soccer ball from the Korean national soccer team.

In 1969, Korea House was the only Korean business in Japantown, and according to my dad, my parents were not particularly welcome. There was still a lot of resentment and discrimination between Koreans and Japanese. The redevelopment agency did not make the situation any easier. Urban renewal legislation gave cities the power to assemble and clear off land, to remove so-called blighted areas, and Japantown was the first site to be redeveloped. They came in by force, displacing hundreds of small business owners and residents, and sold property that once belonged to the Japanese American community to outside buyers, like my parents.

Despite all this upheaval, the seventies were happening times for my parents’ generation. Many of them were Korean immigrants who came to the states after the immigration act passed in 1965. They were in their 20s and 30s, fresh out of college or the Korean army and ready to experience a brave new world. The restaurant and nightclub were bustling. My dad wore fly collar silk Dunhill shirts with gold embellishing everything from his teeth to his belt buckle. His hair was permed and his cheeks full from prosperous boogie nights. He loved seeing people dressed in their most ostentatiously hip attire. He also loved having a good time and if people weren’t having a good time, he gave them a concoction of his own invention that usually involved a drink or two on the house, and something to smoke. Even the cops frequented the club, and in exchange for a little Korean style lovin’, they made sure everything ran smoothly. People were excited to find a place where they felt at home and could meet people with similar histories. This is where a community came to life-where people could be themselves and enjoy their very existence-where individual experiences, places and cultures melded effortlessly to create a new collective American experience and memory.


This is a story of a community in SF. This story is one of many stories that are being told and are still unknown. The majority of Korean immigrants who came to SF did not know or experience American History before 1965. Koreans came to the US after the Civil Rights Movement, a pivotal time in American history that brought marginalized people together to fight for their place in America. If it was not for the Civil Rights Movement, the immigration act that admitted Korean immigrants to the states would not have been passed. Our Japanese Americans neighbors, on the other hand, had ancestors who settled in Japantown in the early 1900s. Their families endured double displacement; once with the internment camps in 1942, and then with redevelopment beginning in the 1950s. The lack of shared knowledge in the events that had occurred in this neighborhood, the western addition that included both the Fillmore and Japantown, is what kept Koreans and Japanese Americans from understanding one another. The only experience they shared was the history of Japan’s colonization of Korea, and it is interesting what happens to history once it is in the context of America. The older generation Koreans and Japanese still harbor the resentment towards one another, but as their children and grandchildren became more Americanized and distanced from this history, they are finding a way to create a new history together.

Today, thirty years later, Japantown is struggling to preserve its heritage as a Japanese cultural center. The younger generation is moving away as new immigrant communities move in. Korean businesses are ubiquitous in the area and the space where the nightclub used to be is quiet. The music has moved beyond the walls to long forgotten closets. Once you become an adult, its time to tuck away irresponsible and shameful stories of youth, behind Confucius sages and Christian morals. The disco ball still hangs where it has always been and the white grand piano where I spent tedious hours playing Hanon exercises, is now collecting dust in the corner. Sometimes, when I hear the right song or see an old photo of the space, the laughter echoes in the silence and the stains in the walls dance with people’s gestures. I want to capture the memories that linger here for my family but also for the collective memories of the Korean community in San Francisco so that their history will be remembered in a larger memory of America.

I was five years old when my parents opened their nightclub in San Francisco’s Japantown. After dinner, I would run downstairs from the restaurant to sit at the bar for a drink. Depending on my craving for maraschino cherries, my drink of choice was the Virgin Pina Colada or Shirley Temple. The room was dazzling and spinning to the music as lanky women in shimmering one-piece suits were rockin’ on stage to cover versions of popular Korean and American songs. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Abba’s “Dancing Queen” were some of my personal favorites. The light from the disco ball caught glimpses of private moments in the dark booths as it glided around the room, over a wall of silhouette drawings, along the white Yamaha grand piano, to the band on stage, “The Ladies of Jade.” The band members would come over to the bar on their break. Occasionally they would take notice of me and pinch my cheeks or tickle me. I didn’t care what they did to me. They were my heroes. I still remember details like their eighties glam rock look mixed with the smell of my mom’s face cream, the sound of gold bangles clinking against each other as they moved their arms, and the deep, husky voice of the lead singer as she said, “Julie darling where’s your daddy?.” When they went back on stage, the smell of perfume and cigarette smoke would linger and I took one long deep inhale so I wouldn’t forget the moment. This story is for my parents who had the audacity to make the world a better place for their friends and family, to Ronald Takaki who inspired me to pursue after an American memory, and to the Ladies of Jade who helped me to remember.

Cinevue Editor's Letter: Crossing the Threshold

Mon, 07/07/2008 - 21:49.

The Asian American International Film Festival is located in an iconic city of mythic proportions; a backdrop for countless films, its image resonates in the minds of people all over the world. Woody Allen’s film, MANHATTAN says it all with its opening lines:

Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no, make that: He-he...romanticized it all out of proportion. Now...to him...no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Ahhh, now let me start this over....

And so here we begin; with the myth of a city perpetuated by the driving force behind most images—capital. Anyone can make an image, but without financing, marketing or distribution, the image will fade to black. The question is, is Hollywood the end all to breathing life into a film?

Daryl Chin mentions in his enlightening article concerning the trends in Asian American cinema that the conditions of filmmaking are changing in large part due to the advances in technology. Technology flattens out the playing field by lowering the economic bar for production. Now, anyone can take a digital camera, shoot, market, and distribute their own films. This evolution is proving to be difficult in Hollywood as it loses ground on the financing and distribution of independent films. Hollywood may be facing a widely discussed “crisis” in independent cinema but with every crisis, there is an opportunity. And those opportunities are new business models and new narrative models. Technology is putting opportunities in the hands of the filmmaker.

Not only is there a flooding of independent films outside of Hollywood, mediums are also collapsing into one another. Whether it’s through a mobile cell phone, video games, karaoke videos or the Internet, images are accumulating more connective tissues or emotional power and technology is allowing for them to disseminate at a rapid rate. Images slip across borders like a chameleon with a satchel of cultural commodities, blurring boundaries between the virtual and real, cultural and economic lines, and expanding narratives. Cinematic effects are adopted by video games like Grand Theft Auto IV, where one can tag the streets of Liberty City; a mythic representation of a crime ridden New York city morphed with other cities, a stark contrast from the real New York City, where graffiti is being tucked away into galleries and boutiques. Negotiating the difference between the myth of a city and the reality of a city is in itself part of this shift in paradigm, as images become aggregators of global information in a new media landscape.

So this is what is happening in film. The glass ceiling is falling and if Asian American Film is going to thrive and take hold of the opportunities in front of them, then it is time to move beyond the insular, self-serving narratives and structures, and think creatively about making change.

As Oliver Wang so astutely points out, “Asian American features have crossed a threshold towards global stories that will undoubtedly become a deeper part of our community filmmaking. It seems richly appropriate that, as the world becomes perceptibly closer, it is helping the landscape of Asian American cinema to expand.”

If technology is indeed changing the very foundation of the motion picture industry, then it is time to look long and wide at the path of Asian American Film and imagine new landscapes for these stories to flourish. Asian American film is about the global experience. It’s visualizing the shift in migrations. The story is no longer just about immigration or assimilating to America, but it’s about circular migrations; the constant ebb and flow of ideas, Asians in America, Americans in Asia, hybrid spaces, transnationalism, and all the messy interactions that happen in between those places. Borders are porous. They have always been; (no matter how impervious they appear) borders are inherently ephemeral, broken down and penetrated by creative resistance against them and built up and reinforced by those who created them. The threshold of the opportunities that lie ahead is magnifying those borders and places in between where things are slippery, messy, offensive, and enlightening. Where transformation happens.

Play it loud,

Julia Kim