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The Motel (Or, I Think I’m Turning Asian)
By Chi-hui Yang

There’s a turning point in adolescence where, usually unbeknownst to the pubescent, life’s experiences turn into puzzles pieces that eventually come together to explain who a person is. Many of these experiences take years to unravel in the subconscious, tucked away until sometime in adulthood, when they begin to make sense, and childhood is suddenly very different (usually more sinister, unusual or traumatic) from what it seemed to be. It’s this moment, when the puzzle begins forming – the stretches of complete confusion– that is so precious and telling (in hindsight of course); when life is turned over to a clueless teen to figure out who they hell they are. Guidance is normally poor at best.

Michael Kang’s first feature, THE MOTEL is a subtle and humorous look at this moment in the life of Ernest Chin (played by Jeffrey Chyau in a wonderfully natural debut), the film’s tubby thirteen-year old hero. Barely conscious of the world around him (the gobs of liquid on the motel bedsheets are just another thing to clean up in his daily chores), Ernest has arrived at this crucial stage, his hormones and angst ready to explode. A small film – a quiet piece of cinema that clocks in under 80 minutes – THE MOTEL is still expansive in scope, charting individual transformation and the complicated intersection of race, class and masculinity.

Ernest lives and works with his mom, grandfather and little sister in the family’s sleezy, rural, road-side motel where the regulars are three-hour check-ins and permanent residents. A kind of naïvete permeates the household, built on a delicate balance as the fiefdom of Ernest’s mother Ahma (Jade Wu), who rules the motel with a baseball bat and an eye that misses no mistakes or lies. Ernest is the awkward man of the house, running the front desk and cleaning the rooms, while his grandfather folds sheets and watches TV and sister plays with her dirt-filled, headless doll. Their extended family of seedy residents is even more uncommunicative, bullish and dysfunctional.

Ernest seems to have no friends, except the fifteen-year old Chinese American girl, Christine, whose family (the only other non-white folks around), own the desolate Chinese restaurant down the way. Occasionally getting together to sneak a drink, smoke or peek at porn, the two are friends, though Ernest is much more engaged in her than she in him. Two events push THE MOTEL’s narrative through during this depressed summer. At Christine’s encouragement, Ernest enters a short story about his life into a contest, and wins an honorable mention. This is to the irritation of his mother, who he failed to tell and who begins passively tearing him down for fear of him growing into his own self.

At the same time, a broken-down Korean American man Sam Kim (Sung Kang, reprising his BETTER LUCK TOMORROW persona of a hard-faced tough but this time with a heart and dark past), checks into the motel, intent on boozing and babing his way into oblivion. As the conflict between Ernest and his mother escalates, Sam takes Ernest under his drunken wing, intent on imparting some questionable masculine wisdom on him.

Many films have been made about Asian American masculinity – from Justin Lin’s aforementioned violent, teen morality-fable BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, to the acculturation/cultural appropriation blues of Rod Pulido’s THE FLIPSIDE, to Wayne Wang’s impotent-laced EAT A BOWL OF TEA. While all explore the confused and tricky mud puddle that race, sex, media and culture are tripped up in, very seldom have filmmakers looked at that all-important and formative post-tween/verging-on-teen stage of life. What about all of these teens and men before they were impotent, hardened and jaded? How did their identification as Asian American men become so twisted, bent and confused?

THE MOTEL’s closest kin may be Stephen Ning’s classic featurette FRECKLED RICE (1983), sans the seedy and vice-filled backdrop. In this Asian American classic, Joe Soo is a thirteen-year-old kid, hanging out in Boston’s Chinatown, trying to figure out why he can’t seem to fit into his surroundings. Unable to use his estranged older brother or checked-out, generationally-gapped father as role models, his world is only what he knows, and race, culture and class are ideas that he can only feel, not understand. Joe’s journey parallels Ernest’s, but the race factor is reversed. As his family prepares to leave comfortable but confining Chinatown for the white suburbs of New Hampshire, and his brother introduces him to his

boho/white rock’n’roll lifestyle, Joe undergoes an existential crisis and questions are provoked that he can only begin to answer. For Joe, race is singular – the folks in Chinatown – and the pressure he feels, caught between the cultural and familial pressures that have split up his family is the only experience he knows. An open door ends the film, with the most important part of his life – exploring the outside world and untangling the complicated web of who he is – to come.

Likewise, Kang’s Ernest Chin is almost pre-race, his self-identification as a Chinese American man (however it may turn out) hasn’t yet been formed. Like Joe Soo, he can feel, but not understand race. Ernest is a perceptive young man – he is intensely affected by how the world sees him and treats him, but it’s all mixed up in a sweaty mixture of hormones, angst and confusion. Why does he like looking at porno magazines (and why are they of Asian women)? What makes him so angry all of the time? Why does he get so pissed off when the WASP boy living in the motel calls him a Chicken Chink? How come he feels comforted by the only other Chinese kid around – a girl to be exact – and why does she think he’s a dork?

THE MOTEL offers a wide-eyed view of Ernest as he stumbles through these questions, and begins to sort out what exactly makes him tick. Sam is his catalyst, forcing him to open his eyes to the world around him, and the rules and codes which govern how he acts and desires. Through bouts of breaking and entering, joyriding and fistfights, the two carouse through his hormonal and racial awakening – and he is introduced to what it means to be different. Based on Ed Lin’s novel WAYLAID, THE MOTEL refreshingly offers an alternate coming of age story – that of a rural, overweight, working-class Chinese American kid. A normal kid. The film’s screenplay – nakedly honest, with stretches of hilarity – was adapted by Kang, and won the screenplay competition at the 2004 New York Asian American International Film Festival. The film was then developed at the Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab and made its premiere at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

The film introduces Kang as a major new talent on the American independent film scene – his patient, painterly style is apparent throughout the film, from the desolate tracts of rural highway, which perfectly capture the anomie of outsider living (beautifully shot by DP Lisa Leone), to small details – the sexually frustrated tearing apart of a Coke can -which so dead-on capture the restlessness of youth. Most interesting is Kang’s treatment of adolescence and race – with a subtleness rarely seen, he explores racial awakening not as the sole product of external forces and racism, but as personal awakening, through the larger forces of puberty and adolescence.

THE MOTEL deals unflinchingly with all those things which are billed as so dangerous to youth and lead one down a path of destruction – sex, domestic abuse, bullying, drinking. What is revealed, however, is that these are all a part of everyday life, and the process of growing up; avoiding them would cause even more dysfunction than engaging with them. Besides, young folk are much more resilient and smart than society perceives..

All of the adults in THE MOTEL care deeply for the children around them – much in part because they themselves are so damaged by the hardships of life. Their experiences of navigating a world that is stacked up against them, and the pain and disappointment of being let down by a society that codes and judges by color are things they desperately want Ernest to avoid. But none of them are equipped to dispense sensible advice and instead offer jaded adult-speak guidance, stuff more likely for an alcoholic uncle to give to his college-aged nephew. Well-intentioned but ultimately incapable, they attempt to rush Ernest into adulthood, bypassing his own personal development and careening dangerously close to the same pitiful cycles they are mired in.

Mid-way through the film, Sam offers Ernest questionable counsel on how to deal with his crush on Christine. After hearing a description of the cute Chinese restaurant waitress, his only suggestion is, “She’s looking for someone to come and save her from all that. You only remind her of it.”

The advice misses its mark – it flies over Ernest’s head (he goes on to crudely proposition her), but surely burrows itself in his unconscious recesses, an idea planted. At thirteen, he’s barely able to comprehend the ways of the world, and how his sexual desires and self-image will be shaped by race, media and every other

cultural input he will absorb. But the question THE MOTEL ultimately asks, is what will happen when all this information is unlocked and understood?

Ernest’s story is left open-ended: we witness all of the help he’s given to guide him along his way (pep talk from a drunk womanizer, an overly harsh mother, a sex and drug-filled home/workplace, a barren, rural setting), but who he becomes is to be determined. Whether he grows comfortable with himself, adjusts and gets out of that town, or wallows and fills with self-hate, like Sam Kim, nobody knows. Perhaps he’ll become one of Lin’s troubled teens and rule the school by submission, or assume the role of model minority, or live on to be something totally different. This is the beauty of THE MOTEL – a momentary glimpse into that crucial point between adolescence and adulthood, when the seeds are sown, but no one knows what the hell will grow from them.