ACAM Dialogues Mini-Episode: An Interview with Mila Zuo (Hosted by Isa You, feat. Dr. Mila Zuo)
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ISA: The Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program would like to acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the traditional, unceded, ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. We hope that as we continue to facilitate these conversations about Asian diasporic communities, we also engage in critical dialogue about what it means to be uninvited guests and settlers on these lands.
Welcome to the third mini episode of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration studies (ACAM) podcast — a series of short interviews where we sit down with members of the ACAM community and learn about the community initiatives and projects they have been working on. My name is Isa You. I’m the Multimedia Production Assistant at ACAM and I’ll be your host for this episode. We hope that this interview series can be a way to continue building connections between ACAM students, staff, faculty and community partners, while also providing our community members with a platform to share similar work they’ve been doing in their community during this time.
My guest for this episode is Mila Zuo, filmmaker, film scholar and assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. We sat down for a chat in advance of the ACAM Halloween screening on October 28th to talk migration, horror, and womanhood. Let’s take a listen.
ISA: Do you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?
MILA: Sure thing. My name is Mila Zuo, and I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Film. I teach primarily Film Studies here at UBC.
ISA: As the Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies program, we’re always interested in hearing about people’s own experiences of migration. Could you tell us a bit more about your, your and your family’s migration story?
MILA: Sure. So well, my parents immigrated to the states when I was about four years old, from Mainland China. My dad was one of the first artists from North East China to be able to come to the US to pursue his graduate studies, which he did at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. And so I grew up in the Midwest of the US, Illinois, and eventually spent most of my time in St. Louis, and the surrounding areas there. And so my migration story is really, actually also rooted in a kind of diaspora and exile from the Cultural Revolution, which impacted both sides of my family.
ISA: And so how do you see that kind of history feeding your work?
MILA: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that there is a great deal of sort of intergenerational trauma that I’m only really recently, surprisingly, getting to deal with and getting, getting to really reckon with I think, it’s always been there kind of underlying my experiences growing up and you know, there’s a kind of spectrality of kind of haunting with this kind of historical trauma. But I think that since my work deals a lot with diasporic experiences, and specifically, you know, Asian American experiences, for example. These experiences are always kind of rooted in a kind of lacuna, or a kind of feeling of lack or absence or void. And I’m trying to understand what that is and trying to understand the ways in which Asian Americans who are the products of migration really the ways in which they’ve been racialized involves both a reckoning with the kind of past, but also grappling with the present and the future that’s always trying to exclude or kind of render them invisible or hyper visible right so It’s all these frictions that run throughout throughout my work that deal with the kind of intergenerational trauma I think.
ISA: So I think it’s really interesting that you brought up the word haunting and just like thinking about the film like Carnal Orient as well. What are your kind of experiences or like thoughts on using horror as like, genre or medium to explore these kinds of histories?
MILA: Um, yeah, I’m really interested in horror, because it’s, it’s, for me, I actually think you can, there’s a great deal of latitude when dealing with racialization and things that you’re not really allowed to utter or say more more explicitly. In other ways, I think in horror, which is a form of allegorical storytelling you can, you can really get into the subconscious, you can get into these arenas of consciousness and surface kind of the problems or the kind of tensions that you may not otherwise be able to address. So, so explicitly so in Carnal Orient, it’s about a kind of appetite for the Asian body, and specifically the Asian female body and the ways in which food and bodies become collapse and the kind of Western, a hungry Western, imaginary, for for this kind of imaginary sub And so it was my attempt to try to portray how that how it feels to be an Asian Asian woman. And to be witness to bear witness to that kind of appetite and the kind of fetishization that results from that.
ISA: So, before we go any further, can you give us a summary or like a synopsis for our listeners who may or may not have seen the film?
MILA: Sure. So Carnal Orient is about these men, anonymous men who are eating in a restaurant and a Chinese restaurant, and suddenly an Asian woman walks in. And there’s a kind of rupture in the, in the reality and the fabric of the reality. And we break into a kind of fantastical sequence which ends in a kind of horrific cannibalization or that sort of left abstract. Yeah, and that’s a sort of plot synopsis. And there’s much, much more in the way of themes that I’m sure you may or may not want to discover yourself or talk about. Yeah.
ISA: So one thing I noticed that I thought was really interesting with like, the visuals of the film, like it wasn’t, you know, calling upon a specific Asian culture. It was very much a mish mash. So can you tell us a bit more about your decisions in doing that?
MILA: For sure. I’m glad you picked up on that, because there’s deliberately an attempt to represent the kind of violent conflation of Asian cultures and symbols and semiotics. And so it’s, it was, you know, she’s wearing like a fan dress or a fan made out of dress made out of fans. And there’s these weird eccentric, but perhaps to some, to many people, not not at all weird kinds of plates of food. But for perhaps a white Western person, they would see that as kind of gross and weird. And I wanted to get into the ways in which these symbols, these signs, not only are conflated under this umbrella sign of Asian-ness. But really, hopefully, those work on a kind of aspect of register that speak to the kind of disgust that’s also rooted in pleasure that, I think happens in the fetishization in the objectification of Asianness and Asian bodies. Yeah.
ISA: I am curious about the opening scene with the butcher, and that kind of like agonizing, like very long take of, you know, taking apart the chicken and stripping it with his bare hands. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
MILA: Sure. So that sequence? Well, that sequence actually takes inspiration from a 1975 feminists film collage on dieleman, in which we stay with the whole I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but should we stay with this woman who’s a homemaker and a prostitute, and we watch as she does all these mundane domestic chores and labours. And it’s about a kind of international viewing experience as you are with this woman and you understand the kind of time and effort that it takes for women to do these household things that are quite quotidian. So that sequence really takes inspiration from that is in a kind of long shot, kind of way to make you stay with the act of ripping apart this chicken preparing this chicken as a meal. But also to really slowly inhabit the not only the kind of like mechanics, the labor mechanics of it, but just to start to feel a little bit uneasy. It sort of lays out a couple of the motifs and themes of the tearing flesh of flesh that’s being rendered. You know, rendered apart and just violently treated right. So it’s about a kind of objectification again. And so, yeah, just kind of hopefully, atmospheric and works on that level as well to kind of give you a sense of dread.
ISA: Can you also tell us a bit more about kind of the inspiration for or like kind of the beginning in the background story of like making this film because I’d read online, it was in response to like, a music video, but I am curious about like, what else does it come from?
MILA: Yeah, it was definitely in response to that. I think there was a lot, so I was working on my PhD dissertation at the time at UCLA. And I think I was really wanting to understand a bit more about desire and the ways in which desire is entangled with fear. And now I think those things are inextricable, psychic functions. And so I think, for me, the film is really about, like, what is the desire for the other? And how do we, how do we acknowledge that there’s this very fearful, horrific component, about difference and about the ways in which people are both really frightened by things they don’t understand or that they other did, but also very desirous of those same things. And so there was, you know, there were some texts and books and things that I read afterwards that I then was like, oh, wow, this actually really fits retrospectively. There’s a book by Kyla Wazana Tompkins about racial indigestion and about eating, the fantasies of eating black bodies, primarily right throughout the 19th century. So those kinds of books also have helped me to understand that the desire is for tasting. The other’s body is also about, it’s not just about destroying the object, but it’s about, it’s about desiring it, desiring to possess it as well. So it’s a bit of a kind of psychoanalytic inspiration. There. Cinematically, I was really inspired by David Lynch, which I think you can see, hopefully, see in the film.
ISA: I see and I do, would you say that you explore it, like there’s a continuation of these themes explored in your upcoming book?
MILA: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So that’s the other kind of components so not only is the book also about racial tasting, and the ways in which racialized bodies in part flavor, or what how I conceive of flavor through various philosophical analytics, but it’s, it’s, it’s again, it’s about that difference and difference being something that’s palatable that’s, that’s tangible, that’s an effective affecting. And in that book, I look at, you know, I go through the five Chinese medicinal flavors, bitter, sweet, salty, pungent, and sour. And I theorize each modality around a certain filmmaker or our star rather than film, or a set of films and a set of stars. And so, carnal orient, I think, again, in retrospect, is about a bitterness, a kind of bitterness of being a racialized subject, and how to make a bitter film that kind of conveys some of that bitterness that we we’ve been racialized and objectified and fetishized might might feel.
ISA: I am curious, like, the choice to explore like, Asian womanhood through, like food and consumption, because that’s something that’s like, super interesting, but also can be a double edged sword and like, how you approach it. Like, how do you kind of grapple with these feelings? Around, you know, understanding that Asian bodies, and especially Asian female bodies are, you know, treated as something for consumption? While always, you know, finding it interesting to use food and consumption to explore your own feelings?
MILA: Oh, yeah. Interesting. So I think the question here is about like whether or not one perpetuates these these kind of stereotypes or these kinds of ways of objectifying Asian women, for example. Right. Yeah, that’s, that is a really great question that I think, really nails the paradox of a lot of my narrative filmmaking is that there is this for me. You know, how do we, the question is, how do we address something? How do we critique something, and show it without indulging in it? And I think that that’s a really fraught question. And I think that’s a really difficult question. Because the cinematic apparatus, through spectacle, always already, aesthetic assizes glamorizes makes appealing these kinds of things, right, or? And so and so it’s sort of the question is around representation and visibility and the kind of visibility or transparency. And I think that’s something I circle around and I don’t have any easy answers. But with my latest film as well, which is called Kin, the film is about white supremacy. But the question is, can I represent white supremacy, without glamorizing it? And I don’t think that I found an answer. And I think the film rather is an experiment to see what audiences think and how people respond to it. I think I’m with you, in that I kind of am more cynical about the power of the cinema to be able to critique something that it’s showing. But even if we can’t fully critique it, I think we can hopefully engage it to the extent that or such that some people can start to find some utility in it for critique. So even if that cinematic object itself can’t fully operate in the realm of critique. Hopefully it is, it inspires, it generates or it provokes some kind of thought to do so. So that’s a really kind of uneasy answer right? And it’s something that I think about a lot.
So I’m curious what draws you to the medium of film and video over other art forms?
MILA: Yeah, good question. Well, I grew up surrounded by Fine Arts because my dad’s a painter. So he, I think from an early age, I grew up with a kind of aesthetic education, but for me, film, cinema and television, all of these things were really important media for, for my becoming, I think, right. And so as a sort of cultural interfaces, with Americanness, and with identification, those were very, very powerful for me. And so I have always wanted to make films and in high school, I really started making films with my friends. And that continued on through my studies and yeah, so it’s something I’ve always just been fascinated by. I think that it straddles the popular arts and Fine Arts in a way that I think could be really accessible and could be really transformative for audiences.
ISA: So I also read that you’ve worked in like documentary or you’ve like made documentaries. And so I’m curious for you, how does the documentary differ from the narrative or, you know, the fiction film? And how do you make the decisions on which angle to pursue with themes or topics that you are interested in?
MILA: Yeah, that’s a great question as well. I mean, I think I started more With a kind of documentarian impulse, like, Oh, I want to record you know, this matriarchal village in China the Moscow people and I just want to be able to share that and maybe create a some kind of academic discourse around it, but it was it’s, it’s difficult for me I haven’t returned to documentary in a straightforward fashion because I think I’m exploring a period of of, again, cynicism towards cinema in his capacity to affect real change. And I think something about documentary you know, I love documentaries, I watch a lot of them, but one of the pitfalls for me was, you know, like the commercial documentary The straightforward documentary is that it claims to have mastered its subject in a way that I’m not comfortable with like it’s it’s sort of its gestures towards mastery, or authenticity, or represent ability are questionable for me. And so you know, for me, I prefer experimental documentaries that really foreground that problem and say like, there’s no way you can make something kind of objective or instance or authentic, completely authentic. Like that’s too that’s so elusive. That’s impossible. Those are impossible projects. Rather This is just as constructed as a narrative in many ways the right and another way is not right and other ways not there’s there are things that are out of your control that you can’t control in front of the camera. But why I gravitate more towards the narrative filmmaking in this moment is that, again, that cynicism, but I think that there’s much for me a more fertile playground with with fantasy, sometimes fantasy, can reveal more about truth than reality. I know that sounds cliche, and I’m probably taking that from a really kind of cliche kind of quotation somewhere about truth and reality but yeah, that’s to me to be kind of indirect or to go around just feels more right and truthful, at the moment for me.
ISA: So, last question, if you could teach an ACAM course on any topic of your choosing, what would you pick?
MILA: Oh, I actually had a recent discussion about this with Chris. So I think actually, I’m gonna be teaching Well, hopefully, if this is approved, I’m going to be teaching a course that will center on VAFF, the Vancouver Asian Film Festival, as a kind of field research festival kind of class, but prior to the festival, and afterwards, I think it will be centered on Asian diasporic cinemas, in theory, and culminate in kind of students making projects. And I haven’t, that’s quite vague at the moment, but I think that I’ll just sort of put some feelers out there and see what they can students are interested in, in the way of in the way of which kind of theoretical grounding they would like but I’d really love to teach something around VAFF and filmmaking practice for ACAM.
ISA: All right, well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today to chat.
MILA: Thank you. Thanks so much for the opportunity.
ISA: You just heard an interview with Mila Zuo, filmmaker, film scholar and assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Film. If you missed our Halloween screening, carnal orient is available on YouTube, link in the show notes.
Thank you for listening to this episode. If you have an idea for a mini episode of the ACAM podcast, we’d love to hear from you. Send us your ideas by emailing us at acam.program@ubc.ca. We hope these mini episodes can provide a way to stay connected with the ACAM community while learning more about the community engagement and advocacy projects our community members and partner organizations are involved in. To be notified when the next podcast episode is released and to stay up to date on all things ACAM, please follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @UBCACAM and like us on Facebook at Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies UBC.
Learn more about the guests and their work:
Dr. Mila Zuo