If you enjoy this show and would like to help me spread the word about it, or support it financially, you can find out more at nuancespod.com/support
GUEST BIO
June Chua loves to tell stories in a myriad of ways. She’s an award-winning filmmaker with more than 20 years experience in journalism, writing, editing, broadcasting and communications. She also helps artists with their proposals and grants. She’s now developing a creative nonfiction project – a collection of poems & stories. In 2015, she decided to resign from her life in Canada, selling her things, giving away books and moving to Berlin–alone. It would mark a 2nd migration. Her family moved from Malaysia to Canada in the 70s..
DEFINITIONS
- Laksa: A spicy noodle dish popular in Southeast Asia.
- Stipendium: A scholarship (in German)
- Sandra Oh: A Canadian & American actor of Korean descent. She’s Dr. Christina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy and the star of the BBC spy thriller “Killing Eve”.
- Mr. Miyagi: A fictional character in the Karate Kid franchise.
MENTIONED
- “9-Man” – Documentary by Ursula Liang
- “Moon Is The Oldest TV” – Documentary by Nam June Paik
- “Minor Feelings” – Book by Cathy Park Hong (*)
- “Fortune Cookie Chronicles” – Book by Jennifer 8. Lee (*)
- “My Year of Meats” – Book by Ruth Ozeki (*)
- “Forever Chinatown” – Documentary by James Q. Chan
TAKEAWAYS
- Immigrant parents struggling to survive often do not have time or bandwidth to provide emotional support
- Art is not created in a vacuum. It is always a reflection of its time, and its creator.
- We often deny ourselves the life we want because we think that’s the right thing, the honorable thing, the expected thing to do. But if we peel back the layers, sometimes all we have are excuses and fear.
- Feeling beautiful is not about external looks, but about feeling comfortable in our own bodies, and our own power.
- Quiet time alone (and or therapy i might add), can help us untangle what we really want, what is really possible, and every other obstacle or expectation that we’ve taken for granted as fact without questioning
CONTACT
Instagram | TikTok | Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
Host: Lazou
(*) These are affiliate links, meaning the host will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you if you choose to click the link and make a purchase. This is a free way to support the show if you plan on getting those books anyway!
Additional links from June
Ode to the Dandelion – June Chua
Egg Rolls & Chicken Balls – June Chua
Our Home and Chosen Land – June Chua
Additional Music Links:
Nuances Podcast – curated Spotify | Apple Music playlists with past guests, hosts & more Asian diaspora artists.
SPONSOR
Featured song: “Sidelines Aren’t For You” by 23rd Hour
This episode is brought to you by 23rdhr.com.
Video with captions
Transcript
Lazou: Our guest today is June Chua. June loves to tell stories in a myriad of ways. She’s an award-winning filmmaker with more than 20 years experience in journalism, writing, editing, broadcasting, and communications. She also helps artists with their proposals and grants. She’s now developing a creative non-fiction project: a collection of poems and stories.
In 2015, she decided to resign from her life in Canada, selling her things, giving away books, and moving to Berlin alone. It would mark a second migration. Her family moved from Malaysia to Canada in the seventies. June, thank you so much for being here with me today.
June: I’m so grateful and happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Lazou: So your family moved to Canada from Malaysia, and you grew up in several places in Alberta. What was that like for you growing up? Did you feel like you were part of the communities around you?
June: I love this question because I come from Alberta, which I’ve often told people is considered the Texas of Canada, and you can take that many ways. It’s very right wing, it’s cowboys and oil. However, we did end up in a small town called Oyen out on the ball prairie in a trailer park. I can’t think of a more North American experience.
We had no idea actually when we moved there, what it was supposed to be. We didn’t have stereotypes in our heads, at least I didn’t, I was quite young. And Oyen being less than a thousand people with the only other Asian family running a Chinese restaurant we were definitely people who stood out.
But I have to say it was a truly magical experience. And I’ve found it interesting that people from big cities are often astonished that I say that. But maybe this is a simpler time, if I can call it that in like the late seventies because people were welcoming. They smiled at us. My father took a job out there as a gas and pipeline engineer. It was the first job he was given, and they said to him you’ll need to live out in this little tiny town for six or seven months. So he said, doesn’t matter, we have almost nothing. We each had two pieces of luggage, so we just moved out there. He had a coworker named Harvey whose wife Ruby was very kind.
And she also had three kids. I think it was only our second day there, we heard a knock on the door and she had baked a pie for us. I know this is sounding like I made it up, but I did not make this up. Harvey and Ruby and their three kids they were wonderful. And I had my first Halloween there, our first Halloween ever.
And I think there can be nothing more magical for a small child than to think that people would give you candy for free. we couldn’t believe it. It was just like, what is this? My parents got to know people in town and one of these teenage girls said, I’ll take your girls out trick or treating.
So she took us trick or treating around this wonderful town where we got free candy and we would even trick or treat at the little hospital. Or maybe it was a clinic, I can’t remember. But the clinic gave us like bandages. And then we would trick or treat at the local max Milk or seven 11 or whatever you wanna call it at that time.
And, of course they gave us lollipops and stuff. It was absolutely fantastic. And the kids, even in this school, were very kind. And I have to say, when we’ve moved into the big city, which is Calgary, and Calgary at the time might’ve had 700,000 people. I think it’s now 1.3 million.
But Calgary was rough. You always think, oh, a bigger city. There’s multiracial kids and, there were more kids that looked like me or looked South Asian or whatever. But for the first time in my life, and I hate saying this word, I was called a chink. And it’s taken me most of my life to be able to say that word without feeling the sting.
It was literally a kid who refused to play with me and told my white friend, I don’t play with chinks,
Lazou: Wow,
June: And when you’re eight or nine years old that incident stayed with me all through my life. I know that your audience out there, whoever they are, have probably had that singular experience where they were alienated and othered in such a brutal manner, especially as a child where you just sitting there going, I don’t understand what he’s saying.
Why? Why is this a problem? You don’t even know me.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: So I don’t think of large cities as these wonderful multiracial places. I actually don’t. I sometimes feel that they can be places that are even more alienating because people stick together. If you’re in a small town, you have to get along with everyone. There’s no choice. So I grew up in Calgary and it’s still weirdly my hometown. It’s the town of the biggest rodeo on earth, the Calgary stampede. Which is also a strange thing to grow up with as a little Asian girl. Because every year we dress up as cowboys and we have a parade.
I remember that parade. I had a little pink cowboy hat. My mom dressed us up in Western gear, mostly like Western shirt and jeans. And then we would watch the parade, which starts the Calgary Stampede every year in July. And then afterwards we would go for Dimm Sum in Chinatown.
Lazou: It’s awesome.
June: That encapsulate the entire Albertan experience for me how strange it is to say all these things in one paragraph,
Lazou: yeah.
June: So I would say that it was harsher in the big city but eventually I got friends and I felt all right.
When you look back from this point of view from years later, I realized that I purposely chose to befriend white people. It’s like I felt that protected me.
That’s something that has taken me years to understand and years to undo, to be honest I have to be honest to all my Asian brothers and sisters out there that I purposely avoided befriending other Asian people. Although I would say by the time I hit high school, I had friends who were, Chinese Korean, you know by high school it was all right. But still, I think I’ve definitely struggled with that idea that if I’m with a white person, I’ll be safe.
Lazou: Yeah, so was it like you felt that if you were with other Asian kids, you would be stereotyped as one of those kids, whereas if you were with mostly white people, you would be accepted as one of the white kids, even though you’re not quite white. Was that kind of the thinking? Yeah.
June: I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s oh, I’m not one of those Asians. I’m one of you. I understand you.
I eat white bread.
Also when I say safe, if you’re walking down the street with a white person, I felt and I still feel that, to tell you the truth, I felt that no one would bother me.
Lazou: yeah.
June: And unfortunately it’s true to this day that if you’re a couple of Asian or p o c people, you can be a target
Lazou: Yeah.
June: It’s terrible when I think about it now, so many decades later that this is still the case. Yeah, I was white adjacent.
Lazou: Yeah. So the poem that we just played, that you wrote in your poem, you have a few items that really punch me in the guts because they would’ve been on my list too as a teenager. The eyes, the nose, being tall and svelte, all those Eurocentric beauty standards.
How has your perception of beauty and your physical attractiveness changed over the years?
June: man. Do you have another couple of hours? Yes, it has changed. I didn’t feel attractive for years. I thought my nose was too flat. As you can tell, I wanted a bridge for my nose I didn’t have those big eyes.
And, my skin was a bit dark. I didn’t have that fair hair, all that stuff. But I have to say, it goes through levels because as I got to university, I understood that oh, I’m attracted to some people and people find me attractive and they want to go out with me.
And I thought, okay, then obviously whatever standard of beauty I had ebbed away in university. In my twenties, I was still thirsty for more representation. There wasn’t enough Asians anywhere and especially females, and I wanted to have more of them. But there were very few.
Sandra Oh in the 1990s started her career in Canada, and I followed her trajectory because we both grew up in Canada around the same time, I am not obviously as famous as she is, but I consider her like a contemporary in that sense.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: And so she was the one I hung onto like 20 years, I swear, because it’s while she can appear on camera, she has monoliths and a round face.
And of course on different shows, people find her attractive, So I hung onto her for a while and then I think.
What really worked for me was sometime in the early two thousands, I took up flamenco dancing and -surprise, I took flamenco dancing. And that did something for me that I don’t think therapy or even talking it out could have done for me, which was I put myself, I’m not a very good dancer, by the way. But I took it because I thought, Hey, that is the first female dance form that I’ve seen where the woman does not have to be 80 pounds, where she doesn’t have to be so light on her feet. In fact, you are required to be heavy. I like that you stomp your feet and that you’re of the earth. That’s what I liked about that dance, and I hadn’t seen much of that growing up. It was just ballet and goodness of, waltz’s and stuff, the old stuff. And so I decided to take it just for the feeling of like heaviness to be rooted.
I took it for six years and I loved it. I am a terrible flamenco dancer. However, my teacher, this wonderful woman in Toronto said, flamenco dancing is not about perfection. It’s not about some strange idea of looking beautiful. Flamenco dancing is emotion. She says, I’ve seen wonderful flamenco dancers where everything just looked gorgeous, but they didn’t have emotion.
And I have seen flamenco dancers where if you really look at the way they dance, it’s not perfect, but they do it with such emotion. That’s what flamenco was about. You are there in the moment and you put everything into it. And it could be rage, it could be sadness, it could be happiness, but be there.
And I think that on its own, made me understand that my body wasn’t about other people looking at me. It was me moving my body in a powerful way. Understanding that my body is here for me. I get to move from A to B with my body. I get to wake up in the morning, I get to walk, I get to get on airplanes. I get to hug people.
And so that gave me such an inner sense of the beauty of the body.
I wanna also tell people that I struggled a lot in my teenage years with weight, with dieting. And this may sound familiar to a lot of people. And I still feel the struggle to this day about my body. However, I am very conscious of the fact that I did flamenco.
That incredible sense of being rooted somewhere to the earth and being powerful has a lot to do with inner beauty. . And so now as I get older, I see that my body has changed and I’m going through another sort of, oh, my body is not as svelte as it was before and I can’t eat so much chocolate But I try to remind myself, how do I feel? Do I feel still strong in my body? And most of the time, yes, not all of the time, but most that’s where I’m at.
Lazou: Yeah. It’s definitely a struggle that a lot of us, especially women have faced in terms of trying to fit into that European beauty standard.
I struggle with my weight too, but I like chocolate too much. I was like, screw it. I’m giving up.
June: I’m with you, Sherry. I did a lot of dieting in my teens, and then at a certain point in my twenties, I was just like, I think this body is pretty good. It seems to be attractive to me and other people. And I love food so much that I cannot really give up on anything like chocolate or I have to say bacon is my failing.
And potato chips, I cannot, I have to just eat them. I cannot put them in my house,
Lazou: you’re Canadian, so you have to eat bacon, don’t you?
June: I do actually. It’s my patriotic duty to love bacon so much. People can’t believe it. I actually eat bacon three times a week. I know. It’s I love it, but I also eat oatmeal.
Lazou: Now your list also speaks to cultural clashes, whether it’s related to food, gender roles, career choices, or things that were not worth spending money on. Do you wanna elaborate on the gap between what you felt you needed in order to fit in and what your family valued at the time?
’cause it seemed like a lot of those things you felt like if you had those, you would be able to fit in better.
June: Yeah. This topic of belonging is so big that it’s almost difficult to encapsulate. The desire of any human being is to belong somehow.
As an immigrant child who didn’t look like everyone else, I didn’t feel like I belonged in my early years in Canadian society or in school, let’s just say.
And my family also had different values that I didn’t understand, so therefore I didn’t belong to my family either. I now can look on it as an adult and go, wow, those two are very painful. I would feel like I needed to belong, like all the kids in school, because in my family it was very strict.
And this may be a familiar story. The slogan of our family, if you could think of one, was get good grades, work hard. And eventually you will marry, buy a house, have children. That was the trajectory that you just knew. And I understand that is something that my parents felt was needed for survival, just pure survival.
And as an adult, I can see fully that they were scared. They have three little girls and what they wanted was for us to be secure and what else? But to become one of five professions. Is it doctor, lawyer, dentist? What are the other two? Engineer? And there’s a fifth maybe pharmacist,
Lazou: Accountant.
June: accountant. right. I joke about this with a lot of friends who didn’t come from Asian families or immigrant values, and they thought that’s not true. I said, you don’t understand. When I look at the people, like my parents’ friends and their children, guess what they became they really did. A lot of them became one of those groupings.
So I really needed, I used the word Mr. Miyagi. Mr. Miyagi stands for so much in that poem, which is a role model, someone to mentor me and to reconnect me maybe to something from my own culture that I could be proud of. Which, at the time I know my parents didn’t have time. They were working too hard. So that’s not something I can fault my parents for at this time. But it is something that years later all of us have to deal with this sort of lack this gap.
You say it felt like a chasm, like a huge canyon between the fact that I didn’t see myself as any of those five professions at all. I was so far away from that internally, and then also that I wanted to be Sandra Oh I just admired her from afar. Because I was like, wow, at the age of 19, she got her first starring role in a Canadian biopic of a Chinese Canadian poet, which is actually quite major when you think about the 1990s that time.
Mr. Miyagi stands for so much, I needed that type of person to guide me and to tell me that I had choices. And when you’re growing up in what I would deem the Texas of Canada in a immigrant family when there’s no internet by the way, and you can only watch so many TV channels that have white people on them, then what are my choices?
It’s so limiting
Lazou: Yeah. One thing that came from that poem when I was reading it, was it seemed like you felt you lacked choices, that you didn’t have agency. So at what point did you finally feel empowered to be yourself and pursue the careers that you wanted?
June: That is a very good question because having agency has taken me years. I think I had a tiny amount of agency in high school when I took a drama class. I just thought, you know what?
Life isn’t just about chemistry, math, biology, and whatever else I had to take. I looked at this and went, I’m gonna take drama class because no one can stop me. It was one of my credits. So I did, and I am eternally happy that I found this class where a man named Agrell pushed us.
Everyone can talk about a very good teacher in their life. Mine was the drama teacher. He basically took us through a journey through world history.
And if you took his class for three years, 15, 16, 17 years old, he told you that, if you’re an artist in the world, you have to know what’s happening in the world.
He pushed us a lot as high schoolers to understand the world.
He infused in us critical thinking. He would say, what did you watch on the news last night? This is drama class. We’re just like, oh, we watched people were starving somewhere. He goes, and do you think that’s your fault? I said we’re not sure. What answer do you want? And he just said, think about it.
What caused the starvation? And really, he pushed us to think about the world of politics and economics and how does that affect people? And then he introduced us to the idea that, when you write plays, you’re not just a person in a cave writing a play.
You’re part of the world.
So we’re gonna study this play. Now, we’re gonna research what was happening at the time that the playwright wrote this? Study everything, dig it up. If we studied a play, we had to study everything about the playwright and the time that he did the play, all the social things that were happening, politics, whatever that would affect how the play was written and why the playwright wrote it.
He gave us a good grounding on world politics, history, society, and how plays are done or produced, how the playwright goes about doing these things. And I think that gave me an opening into, oh, the arts isn’t just some endpoint, it’s a whole world, a universe of creation. And if you’re in the world, you can be an artist.
As a high school student, it opened me up to world history in a way that made me understand that there’s a lot of things happening out there. It sounds so general, but it was bigger than the five choices of careers that were open to me.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: And I think that that gave me some agency to pick journalism as a career, which at the time, I have to say I had no one in my life did anything that different. I look at my cousins and my aunts and uncles. I have virtually no one to follow. At the time, I just thought I can call myself a journalist and that’s just a little bit different and I get to write, or I get to do something that is not part of those five professions.
Doctoral lawyer, dentist engineer, accountant. That was my first introduction to having some agency, but actual agency, I would say arrived later in life. Later in my journalism career.
Lazou: So Let’s talk a little bit about your career in journalism. What was that like to navigate as an Asian woman at the time in Canada?
June: I find it strange when I hear the word career because sometimes when I look back it looks like I created this, but a lot of times it was just like, I think I’ll become a journalist and see where I go with that. And I enjoyed it. The difficulty in the nineties in Canada was that there were so few of us and we were often seen as special hires. This is a big problem because you need to have people of different backgrounds in a profession, but the people hiring are all the same kind of people, white. So they had to institute programs to make sure they hired people of different backgrounds. And then the problem is you enter these white newsrooms and they just look at you as if, oh, you’re special. how could you be good?
Lazou: Yeah.
June: No one questioned me that way, but you could sense it and feel it. There were only a few of us, and you could tell that they were very wary of us. The people who’d been in the news for, let’s say more than 10 years, you could sense it.
Just the way they looked at you, it’s like, oh, another one. I wonder how she’ll do. The difficulty when there’s only maybe three people of color in a newsroom, let’s just say, and one person isn’t very good, then suddenly all people of color get painted with the same brush, which is awful. Like I, I don’t even have words to say that. Whereas I encountered in newsrooms, people who were of white European backgrounds who were not doing very much, and some of them were rather inept, but they never got fired. They were part of a large group of people. So no one ever said, oh, all those white people, they must be inept because these five, other people are inept.
It’s just unfair on so many circumstances. And that’s what happened. They would quietly say to me, oh, you’re doing great. And I could tell that they were relieved because, I don’t know, some other special hire didn’t do so great. It is really difficult because I busted my ass for the first five years of journalism like you wouldn’t believe. And I still felt I was going nowhere because it’s always been competitive profession, even more so now. But in the 1990s it was like I did double the stories of some of the men who’d been there for 15, 20 years and still they weren’t gonna give me a full-time job.
Lazou: Wow.
June: And, you know, this is the 1990s, this is not 2020 where we have a lot of other things going on in media. And I was people pleasing a lot too. I was trying to, again, fit in, be happy with everything and bust my butt doing so many stories and I burnt out. I actually burnt out in my twenties, which is not unusual these days to burn out in your twenties.
But I burnt out
Lazou: Yeah.
June: and I took my own sabbatical when I was 26. I went to France.
Lazou: Nice.
June: So I always say to people, understand why you are working and protect yourself.
A lot of times it’s not because you work hard and you’re good, it’s because of other circumstances. And so you have to protect yourself, your health, your wellbeing. That’s number one.
Lazou: Yeah. There’s this double standard when you’re a minority and they consider you a minority hire, it’s like, when you’re good it’s oh we’re all good. So of course you have to be good. When you do well, they don’t go and say, oh, all the bipoc hires must be good.
No, that doesn’t happen. It only happens in the other direction.
June: Oh, so true. That is so true. That’s what’s so frustrating.
Yes. Yes. I always try to counter that type of talk with You know what? Being part of this great world and being someone of a different background than all the other white people, I am also allowed to be a failure. How about that?
Lazou: Yeah.
June: Can’t you see me as a whole person?
Lazou: Yeah.
June: That’s what makes me wanna scream. It’s just like I can be a bad person. I can be also a good person. I can also fail and also fail at a lot of things in a gigantic way, but I’m allowed to fail. But this is the difficulty the whole model minority image of, smiling and working hard and all that stuff is just, frankly, I’m just tired.
Lazou: yeah.
June: I just try to be direct. Now, I don’t wanna be a smiley Yes person, as you can tell I’m not. I have tried all my life not to be, but there have been many times at work where I’ve had to be, and that’s what I don’t like Sherry, is that I just thought, I don’t belong at work either.
I don’t belong here with these smiley people nodding their heads. That was very unpleasant for me too. And so I guess I’m still finding myself.
Lazou: I think that’s a lifelong journey for all of us.
June: Totally. Totally.
Lazou: it’s a lot of pressure when you’re a minority in any setting,
You have this burden of representing your people. It’s like, I am not all the people. In fact, I’m probably a poor example of my people in many respects. Don’t look at me for that.
June: Hallelujah. I totally, that’s exactly what I would say too.
Lazou: So how did you branch out from journalism into other fields?
June: I think that Documentary filmmaking is linked to journalism, and I wouldn’t say I branched out as much as I saw a story that I felt I needed to follow. And by the mid two thousands, I’d already spent, I don’t know, more than a decade in journalism at that point.
And I’d already gone into like online journalism, one of the early people at the time, and I thought, okay, this is fun, but really I would really like to do more. I only did a few documentaries. The first one was called "Twin Trek" and it fell into my lap. It was a story about Bengali Norwegian twin brothers from Canada who go to a family reunion in northern Norway and uncover a secret.
That’s my elevator pitch. And it fell into my lap at a time when I was really looking for a challenge actually. And so I had to buy a mini DV camera, figure out how to shoot. I didn’t know how to shoot a camera at that time. It seems so easy now with all the technology, but at the time, no.
I bought the camera kit on my own. Then I taught my partner at the time to shoot a camera, or rather, I asked a fellow filmmaker who happened to be a slightly older Chinese Canadian cameraman. He said, listen do you need help? I said do you have one day where you can just teach us camera tricks?
He said, sure. Just buy me dinner. I’m like, no problem. Basically, he said to us, your friend is this switch. It was the automatic switch. Because when you’re running around trying to shoot a doc and things are unfolding, you can’t do white balance or focus. You just press automatic June.
And the other thing is always have sound. Make sure your sound is running. You can always try to do something with the pictures if something goes wrong, you can somehow scrape by. But if there’s no audio of a key moment, you’re screwed. So it’s like audio. Yes, audio. But yeah, that’s how I fell into documentary filmmaking.
And on my first try at Hot Docs, the largest documentary festival in North America. I won my pitch.
I won my pitch.
Lazou: Awesome.
June: And I have to say, it is also thanks to a wonderful African American filmmaker called Marco Williams, who happened to be standing by the food table with me at a party at Hot Docs. And he looked just as uncomfortable as I did, although he has a lot more experience than me. I was a newbie I was just standing there and I looked at him, I said, Hey are you a filmmaker here? Whatcha doing here? And he just started talking to me. Then I told him that I was trying to pitch my first ever doc, and he goes, I can help you.
So we worked on my oral pitch. you know, I have to Sit there in front of a commissioning editor and tell them your story. so we worked on it over a period of 10, 15 minutes and yeah, I won the pitch competition for that specific pitch prize.
Lazou: Amazing.
June: that got me rolling.
Lazou: Awesome.
June: Yeah that’s how that happened. But a lot of times it’s me feeling a little bit bored and trying to find new ways of doing other things. That’s how I fell into a few things here and there, I was seeking.
Lazou: Yeah. And you had not one, but several amazing careers in multiple different creative fields. So I wanted to give you the opportunity to tell us about some of the highlights, your favorite moments in various roles that you have played over the years.
June: I think she, it’s really difficult to be beating my chest. I’m not used to it, believe it or not.
Lazou: It doesn’t have to be something that you feel like deserve international acclaim, but it can be something that you were proud of. What was a piece in journalism that you worked on that you were really proud of, or any other project that you were proud of.
That’s all that matters.
June: Thank you. It’s a lovely question to ask because then it makes me understand what I’ve done, and I don’t pause many times to think about it.
There is a few things I would say I’m most proud of. I worked in the town of Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, as a TV journalist, I was actually the first journalist ever allowed to follow the SWAT team in Ottawa.
So we did a two week follow along and it sounds so quaint now, but at the time they did not allow TV journalists along. And so I had a first, let’s just say, and we did this huge long TV doc about the, they call them the tactical unit, they don’t call themselves swat, but I hung around these guys.
It was the most intense, dare I say, fun follow along to understand how they work.
The other thing is Twin Trek", the first independent doc I did did not end up at Hot Docs or at, the Berlinale or at any major festival in the world. It did not end up at any medium-sized festival either. I spent a whole year completely frustrated, like a lot of filmmakers, like, why wouldn’t anyone watch my film? But there was one year, it just seemed, it felt like it was the year for my film. It ended up being shown in this special cultural festival in northern Norway.
The film, of course, takes place in that part of the world. And it features a particular part of Norwegian history that was hidden. We showed the film in this cultural festival in their biggest room, which was the community hall and like over a hundred people in this village, and they went completely quiet after the end and they clap politely, like Canadians actually. But at first I thought, did I insult these people? What happened? And then they started drinking and having fun after this presentation. And when I walked through the village, people were calling out to me and asking if they could buy my DVDs. One woman in particular offered me beer and a large beer.
She was slightly inebriated. She says, I wish my father was here. He would love your film. And I, ‘ I said, I can sell it to you. She said, sure. And then she looked at me, do you know what happened after your film was shown? I said, I don’t know. Everyone was silent. Please tell me. She goes, all the old people were crying.
Lazou: Oh,
June: Oh, I was just, I looked at her, I said, really? She goes, yes, they were crying June, they saw them.
Lazou: so you are the Asian women who made white people feel seen.
June: Yes a certain segment of that population in northern Norway. I don’t wanna give up the secret that’s in this film. But yes. And also this film ended up at the Kathmandu Film Festival in Nepal. And I have to say, nothing is going to top, I can’t believe I’m saying this, nothing is gonna top that feeling of having landed in Kathmandu, which feels like, I don’t know.
It was like a film festival on Mars basically. It was so unique to be in a place like that where you’re just like, wow, I’m in Kathmandu and apparently my film is screening here. And they said, they said, your film is screening there. And they pointed at this giant auditorium. I said, what?
I thought it would be screening at the smaller venue. They said no, it’s gonna be here. I said, how many seats are in there? They said, 700. I said, no. Who’s gonna show up on a Tuesday night to see my film? Are you? They said, June, there’s a lot of university students around here. They’re gonna come see your film.
All lots of people, they’re gonna come. I said, yeah, sure. I arrive on a Tuesday and I see a lineup
Lazou: Wow.
June: out the door of this auditorium. And I was like, what? And I was slightly hyperventilating Sherry. I’m not kidding. I was just like, wow, I can’t believe this. I can’t. And I was with several filmmakers.
They were from different parts of the, like from India, from Sri Lanka. Bhutanese filmmakers. They were so sweet. These filmmakers I was with during that whole time. They were wonderful. And And they looked at me and there’s like, are you okay? I said, no. And then we get into the auditorium and I see all the seats filling up I run to the bathroom.
I am crying like you wouldn’t believe. It was just enormous.
And so I always say to people you don’t know when you start a creative project where it’s gonna end up and you’re gonna be really frustrated. Really, you’re gonna think you made the worst film in the world. Or that no one cares and no one’s ever gonna see your film.
And then the world opens up somehow.
I may never make it to the Berlinale or Cannes with my film or Hot Docs, but I tell you, that moment will never be taken away from me or the film. There were like not 700 people in the auditorium, but it was quite full. So they said probably over 500 people.
I was like, wow,
Lazou: a lot
June: That is an enormous amount of people and
Lazou: for a Tuesday night. That is insane for a Tuesday night.
June: Kathmandu. And I think of all the films at Hot Docs, which are all great, ‘ cause I was going to Hot Docs forever. Some of the films would end up in smaller venues at Hot Docs, which is totally fine. But I think, if for some reason this film ended up in Hot Docs, I would not have been in the 800 seat auditorium.
Not like it was at Kathmandu.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: It was stuff like that. You just you will never forget. And also, my other film "Travels With My Brother", not my brother, my friend’s brother, actually. It’s about an autistic man. We show his inner world by using stop motion animation. That film ended up being screened in I don’t wanna use the word strange, places I never thought it would’ve screened at. A big festival in Switzerland. All over India,
In Thailand, and then in the Met Museum in New York City.
Lazou: That’s cool.
June: Like what? I’m really proud of that. And of course, I’ve done a lot of writing and personal essays, which I’m proud of, one of which was about flamenco and what it did for me and my body. That was in the back page of the Global Mail newspaper in Canada. And that was for me, a sterling moment also.
Lazou: Do you have a link to that? We could put it in the show notes.
June: Absolutely. Flamenco essay. Oh God. Sherry, you’ve got me talking.
Lazou: You have so many cool stories. I wanna hear them all like we only have an hour, but like I wanna hear them all.
June: I know. I just thank you for making, when I recount these things, it makes me feel really good.
Lazou: Yeah, and hearing your story about both documentaries, it reinforces the new idea around social media these days that you really have to find your niche and just make whatever you wanna make ’cause there’s an audience for it.
June: I totally agree.
Lazou: Finding that audience where they live, it’s a little tricky. Sometimes you might have to go to Kathmandu,
June: Yeah,
Lazou: if you do go there, it’s pretty awesome, apparently.
June: yes. Yes. If I could just interject about another thing about Kathmandu. On my way to Kathmandu. You have to stop at different points just to get all the way there. I got an email from a woman who ran the Spiny Babbler Arts Club in Kathmandu. I remember looking at going, this sounds like it’s from Harry Potter. Is this email even real? And she said, hi. I do this arts club for children in Kathmandu every Saturday. And I’m also part of the Kathmandu Film Festival. I really like your film. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind showing it to these kids in Kathmandu while you’re here.
Lazou: That’s really cool.
June: That, again, like you don’t know what’s gonna happen to you or your film when you start a creative project. And let me tell you, I got picked up by a 16 year old on a motorbike on a Saturday morning to go somewhere in Kathmandu. And I looked at him, I remember I said to him do you have a second helmet? He just wanted me to get on that because the traffic in Kathmandu is insane.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: I just said, I’m not gonna survive this, but what a great obituary Canadian filmmaker dies on the back of a motorcycle in Kathmandu, and then he just said, oh, yes. So he gave me not the best fitting helmet, but it was a helmet, and I put it on, and then I clung to this boy for my dear life because there are no traffic rules in Kathmandu.
He’s weaving in and out of traffic like you wouldn’t believe. And I could feel my leg brushing up against the side of a van or something. I’m like, oh God, let me survive this. Let me survive this. And I got to present my film to a group of eight to 14 year olds. I would say that the older kids were more interested than the younger kids.
There is a picture of me with all these kids in Kathmandu somewhere, and I don’t know, it’s all very special.
It’s not the most, how do you say
Lazou: Prestigious.
June: prestigious, that is the word, but it means something. A lot of it meant something
Lazou: Yeah.
June: to some people somewhere in the world.
Lazou: Yeah. And I think at the end of the day, that’s what matters more. don’t get me wrong, it’s nice if you get an Academy Award, but I’m not saying it’s not, but,
June: I would love one, yeah.
Lazou: but the fact that it has meaning for the people who see it, just like with this podcast, it’s not like I’m getting awards for this, but people will send me messages and say, you know, I really feel seen when I listen to those stories. And that means a lot to me because that was representation I never had growing up,
June: yeah. Sherry, I have to give full props to you.
Lazou: Oh, thank
June: The fact that your podcast asks the good questions. The fact that you do research, the fact that you ask me a lot of pre things that happened before the interview, just, I think your audience knows this, but I just wanna reiterate that we need this so badly and not in a way that’s, that it has to be focused actually, that’s not the exact word I wanna use, but focused and deep. That’s the reason why I wanted to be on your podcast. You know? I,
Lazou: Thank you. I appreciate that. Yes, I do try to make sure that the interview really allows every guest to shine because I think all the guests that I’ve brought on the show had really cool stories, and I really want our audience to hear those cool stories.
June: yeah. Thank you.
Lazou: You’re welcome. You moved to Berlin in 2015 and started from scratch after having built your network in Canada for decades and from the outside that might seem like a really bold move and it is, but usually when you have a crazy idea that feels crazy to other people, a lot of times for the person doing it, it feels like the best or the only way forward.
Was that the case for you?
June: You did it again actually. Yes. Yes. By 2015, I was almost 20 years in like journalism, writing some documentary, and by that point journalism had also changed. I think everyone knows that. Between 2010 to 2015, the change was so drastic.
It was shocking if you’re in it, you’re just like, how did this happen?
Why am I putting videos of pandas? And it’s true. We put out videos of pandas. I love pandas by the way, and I watch them. But, news organizations were trying to get eyes to their sites. They would do anything. And it was also during the war in Syria that social media got much bigger and much stronger, and to the detriment of trying to get information and news from Syria out into the world suddenly, Facebook, Twitter, it got so difficult to put good stories in front of people. And I always say to people, I wish you would stop blaming the media for not whatever. What you need to do as a human being on this planet is to be a responsible human being. Look for the information, look for the good information.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: Inform yourself. But I’m just a voice in the wilderness at this point. What do you do? You’re in the biggest city in Canada. You’ve been part of a broadcaster. There’s only so many in Canada, by the way. I just didn’t know what to do. Also, we had governments that were cutting into the arts at that point, like major cutbacks. And not that you should give up your art, I’m just saying that everything was turning dark between 2010 to 2015 and I felt frustrated. As a woman who had hit middle aged, what was I supposed to do? I had visited Berlin because I befriended someone who was an actual Berliner who happened to be working for one year in Toronto. And she was lovely. And she just kept pushing me, saying, at least come for a visit when I go back to Berlin. And I went November, . I can tell you November and Berlin is not the south of France, and everyone asks me, why would you do that? I think it’s easy to love anything when it’s sunny and nice. It’s harder when it’s raining and cold
And dark. So I landed in Berlin on a very sunny day, by the way, for two days.
It was glorious, and then it turned, then it got very cold. But I had coffee with people who were friends of friends. I only knew this one Berliner. So I just emailed or messaged people that I knew in Europe and just said, Hey, you got a friend I can have coffee with.
Berlin is known to be so industrial and dark. Yeah. It’s that, but it’s also strangely a freeing place. When you arrive in a place that you know no one, you feel free.
Lazou: That is true.
June: Also, people that I encountered that had moved here, they seemed very relaxed. They weren’t sitting there telling me they did this or that. They asked good questions how are you doing? Why are you here? What was your film about?
Oh, they didn’t go around asking sort of the things that happen in North America, which is people trying to figure out if you, I don’t know, own a house or an apartment or where you are in life exactly. Whereas here, it’s not about what you are, it’s who you are. That’s how I felt when I was around here. And I found it so difficult to leave. One person that I met borrowed a projector and before I left, he emailed me and said when are you leaving Berlin june? I got a projector. Let’s make a screening of your films. I was like, what? I said, I have two films.
He goes, sure, let’s do it Sunday night. invite people, you know? I said, I know five people. Peter, I think you have to invite all your friends. I think 15 people showed up on a Sunday night from different parts of the world, and they asked very good questions after each film very pointed, very direct, very honest.
So we had a very good discussion after each film and then we had pizza. And then they asked me they always ask filmmakers, what’s your next project? And I just looked at them. I said I don’t know. I don’t have a project. I said, why? And they were so concerned. They said, why? Why? You’re a filmmaker. You must have a something. I said, no, I have nothing. I actually don’t feel very creative. To be in a room of strangers that had such concern for what I would call my wellbeing was practically revolutionary for me in that moment in time.
Wow, I feel more cared for in this room
Lazou: Yeah.
June: than I did at work where I’ve been working for so long. In a city that I had slowly started to dislike. Just the care which total strangers looked at me like, it was wonderful. One guy said to me, why don’t you come to Berlin?
You can come here just for six months. I said, really? I don’t think so. I mean, I would have to, what would you have to do? Well, I would have to take, let’s see a leave. And then what do you have in Toronto? I said, an apartment. Your answers become ridiculous. When people ask, and I said what would I do for, like, how would I he looked at me, he goes, you’re from Canada.
You can get here and go back home. There are people in this room from Eastern Europe especially who came here. June with nothing. And when he says nothing, he means it.
And, that’s when it really hit me. Like, What was my obstacle?
Lazou: Yeah. What’s really holding you back?
June: Yeah. And my obstacle was me. my obstacle was ideas I had of me.
ideas that I thought society had of me that I was supposed to, I don’t know, be successful in some manner. I don’t know what 2014 was a watershed. It was just like, wow. I can’t even tell you why I shouldn’t come here, but I’m making excuses.
But I went back to Toronto and thought that I was just here for a vacation and that I should just forget about it. And that’s the interesting part. I could not forget about it. It kept coming back to me over and over again as I did my job, as I schlepped myself around the city that I was disliking at that point and thinking to myself , why am I here? I actually don’t like it at all. None of it. So yes, I came to a point in my life where I had to leave. I had to leave. didn’t see any more choices left in that city for me. I didn’t like being there at all. And so I packed up six months later, I packed up. I shipped some boxes. I gave away clothes, shoes, bags, oh, my beautiful bags and books. And I arrived in Berlin with three pieces of luggage a box of shoes, and no plan. Probably the best decision I made.
Lazou: Yeah, sounds like it was a great decision. So what would you say is the experience of minorities in Berlin? Like how does that differ in Europe versus North America from your experience?
June: I think the difference has to be with the type of racism. Racism comes in so many different forms
There are a lot of minorities in Europe that have such a different history than the minorities in North America.
So as someone who’s now lived in both, I would say that at minimum in North America, I can walk the streets and feel as if not always, for the most part in Canada, people believe that A, I speak English and b, that possibly I’m actually from there. When I was younger, people used to mimic Chinese to me, but that was when you’re a kid. But in Europe, we’re now 2023, there’s still incidences of people of Asian descent getting these weird people trying to mimic Chinese to them as if to insult you. And I just think: how can it be that your racism is so stupid? Like how pathetic is that? So there’s this strange sense of reliving a time in the eighties, right when there was a certain type of racism that doesn’t normally happen in North America, whereas it just happens in Europe because they’re 15 to 20 years behind on this but there is a lot happening in Germany to Decolonize.
There’s a lot. And it took a lot from the Afro German community, especially. They’ve been working on it for 20, 30 years to change street names, to take off the names of colonizers, to return art objects.
I’m not part of that, so I can’t be a representative speaking about what happens in that sphere. But I have to say that in the last five years I have seen so much movement here that it gives me a tiny bit of hope.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: I think also there is a time a lot of Asian women can say this, where you are seen either as a prostitute or as someone who cleans houses.
And there’s nothing wrong per se with sex work. And there’s nothing wrong with someone cleaning houses. But again, I feel as if there’s such a lack of understanding of a whole person as we keep talking about in your podcast. Here, it’s particularly stark. It feels as if, oh, am I sometimes back in like 1993.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: And then once in a while they do something that makes me think, wait a minute. You’re so far ahead. Traditional Chinese medicine here is practiced by physicians. So actual doctors medical doctors for the last decades in Germany have learned acupuncture. This is not the case in Canada.
Lazou: Yeah. This is starting to become a thing here too.
June: So there’s little strange things that you discover when you’re living here that you think you guys took on traditional Chinese medicine, like way back. how did this happen here in this place? I don’t, yeah. So there’s things that are good and there are things that are quite bad.
Lazou: what advice you have for listeners who may be considering a bold move. How do you go about deciding what options to pursue?
June: I think it’s tough for me to give advice. Different people are at different points in their life and it’s hard to hear advice sometimes when you’re so low that you think, no, I can’t do that. But wherever you are in your life, a, it helps to be somewhere quiet and alone. I spent hours and hours alone in January, 2015 thinking about my life. There’s a small, quiet voice in you that wants to get out, that’s trying to tell you something. And there’s so much noise around you in your head, in society, on tv, that it takes a while to sit quietly with yourself and really understand what your body is saying to you.
Literally, it’s your body saying you can’t stay here. That is what I actually felt sitting in my apartment in Toronto.
May sound like I heard a real voice. That’s not what I’m saying. Internally, I heard an internal whisper that said no, you can’t stay here.
And I’m not telling people to move halfway across the world either.
That is not what I’m saying. It’s about decision making and it’s so difficult if you’re tired, fatigued, upset, depressed.
Lazou: And it’s also, figuring out really what are you doing that is for yourself that you personally, your own self wants to do and what you’re doing because you think that’s what you supposed to do or want to do, and what other people think you’re supposed to do or want to do.
June: Yes.
Lazou: Untangling all of those is really important.
June: Totally Sherry. The questions you just posed to yourself are perfect what are my values? Which speaks to what you wanna do with your life. how do I see myself and how do I see other people see me?
Is that correct? If it’s not what you want, something is off kilter, right?
And I think it’s taken me years and even being in Berlin for the last eight years, even just sorting that out for myself yet again. When I was sitting in my apartment in Toronto trying to make life choices, sometimes you see a quote and it just resonates with you.
Apparently this was attributed to f Scott Fitzgerald, but it’s been said that it was written in a film. So some brilliant script writer wrote this, by the way. And it’s
for what it’s worth, it’s never too late or too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.
Lazou: That’s perfect.
so I wanted to ask you, What’s next for you and what are you excited about?
June: I am totally into creative writing. I got a stipendium, as they say in German, to develop my book idea, which is a collection of poems, stories, creative nonfiction that speak to my experience. So I’m using objects and things to talk about my life. I don’t wanna do a straight memoir.
It’s more thinking of an object and talking about it. For instance, I did a essay that was translated into German, and published by an online Berlin magazine called Poco Lit, and it’s called Ode to the Dandelion. And so I did an entire personal essay that talked about having to dig up dandelions when I was a kid.
But that whole essay, of course, opens up into the whole idea of what is a dandelion.
Lazou: Yeah.
June: It’s a weeded that no one wanted, but in fact it helps all the plants around it, as we discovered now. And it grows everywhere. It passes borders, cultures, pristine lawns. So this essay gave me the idea of yes, I can do different types of writing, not just essays, but poetry, even science fiction that can take an object or an idea. And I spin it in a way that is about my experiences. I’ve written three poems now and, one science fiction piece, one fiction piece, and I’m just pushing the idea that I can be a creative writer, not a journalistic writer, which can sometimes be creative, but not in this sense.
So I’m excited to figure out if this is going to be something, and it may not. When they say dare to fail, what they mean is just dare to do it. That’s what they mean.
Lazou: Yeah. There’s no guarantee in exploration. You just gotta do it.
June: It’s so fulfilling, Sherri. I think you know that too, right?
Lazou: Yeah.
June: For all you people out there who are creative in any way possible, the fulfillment level is so high that in the end, who cares? If you got a prize or whatever ? all the best things I ever did in life had to do with taking some sort of risk,
Lazou: yeah. I like to round out the interview with some rapid fire questions. These are one word or one phrase answers you can explain, but you don’t have to.
June: okay.
Whoa.
Lazou: Ready?
June: Yes, I think so.
Lazou: what’s an Asian food that you should like, but don’t?
June: anything with runny eggs on it.
Lazou: What’s an Asian food that you’ll never get tired of?
June: Malaysian laksa.
Lazou: What languages do you speak? I.
June: English. Pretty well French. All right. And German? Still badly?
Lazou: Hey, getting there, right?
June: Yes. It’s a journey.
Lazou: What is a film that inspired you recently?
June: It was the Nam June Paik, Moon Is The Oldest TV. It’s a documentary about the first ever video artist. This particular doc will inspire you in so many ways. His life is a testament to creative exploration.
The other doc that I enjoyed is called 9-Man. It’s about this special volleyball game that Chinese man used to play in Chinatown and now it’s like tournaments all over the US and in Canada. That is a fantastic doc by Ursula Liang.
Lazou: who’s a writer that’s inspiring you right now?
June: I recently read Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. That tore away so many ideas I had, even though I thought I knew a lot of things about the Asian American experience. Other books that I would suggest: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer eight Lee. A wonderful ride through the history of the fortune cookie, And My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki. It’s about a TV producer who has to create some sort of docuseries.
Lazou: Awesome. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. It was really such a treat, chatting with you again.
June: yes, Sherry I just wanna say that I felt seen and heard by you. Thank you so much. wow. It’s been a very deep ride being part of this podcast, so I have enjoyed it as well. Keep doing it.
Lazou: Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
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