Crystal Kwok reveals racial history with ‘Blurring the Color Line: Chinese in the Segregated South’

Born in San Francisco to a Chinese father and Chinese American mother, Crystal Kwok was 3 when they moved to Hong Kong. When she was 10, they returned to San Francisco and she lived in the United States until she graduated from UCLA with a degree in theater. Kwok entered a beauty pageant and was awarded a trip to Hong Kong, and then received a two-year film contract with Golden Harvest, the biggest film production company in Hong Kong.

Kwok appeared in films opposite Jackie Chan, and then branched out as writer, director, filmmaker and talk-show host. She made waves as the host of a radio and television talk show renowned for its open discussion of sexual topics, and made history as the writer/director of a controversial 1999 film, “The Mistress.”

Kwok came back to the United States in 2015. She enrolled in the University of Hawaii at Manoa where she is completing a Ph.D. in performance studies; she created a 76-minute film as her doctoral dissertation.

It began as “Unruly Chinese Women: Disrupting Racial Narratives,” a documentary about the experiences of her grandmother and great aunts growing up in a large and very traditional Chinese family living above the family store in a “colored” neighborhood in the “Jim Crow” South. Kwok was already planning to include the memories of the store’s customers when the murder of George Floyd heightened her concerns about the Black experience in general. A series of highly publicized attacks on Asians in the United States brought another shift in the narrative.

The film was completed as “Blurring the Color Line: Chinese in the Segregated South.”

Kwok, 55, celebrated the film’s Hawaii premiere April 12 at Consolidated Theatres Kahala. For more information, visit blurringthecolorline.com.

Your film combines history with fascinating portraits of your family. How did you put it together?

It’s really my journey in racial structure and my discovery process. There’s the personal story and the larger family story, and the racial story and then the gender story. It evolved around that and opened up untold family history. It puts a lot of rats on the table.

Would one of the “rats” be that Chinese women of your grandmother’s generation didn’t have the freedom that women take for granted today?

The whole Chinese thing was: You don’t argue, you accept your place and be that good daughter, good wife and good mother. Like one of the answers in the film (about marriage) is that happiness had nothing to do with it. That reminds me how privileged I am to even ask these questions when that wasn’t even part of the equation back then. From a feminist point of view, I thought I needed to question it.

Are audiences surprised there were Chinese living in the segregated South?

Absolutely. There has been some recent work about Chinese in the South that kind of exposes this community, but not so much directly to the racial aspects of the positioning of the Chinese experience.

In the old-time mom-and-pop stores here in Hawaii, the owners lived above the stores. Is that why your great-grandparents lived on the “colored” side of town?

Yes, they felt that that was where the business opportunity was, but (the children) would all be referred to the white schools, which were outside the neighborhood. There is so much of the history we don’t know about, like how these laws played into how the Chinese were situated.

Looking back at your career in Hong Kong, what made “The Mistress” so controversial?

It was the first time that a movie had been made by a woman with that kind of a woman’s perspective, especially when it comes to erotic fantasies. At the time I was dating a guy whose friends were businessmen who had mistresses … as a young Asian American, a college grad, entering this space where I had to try to understand why women chose to be the “other woman.” I was fascinated. But (“The Mistress”) goes hand in hand with the talk show I had at the time. I had a very provocative kind of sensational talk show because at the time talking about sex was a very taboo thing, especially coming from a female host. I offered a very frank conversation about sexuality that no shows had done at the time. So I think you can’t mention the film without mentioning the success of the talk show.

What is next for you?

If a film is involved with social change or transformative justice, which I think my film is, I feel like I have this responsibility to reach larger audiences with why this small history is relevant and should resonate with many more people outside of this small community. For now, getting streaming is the difficult thing — how do I get this film picked up?

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Reach John Berger at jberger@staradvertiser.com.