Worldwide Locations

Worldwide Locations

Interview: Meet the Creative Team Behind 'The Floating Box: A Story in Chinatown'


Asia Society spoke with the group at Asia Society's New York office.




Jean, how did you get involved with The Floating Box?






Did you interview mostly older people?

Jason Hwang: It was a cross-section of the population. We mainly spoke to first or second generation [immigrants] who spoke English, but we also went to a senior citizen center and Susan Cheng from Music From China translated for us. Also concurrent with the 40 hours of oral history we recorded was my work with the high school kids at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas. We created a CD installation which included their personal poetry and oral histories — what went on in the playgrounds, in the classroom and after school — and we also recorded a song. They loved overdubbing vocals to rhythm tracks I composed. We did not draw from the [kids'] oral histories in [The Floating Box] story, but their CD certainly gave us another vivid perspective of the characters .

One of the themes of both the CD you recorded with the kids from the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas and The Floating Box is generational conflict, and how the differences between generations are further exacerbated by the immigration experience. Why was this an important issue for you to address?

Jason Hwang: It's common for young immigrants or for the American-born children of immigrants, like me, to know very little about the lives of our parents in China. Language, of course, is a huge wall. I don't speak Chinese. There were only two Chinese families in the town I grew up in, and during that era of the "melting pot," bilingual education was unheard of. My parents spoke excellent English, but it was a second language. My wife communicates to her parents only with her limited Cantonese. Generational differences and change are important themes.

Catherine Filloux: There’s a sense of this "other place" with the older generation coming from somewhere else that immediately becomes something to push against emotionally. Sometimes I find a sense of having to respect parents in a way that makes it difficult to see who the real person behind that figurehead is. So those are two themes.