July/August 2021 Newsletter: A Conversation with Ina Adele Ray by Sumita Chakravarty and Guillermina Zabala Suárez

Entanglements: A Conversation with Mediamaker Ina Adele Ray

– conducted by Sumita S. Chakravarty and Guillermina Zabala Suárez

In recent months, we have become painfully aware of racial attacks against Asian Americans in San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, and elsewhere in the U.S. Some have attributed the hatred to fears stoked by the COVID-19 virus, infamously labeled the ‘China virus’ by former President Trump. Others have pointed out that racial animosity against Asians is nothing new and goes back to the mid-19th century when Chinese workers came to the U.S. to build the railroads. Asian Americans have also had to contend with their designation as a ‘’model minority” within American society, with exceptional contributions to many spheres of activity. As our society becomes more diverse (with Asian-Americans and Hispanics the two fastest-growing demographic groups, according to the latest census), there is a need for both analytical and creative voices to address some new challenges we might face.

To discuss these and other matters, Sumita S. Chakravarty and Guillermina Zabala Suárez met with Ina Adele Ray over zoom for a wide-ranging conversation. Based in Oakland, California, Adele is an artist, media-maker, teacher, mother, digital experimenter, engaged community participant, and thoughtful contributor to the needs of our troubled times.

“[A]s I’ve evolved through time and matured as a human being, I realize that my purpose, and the way I make films is to channel the spirit of the story, to channel spirit, period.

People project on me what they want to see.

I felt seen, I didn’t have to tell that story over and over again to explain to people who I was, and where I came from. My mom was not a war bride. My mom was not a prostitute. My mom was an [Vietnamese] American, she came to the United States, and she had a job. And that’s how she met my dad. You know, I finally had a film to explain that.”

– Ina Adele Ray

Before we start, we’d like to know how you and your family are doing in the recent climate of violence against Asian-Americans in Oakland where you live, and elsewhere. What have been some reactions in the community, and how are people dealing with the trauma of racism and Asian-directed hate? It seems that your own work has taken a turn towards healing and resilience. Tell us about some of this experience.

Yeah. It’s interesting being someone who can walk on the street and not be attacked. I need to point out that I do not look Asian or East Asian. I look more Latinx or Hasidic or Puerto Rican, I don’t know. But my family looks Asian, my mom who is 80, is from Vietnam. Luckily, where she lives is not as bad, but because of the privilege I have, I don’t have the direct fear that is instilled in the fear of your body being attacked. I don’t embody that kind of physical fear. But I do have that fear for my loved ones. And it’s my community. And so what I can do with my privilege is basically hold space for all of my loved ones.

I’ve noticed with some friends that there is a lot of rage. I think there was rage across the board, male and female, but a few men that I know [of Asian descent] who don’t really identify as being ‘Asian’, but are obviously freaking pissed. And I know there’s fear. So rage and fear are like the main emotions I’m seeing in reaction, rightly so. I’m a spiritual Buddhist too. I started doing this Braided Wisdom Leadership Training Program with a mixed race, Basque indigenous teacher. She is of Comanche and Basque descent. And she also has a Buddhist lineage and has a Theravada tradition as well.

So I started this program, and one of my spiritual friends in the program is of Vietnamese descent, Danielle Duong. We really vibe together on the whole Vietnamese thing. The intergenerational trauma, all that stuff. And so when this Asian violence was happening, she and I both felt the need to do a podcast to create a space that was Asian-centered for people to heal the trauma and triggers and fear and anger that they were facing. That’s channeling spirit using technology for healing. And that’s kind of where I’ve evolved to understand my purpose in life.

That is such an inspiring place to begin our conversation! Keeping with the Asian-American community theme in Oakland for a moment, what kind of vibe have you felt as an artist and mediamaker, and how has this contributed to the range of projects and roles that you take up?

2019 (Busan, South Korea) Ina Adele Ray at VR Forum at Busan International Film Festival in with fellow panelists and organizers from Dankook University.

I ended up in Oakland and got a job working for a Chinese-American owned production company, producing and editing travel shows in China. But when I came here, I wanted to replicate my life in Brooklyn, so I moved to downtown Oakland, where every place was walkable. One of the things I really noticed is so much ‘blasian’ love, black and Asian. I saw so many beautiful black and Asian couples. You hear a lot about the divisiveness within the communities of Asians and blacks, and that’s real, okay? But there is a whole other layer of love here. There is a lot of black and Asian love. And that’s the problem with the polarization of the media. For journalism it is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” But there is more black and Asian love here, than there is black and Asian hate.

Media polarization is part of the problem. And the media that I’m creating now in response is for my community. I’ve been involved with the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), which is a literary and arts organization. I was a co-director of their International Southeast Asian Film Festival in 2015. And my film, The Red Room Project (2019), was shown at the Busan International Film Festival where I hung out with a bunch of Vietnamese and Asian filmmakers. I love South Korea. We need to follow that model of what South Korea is doing to the United States. Because they fund, their government heavily invests in their film industry. It’s a machine over there. They’re like the best at it. And we need to follow up on that. They funded me to come out there to be in their VR forum.

2017 (San Francisco, CA) Ina Adele Ray presenting with a panel on “Personal Perspectives in Asian American Documentary Film” at United States of Asian America Festival [Photo courtesy of Jenny Chu]

In Oakland I’ve been around a lot of Vietnamese and Asian artists, activists, and literati types and actually, once you get here, you see there’s a huge Asian American movement; San Francisco State University is basically the mecca of Asian American Studies. Asian American Studies started at SFSU. I’ve spoken there before, I’ve been on panels with people who have made Asian American history in the United States. The Asian American movement was born in this region. So Asian America is deep here. And it’s really interesting, because when you’re on the East Coast, there’s more of a fresher immigrant population. But here, it’s like three or four generations. And so like people who come from the east coast, they come over to California, and they see an older Asian dude who sounds like a surfer. They’re like, “Whoa, this is so weird. You don’t have an accent”… like what’s going on? So that’s an interesting thing, too. But there’s Japanese and Chinese Americans who have deep roots here. And now the Vietnamese have deep roots here. The Laotians have deeper roots, the Southeast Asians, the Hmong, the Mien, indigenous Southeast Asians, there’s a lot of diversity.

We can now flashback a bit to your story as a biracial person who straddles many worlds. So much of recent immigrant writing and storytelling has taken us on journeys into remote and fascinating spaces, both physical and mental. The output is indeed rich and continues to grow. Your own work is experimental in the sense that you move across different mediums, genres, styles. While we cannot cover all of this material (available on your website), we are interested in your reflections about growing up as Asian and as American. For our readers, can you give us your full name?

My legal name is Ina Adele Ray, but I go by my middle name, Adele. My Vietnamese name is Phương Liên. Everybody calls me Adele. But in my credits and films and professional work, I use my full legal name.

Can you tell us a little bit about your family background and upbringing? What are some of the challenges you faced or still face?

I’m mixed race: my mother is from Vietnam, so I’m half Vietnamese, and my father is Scotch-Irish, Southern American. He’s from the south, and he’s Caucasian. And so I’m mixed race, half white, half Asian. I grew up in Northern Virginia right outside of Washington DC. And there was a large population of Vietnamese people. It was pretty diverse with a large immigrant community. As mentioned earlier, for readers who can’t see me, I do not necessarily look Asian, a lot of people mistake me for being other things besides Asian. Sometimes it’s white, sometimes it’s indigenous, sometimes it is LatinX. When I lived in New York people thought that I was Hasidic, or Puerto Rican, basically as a multiracial person who has an ambiguous ethnic visual identity. I am lighter-skinned, so I got the privilege from that as well. People project on me what they want to see.

1980 (Annandale, VA) Adele [lower right] with grandmother [upper left], Ba Ngoai and Grandfather [upper right], Ong Ngoai, with mixed-race sister Mary Claire [lower left]

So I’ve lived in a world where I am what they perceive me as, and growing up, in elementary school I was perceived differently than when I was in middle school or high school, and then when I was in college, because every environment was different culturally. I think as a young child, I didn’t understand what xenophobia meant. But there were a lot of American-centered, predominantly white communities that I was involved with in elementary school. And there were a lot of Christian people. I was raised Buddhist, my family’s Buddhist, but culturally Buddhist, it wasn’t like I went to a temple or anything. We had an altar, and a Buddha on the altar. We did certain rituals during certain times of the year, we ate Vietnamese food. So culturally, we were Vietnamese, we were Buddhist, my dad was the only white person in the house. Everybody else was either Vietnamese or mixed, me and my sister were mixed. Vietnamese was spoken a lot in the house, and French, as well as English. But for us, because we’re in America, we spoke primarily English. We didn’t really speak much Vietnamese, but my Vietnamese grandparents stayed with us a lot. I have full Vietnamese siblings. So my household was definitely like a Vietnamese one, you know, mixed culture… we did have a Bible in the house as well. My dad was raised Christian Presbyterian from Tennessee. He was raised Christian, but then got disillusioned by the church at a very young age. He’s very intelligent, has read the Bible. And when I asked him “Dad, do you believe in God?” he just said, “I don’t know, do you?” He always left it up to us to decide.

So inside the house was a very different way of living than, say, inside the house of the white Christian girl whose father was a pastor at a church. And I didn’t realize I had experienced xenophobia until I was an adult. As a child, I was told I was going to go to hell for not being Christian. I was made to feel bad, and shameful and ashamed of my Asian heritage. And I was told that my house smelled because of the different foods that were being cooked, you know, fried fish, fish sauce, those kinds of different smells and spices. And so there was this, but I had the privilege of hiding behind my skin that does not look Asian when I walked out the door.

It must have been hard to navigate these differences as a child.

I did feel kind of crappy and alienated in elementary school, and I really tried to belong. I used to wish I was Christian. I know that’s so weird. Stuff like that. My dad’s side of the family, I love them. And some of them were more open minded than others, but they all accepted me, but didn’t know what to make of me and my sister, and my mom always felt a little on the outside. She didn’t really like going down to Tennessee very much. So that’s just how it was. We wanted to be accepted. We wanted to be involved. We wanted to be in the in-crowd, right? We wanted to be in the community of the family of the church, the Christian Church, the elementary school people who were all Christian.

So then I went to middle school and it was at Luther Jackson, it was a public school. My middle school was one of the first African American schools from K-12th grade before integration, and later it changed and was only a middle school 7-8th grade when I got there. Some considered it to not be a good school and some kids’ parents from elementary school sent their kids to middle and high schools elsewhere. It was probably 50% Latinx and 30% Asian, maybe 10% Black and the White was a minority.

By the time I got to middle school, the LatinX kids had an affinity towards me, I think because I could pass as LatinX. So everybody just embraced me. I blended with every diverse crowd. I didn’t even know it, but they just saw me as them, as one of their people, you know. And there were Muslims and other faiths and it didn’t matter anymore. And that continued into high school, and I played sports and kind of found my place. And I remember in middle school people told us that our school was so special, because it was so culturally diverse. People came to visit our school like artists, performers, and they said, “You guys are so special, you’re so multicultural.” It was cool to be different.

And I started vibing with people who were more intersectional, close friends that were mixed race, maybe half-black, half-white, half-Puerto Rican. There were Chilean immigrants, skater kids, you know, it was really just a whole mix. There were all these different groups of people, and it wasn’t segregated.

So did school feel like a kind of haven within a broader cultural environment that was more segregated, or did you feel like you were seeing a reflection of the country at large?

Well, let’s introduce technology into this. All of us were influenced by media. At that time, like in the 80s, and early 90s, we had In Living Color on television, right? I used to listen to R&B all the time. We’d listen to Tony! Toni! Toné!, everybody listened to Biggie Smalls, you know, like Tribe Called Quest. You could be from any cultural background, and everybody listened to the same pop culture. And so the thing that unified us in a way was the music and the culture, the subculture of the 90s, you know…

2017 (Oakland, CA) Behind the scenes re-enactment of Adele’s grandparent’s story.

When did you actually start getting interested in media, learning more behind the scenes and getting to produce and thinking in terms of, this is something I actually want to go to college and study? Did you start thinking about these things when you were in high school? Or was it later, when you went to college?

Before I answer that, you made me think of something else. And I’m wondering if I can comment on it. So the other thing I didn’t mention about growing up in the 80s, in elementary school, was media contributing to my own self-loathing because of xenophobia, which is basically in the article I wrote for Hyphen. When I saw representations of Vietnam, and war movies, the one that really sticks out to me is “Me love you long time,” from Full Metal Jacket. I was like, that’s not my mom, that’s not a Vietnamese woman I’ve seen, this doesn’t even represent anybody’s culture. This does not look like Vietnam at all, but yet I watched that TV show China Beach all the freakin time. It’s like all the Vietnamese were so foreign to me watching on television, it was so disconnected from my actual culture.

But let’s cut to high school. Actually my brother, who’s full Vietnamese, from my mom’s first marriage, gave me my first camera. It was a Canon AE1. And I still have it. Yeah, it was a great 35 millimeter camera. I took a photography class in high school, and it was about making prints and taking photographs. When I was little, I used to have one of those point-and-shoot cameras. I wanted to be like a National Geographic photographer and photograph nature. I was interested in taking pictures and I took pictures. I loved doing the darkroom, and it was really fun. I would just take pictures and document my friends, document life. I like to make prints. I didn’t really think about it as a career. But I always had my camera and I always took pictures. And then I went to college, and I actually started out majoring in psychology. I wanted to study the mind, how people’s minds work; people were so weird. But I got sick of the theories; it wasn’t me. So I went from that to liberal arts where I had three minors. I was really into sociology and communications. And I was into English. I liked writing, I liked poetry, I’ve always been into poetry. I probably changed my major five times in college. But it was in my sophomore year where I had an epiphany. I was watching tv at my sister’s house in Arizona and thinking about the power of this medium to broadcast to everybody. I thought, okay, I’m going to work in communications, I’m going to work in television. A lot of us biracial people have this need to feel like a bridge, the cultural bridge, they’re communicating because there are always misunderstandings, people don’t understand each other. But I see the truth, I can see it, I can help you resolve that communication breakdown.

And what college was this?

I went to Virginia Tech. I graduated, and worked for a TV production company. It was in the south. I filmed a lot of a black televangelist church. The black culture was so interesting to me. I really loved filming it. But I didn’t like the producer [who was not a part of the black community or church] and so I quit. I ended up getting a job for a multimedia production company called American Research Corporation in southwest Virginia. Doing multimedia production, that’s where I literally learned how to direct and shoot and edit. And I was making interactive educational CD ROMs when they had CD ROMs back in the day. Sex education and stuff like that was really interesting.

2016 (Oakland, CA) Oakland Asian Cultural Center with journalist and writer Momo Chang and filmmaker Anita Chang after a panel on “API Women in Media” panel.

Why did you come to New York?

I came to New York to go to The New School for graduate studies. I did my first film, El Paso, Vietnam in grad school. I felt seen, I didn’t have to tell that story over and over again to explain to people who I was, and where I came from. My mom was not a war bride. My mom was not a prostitute. My mom was an American, she came to the United States, and she had a job. And that’s how she met my dad. You know, I finally had a film to explain that.

The film showed internationally, and the Center for Asian American media (which at the time was called the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival) adopted the film. That film festival is like the mecca for all Asian Film Festival directors in North America. It basically gave me a platform to spread my story and gave me name recognition as a filmmaker.

Do you mind talking a little bit about the process of putting it together? Especially the use of archival footage, and as a documentarian, do you have a specific style that you like to go with in terms of the process, how to interview people, how to use voiceovers, visuals, etc.?

I’m really influenced by filmmakers like Rea Tajiri who did History and Memory, and Alan Berliner who is just amazing. And also, Su Friedrich, who is also a filmmaker. I don’t consider myself a documentary filmmaker necessarily, I consider myself a storyteller. Here in the United States, documentary is usually cinema vérité, observational cinema. But I’m actually the opposite. I’m more into constructing things. I like to make the story. I like to do a lot of research, pre-interviewing, and have the story before I actually put the pieces together.

How do you get to the truth? Do we get to the truth by letting it unfold in front of us? Some people will say that if your camera’s in front of them it’s not natural, you know? Or do you get to the truth by really understanding the essence of the spirit and channeling that in some way? As a filmmaker, as I’ve evolved through time and matured as a human being, I realize my purpose and the way I make films is to channel the spirit of the story, to channel spirit, period. Doing it in a way that honors the person whose story is being told. I’m interested in decolonizing the industry, not extracting or exploiting, but collaborating and honoring.

My films rested along the spectrum between formalism and realism. When it comes to filmmaking I’m a maximalist, I like everything, such as soap operas, I like Korean soap operas.

I’m still trying to work on this film on my grandparents, trying to understand their past. And I have to say it was painful; I’ve had family members say that I’m not really Vietnamese and that made me stop. So I’ve gone through this evolution of telling the story of a family that’s Vietnamese, and just knowing my place. I’ve been humbled a lot in that process.

2018 (Oakland, CA) Behind the scenes of Red Room Project VR documentary at Ghost Ship Fire in Fruitvale neighborhood.

What got you into VR?

Oh, this is interesting! My bread and butter up until maybe a year ago has been working as a video editor. I started experimenting, doing a lot of research, talking about it at Berkeley City College where I teach. In my research what I discovered is that in VR, space is a character. To quote Sun Ra, the famous musician, “Space is the place.” So imagine if you film inside of a space, and then the person who experiences it is inside of it, how are they going to feel?

Shane, a hip hop artist in Oakland, was talking about this Red Room of his that he made music in. He made it sound like sacred space, this red room that was red lit. I asked him about his artist’s journey and he told me an amazing story about how he lived in Sacramento and how he wasn’t doing much. He was kind of homeless, trying to figure out his way, and came to Oakland where found his people and created the space. And then the Ghost Ship fire happened. The Ghost Ship fire was like 9/11 for Oakland — 40 artists died, and it really affected his community. And so he ended up opening up his room, this little red room to be a healing space where they made music and art. And that’s what the film is about. And so it ended up being like, traditionally in the form of a documentary, but the 360 space where he brought you to his worlds.

2018 (Oakland, CA) Behind the scenes interview with Shane Lassiter aka Shino Smoke, Red Room Project 2018

2018 (Oakland, CA) – Cast and crew of The Red Room Project

In conclusion, we want you to touch briefly on how the current crisis in Afghanistan connected to the U.S. troop withdrawal has inspired some of the healing work you mentioned at the beginning of this interview. There have been many comparisons with the pullout from Vietnam in news media and it must be difficult for the Vietnamese community to relive those memories.

This is some raw stuff, Sumita! I’m working on a project with an Afghan interpreter Behroz Mohmand. I started it over a year ago, pre-pandemic. And now, the way things are, it would have to be a totally different story. I don’t even know if I want to finish it. But I just feel like I would do it for his nonprofit organization. It’s a nonprofit organization to help shepherd other people who need support like him.

2019 (Oakland, CA) Still Image from Adele’s short documentary, “Interpreting Freedom” with former Afghan interpreter, Behroz Mohmand.

But I think the first initial experience for me was my mom calling me the day before, and she seemed distraught and really upset. I could just see it in her face. My mom watched the news on television, losing her country in the exact same way that the Afghan people abroad and my friend, Behroz, whose film I’m making, is watching on television. For her, it’s like triggering this trauma. I have friends who were boat people, or who escaped or who were on helicopters. My friend Doan Hoang, she was in the last helicopter; her film Oh, Saigon was about that. And she’s been going through it, so I wrote to her.

I just feel like I’m holding space and community and prayer and calling upon the ancestors and being in the moment and not being in despair at the same time. It’s worse actually than Vietnam, it’s worse because of the women. I’ve talked about this subject in my film.He’s told me some stuff and it’s horrible. It’s kind of paralyzing. But at the same time, that’s where I’m bringing my medicine, I think this is the time. So back to spirituality and kind of giving a big picture of things. We are as a humanity at a reckoning, and we’re seeing all of the effects of what we’re doing. And the earth is telling us this, the end of times, you’re feeling it and what my indigenous teachers are telling me is, this is Mother Nature. This is our next podcast with my teacher, Carol Cano: she’s going to talk about this, but she quotes from her colleague, M’bali, “This is my Mother Nature telling us to go to our rooms.” We’re at a dark time of the soul right now. That’s what she was saying. It’s like, we are in a period, this is a breaking point. And then we had to decide who we really are. As a humanity. And individually internally, who are we and why are we here? And we have a choice to say who we are. And it can be a gift. In movies, the “dark night of the soul.” You have that breaking point in a movie, the form of a film and you get to that climax, and it’s either do or die. And then after that you either have a happy ending or depending on what you’re into, nihilism. Negative ending. And I just want to contribute to grounding us in whatever it is and in repairing the wrongs, to the earth, to the indigenous people, to the women. Everything.

Thank you, Adele! You have given us a lot to think about.

References

Roots of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University:
https://aas.sfsu.edu/

Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University:
https://ethnicstudies.sfsu.edu/history

Braided Wisdom Leadership Training Program
https://www.braidedwisdom.org/leadership-program

Asian Heart Mind Body Collective Podcast
http://www.asianheartmindbodycollective.com/

The Red Room Project VR documentary
https://www.theredroomproject.com/

Paper presented at Busan International Film Festival on the making of The Red Room Project
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10AHgYeBbxkoFZ-dOLrFjfSrDEtOSgqD6/view

Hyphen essay, “Vietnamese as the ‘backdrop’ and the Invisible Cultural Producer”
https://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2015/4/24/vietnamese-backdrop-invisible-cultural-producer

Latest original films: https://www.adeleray.com/original-films.html

Non-profit org, Interpreting Freedom Foundation, co-founded by Behroz Mohmand, the main character is Adele’s short film.
https://interpretingfreedomorg.wpcomstaging.com/

Active list of organizations to support Afghan people during this time:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15s0dB44PLaADHst_hQP4upkSpXVi1oLw9GgSoHPrOOk/edit?fbclid=IwAR1C8U9n1NM_F4yaniN17XnUndIn2mCiKKPG0Ghe7iXMHtHq-Z76diJEWGs

Entanglements: A Conversation with Mediamaker Ina Adele Ray

Further Reading: