Season 4, Ep. 2: Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue

Saturday School Podcast

Part of the reason we thought it'd be fun to do Season 4 of Saturday School on Troublemakers was to highlight some of the bad girls/bad boys of Asian American film, but another reason was to remind ourselves that the Asian American movement itself was born out of a desire to create trouble. So for episode 2, we go back almost 40 years to Curtis Choy's 1976 film essay "Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue," which embodies this spirit -- spitting in the face of reporters, cops, the white gaze, Hollywood, Chinatown tourists, and the general establishment, even calling out fellow Asian Americans in the industry as sell-outs. We reflect on how the goals of Asian America have evolved over the years and jokingly lament that there aren't that many public Asian American "Frank Chin vs. Amy Tan, David Henry Hwang, and Maxine Hong Kingston" feuds anymore.