• Home
  • Clips
  • The Novel
  • Ebert's Review
  • Shawn Wong
  • More
    • Home
    • Clips
    • The Novel
    • Ebert's Review
    • Shawn Wong
  • Home
  • Clips
  • The Novel
  • Ebert's Review
  • Shawn Wong
data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAD/ACwAAAAAAQABAAACADs=

Clips

About the Film

Writer-director Eric Byler delivers an intimate adaptation of Shawn Wong’s quintessential Asian American novel, American Knees.  Byler hones in on the delicate dangers of the inertia that can set in  after a romantic break up. Raymond Ding (played by Academy-Award® winner  Chris Tashima) is middle aged, divorced, and in the throes of yet  another failed relationship. He sleepwalks through the formalities of  splitting up but finds himself in a strange holding pattern where he  can’t let go nor move on.


Aurora Crane, his ex-girlfriend (played by Allison Sie) is  doggedly trying to move on with her life. She had become the no longer  young, younger woman in Raymond’s life. Leaving the relationship with an  under-developed sense of identity, she forces herself into her future,  but without direction or sense of purpose.


AMERICANESE explores the ripple  effect that this period creates on their futures as well as the futures  of those around them. Raymond, a university professor, tentatively tries  to move forward by dating co-worker, Betty Nguyen, portrayed  uncompromisingly by Joan Chen. Aurora, who is bi-racial with a white  father, decidedly dates a “non-Asian” man named Steve (played by  Emmy-nominated Ben Shenkman) in hopes of a safer more familiar type of  relationship. The reality that Steve is the ex of her best friend Brenda  (Kelly Hu) is lost on her as she tries to surface from her emotional  fog.


The story examines the purgatory of romantic separation with an uncomfortable honesty that is bald but not judgmental. AMERICANESE is a gently cautionary tale; the actions taken in our most vulnerable state often lay the emotional groundwork for our future.

Cast & Crew

The Novel

American Knees

by Shawn Wong


“I cracked up reading Shawn Wong’s witty, tender, wise, and sexy  new novel. His lovable but ambivalent protagonist collides memorably  with a cast of female characters who are a welcome change from the  shrinking violets and silent martyrs we’ve come to expect from ‘ethnic’  literature. American Knees is contemporary to the bone – a highly  entertaining, deftly written, provocative and moving work of fiction.” 


Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeaters

Production Stills

  • Clips
  • The Novel
  • Ebert's Review
  • Shawn Wong

Americanese

Copyright © 2006 Americanese - All Rights Reserved.