Maegan Houang is a writer and director who’s directed several short films and music videos, frequently collaborating with artists Mitski and Hana Vu. I discovered her work through her music video for ‘Water Me Down’ by Vagabon, which is an amazing video for an amazing song. Then I watched her short film Astonishing Little Feet, and it blew me away.
Astonishing Little Feet is a marvel of short filmmaking, capturing so much in nine minutes without it becoming explicit and without the loss of the story’s brutal intimacy. The film is a fictionalized account of Afong Moy‘s arrival in America in 1834 and the moment she is turned into a curio called ‘The Chinese Lady’. In a seemingly straightforward scene, Astonishing Little Feet reflects on the capitalist, racist and sexist history behind multicultural America. It’s a beautifully made, very painful watch.
First of all, thank you so much for your time. What project(s) are you currently working on?
I recently finished working in the writers room for Season 2 of Shōgun. Otherwise, I spend most of my time on a television show and a couple feature films I have in development. Hopefully, I will get to direct one of the films!
Your excellent, heartbreaking short film Astonishing Little Feet depicts a relatively short interaction, yet captures so many different power dynamics that still exist today, from the sexualization of Asian women to the online fetishization of women’s feet. How did you decide on focussing on this particular moment in Afong Moy’s life?
I first learned about Afong Moy reading The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee. She has one line in the book which explains that Afong Moy was the first documented Chinese woman to come to the United States, and she was brought here in order to help sell imported goods from China by exploiting the peculiarities of her bound feet. I had never heard of Afong Moy before and I found the very idea of her existence illuminating. As the first documented Chinese woman in the United States, she travelled the country as a marketing tool/circus act and was likely the very first Asian woman most Americans saw.
The way in which she was placed inside a booth for people to pay and visit, to come and gawk at how strange she was, felt like the origin story of how Asian women have long been objectified and hypersexualized in Western cultures. I wanted to make a film that captured that men’s sense of wonder and their realization that they could profit simply by exhibiting her body.
Growing up as a mixed-race Asian American woman in Michigan and the American midwest, I often felt out of place, like I too was peculiar and I was treated differently by young men than my peers. For a long time, I internalized this treatment, rationalizing that I deserved it due to some kind of inherent deficiency. The more I’ve learned about American society and its long legacy of racism, I better understood that the way people treated me as a young Asian woman had little to do with me as a person, and more to do with how these harmful stereotypes about Asian women have been perpetuated in society. I wanted to make this film for my younger self and other Asian American women who, through no fault of their own, haven’t had access to Asian American history.
Watching the movie, I was struck by the feeling of how much yet how little things have changed. When dealing with issues of representation, marginalization and oppression in your work, is it sometimes hard to avoid becoming cynical? How do you remain hopeful?
While I do see many parallels in our present day society and the past, I do think it’s important to underscore some key differences between Afong Moy’s experience and my own. Afong Moy was brought to the United States under an agreement her father likely made with American merchants; she was likely brought to the United States against her will. She was probably not paid and essentially kept in captivity. At one point in her life, she lived in a poor house and was only rescued when P.T. Barnum thought she would make an excellent great circus act. Whatever dehumanization I have personally experienced has never been even remotely akin to hers and I think while progress can feel slow, it is important to contend with the reality that there has been progress.
I do not at all wish to imply that I believe in a teleological view of history – I very much believe we can slip backwards at any moment – but at least for now I am afforded so many more opportunities and a much higher standard of living that she likely ever had. Though the 1830s may seem like a long time ago, it was also less than 200 years in the past, and I retain hope by remembering how much can change so fast. Fast change is also always a scary prospect, too.
We must look to the past to look forward, but I also firmly advocate that society does not do enough to live in the present. Scrolling on your phone is not living in the present, but zoning out to your own emotions and society. To stay hopeful, at least for me, means spending time engaging in real self-reflection and trying to stay as present in what I feel right now and what I am able to do right now. We cannot let the anxiety of the future crush our need to live full lives in the present and the future will undoubtedly require a movement toward massive collective action.
The greatest impediment to collective action will be the individual’s inability to move past themselves and their own ego because it will require a significant amount of compromise. The more we can self-reflect on the things that truly matter to us the more we’ll be able to enact the necessary collective change to survive the potential horror of climate change, authoritarianism and fascism. Far too many people focus on their own pain, their own trauma, and themselves and we must not equate the objective comfort and freedom within our daily lives to the restrictions of the past. The past can only teach us what not to replicate and why.
You’ve frequently worked with Mitski, directing the music videos for ‘Happy’, ‘Stay Soft’, ‘The Only Heartbreaker’ and ‘Star’. When you work together so often, how does your collaboration evolve?
I first started working with Mitski after I cold emailed her manager in 2015 wondering if I could make a music video for her. It has been a wondrous experience to evolve from being a huge fan of her music to becoming close friends. Our collaboration is one of the most fulfilling parts of my artistic practice. I love working with her and I hope we’ll find other things to pursue together again.
A lot of your music videos have strong horror influences, from serial killers and cults to zombies and mutant fever dreams. What draws you to this genre?
Music videos are a short form medium and I often find genre can be a useful tool in communicating the emotional arcs and stories I’m trying to express. People have an instant association with specific images and ideas and when I don’t have a lot of runtime, it’s helpful to be able to immediately establish ideas and characters with 10-20 seconds that I can later undercut for effect. The horror genre is also inherently cinematic, it lends itself to more visual storytelling, and that works particularly well in the music video format. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a huge horror fan, but rather someone who is quite agnostic when it comes to which genres I tend to favor or not. I love movies of all kinds; genre is just another tool like composition, mise-en-scene, lighting or editing and I try to employ it when it best serves the ideas or story that I’m telling.
I discovered your work through your music video for Vagabon’s ‘Water Me Down’. You’ve talked about this video being more performance-based rather than narrative. What are the benefits and what are the challenges of approaching a music video this way?
‘Water Me Down’ was the first performance-driven video I directed, but I still tried to approach the process in a similar way – how can we create a coherent formal language through repetition and variation that ends up meaning something, at least to me, and, also hopefully, the audience. The simplest way to think of formal film analysis is every shot was a wide shot except for one, why did the director choose this moment to use a close-up? What does that mean in relation to the narrative and emotional schema of the project? But it’s actually harder sometimes to analyze how form works in filmmaking that has an internal logic but a less consistent and precise language. I truly love and learn from both the rigid formalists like Ozu and Hong Sang-Soo, but also love filmmakers like Hitchcock or Kurosawa whose formal language feels more ‘invisible’ and is sometimes derisively described as subservient to the story. The best films or cinematic projects have an internal formal logic created by the filmmaker to convey some kind of idea or emotion, ideally both.
As an outsider looking at the United States and the entertainment industry, in recent years there seems to be a growing sense of solidarity across the industry, with the 2023 writers’ strike and the response to the L.A. wildfires as clear examples. How have you experienced this development, and what obstacles do you think lie ahead?
In our current society we face collective problems that can only be solved with collective action. I believe younger generations are becoming increasingly aware that no one will fix our world alone, which has helped inspire solidarity in times of crisis. I hope we are not headed into a recession, but regardless, the film and television industry is in the middle of a significant contraction. Our challenge will be to maintain a sense of solidarity while more and more people lose the opportunity to work and make a living wage. The business, like the economy, is cyclical and I have hope that in the future things will return to a less harsh equilibrium. In the meantime, we have to try not to tear each other’s heads off and instead focus on building community, mutual aid and supporting people when they’re down.
Thank you so much for your time. To finish: which work or artist has been particularly inspiring to you recently?
I would like to highly recommend the new album by Ohyung You are Always on My Mind. Lia composed the music for my short films Astonishing Little Feet and In Full Bloom as well as for feature films Problemista and Happyend. Her newest album is incredible.
I also feel inspired by the work of my dear friend Beaux Mendes, who is a painter based in Los Angeles. Their work encapsulates the transcendental beauty of nature and the limitations of our ability as artists to capture it. We must instead make it something of our own.
More Maegan Houang:
Interview with Mixed Asian Media
Interview with Life Behind the Camera podcast
Interview with The Conversationalist
Website