Yearly Archives: 2007

A wrist and arm injury has kept me from writing for a better part of the year. This has made me very sad. Especially because I have so much to say. I have traveled with Divided We Fall to fifty different cities around North America since we premiered last September. It has been an astounding journey. I have encountered remarkable stories, experienced rich and brave dialogue, and have gained deep insight into… Continue Reading

We have been invited to Yale University to screen as part of the annual ECAASU Conference – the East Coast Asian American Student Union. It is a cold February night as two hundred students gather in a theater to watch the film and talk. This particular audience is all about the connections…

“Did Sikhs think there would be an internment like in World War?”
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“I see parallels between the Sikh and Jewish experiences. Is… Continue Reading

I blink. There are one thousand people in the audience, but the stage lights blind me, and all I can make out is the roar of applause coming from a dark moving sea of people. This is our largest audience yet, and they are giving us a standing ovation. I send a smile of gratitude over to our host Angela Rola, Director of the Asian American Cultural Center at the University of… Continue Reading

On all sides, endless white snow. The snow-draped trees stretch to the horizon as far as I can see outside my car window. I have never driven through New England in February, and now Sharat Raju and I make our way between snow falls to Dartmouth College for Divided We Fall’s New Hampshire premiere. The road is long and the winter is breathtaking.

Somewhere nestled in the snow, we find the small… Continue Reading

I am blinking in the stage lights. I can barely make out the faces of the nearly 400 people who have filled the plush red seats of the enormous theater. There are tiny beams of light in the back of the theater – ushers dressed in black and white attire using flashlights to show people to their seats. I take a deep breath and welcome everyone to the Stockton premiere of Divided We Fall… Continue Reading

This week, I came home. On Sunday night, we screened Divided We Fall at Stanford University and then crossed the San Francisco Bay on Wednesday night for a screening at UC Berkeley. Although these two schools are divided by the bay, not to mention decades of rivalry, I crossed the bridge between them more times than I can remember as a college student: my weekdays were spent on the sun-drenched Stanford campus (pictured)… Continue Reading

The doors of the classroom swing open and thirty middle school kids tumble in, talking, giggling, tugging at each other, bouncing with energy. I am nervous. Divided We Fall has never been shown to junior high school students – we had aimed the film for colleges and high schools, but when the Fayerweather Street School invited me to teach their seventh and eighth grade class for a day, I was curious.

I’ve… Continue Reading

Sometimes magic happens. Last fall, through a series of coincidences, I met a woman named Valerie Courville. “My name is inside your name!” I told her. We took it as a sign. Valerie (pictured) introduced me to her 9 year-old son Dylan, an old soul with light in his eyes. They both grew close to my heart. It wasn’t long before they offered to bring Divided We Fall to Dylan’s school – the Continue Reading