The Catch of the Day

The breakfast crowd at Al’s Deli in Studio City is well into its omelets when film maker Chi Muoi Lo, 31, rushes in and settles himself into a booth at the rear of the restaurant. With his Old World charm, GQ style and raven-black bangs arcing hiply against his brow, Lo manages to project both smugness and edge.

The edginess is understandable. He is in the final days before the release Friday of his first feature film, “Catfish in Black Bean Sauce,” a romantic comedy, for which he performs myriad roles as the films’ director, writer, producer and star.

“People ask why did [I give] this movie this name,” Lo begins, invoking the Vietnamese delicacy whose cultural pedigree is a metaphor for the central theme of his story. “I’ve been saying, ‘Because it’s outrageous.’

“ ‘Catfish in Black Bean Sauce’ sounds like cuisine from the black American South or Vietnam. But the funny thing is [the dish] is really Chinese.”

That Lo is able to derive both comedy and pathos out of such odd subtleties and misperceptions (about food, identity, sex and love-in-crisis) is one of his film’s narrative delights. Race is never mentioned in a pejorative sense; rather, it is portrayed as it is in much of American life: an ever-present subtext, refocusing and coloring every scene.

“Catfish,” a low-budget (less than $2 million) independent feature released by Black Hawk Entertainment, tells the story of Dwayne Williams (Lo), a Vietnamese American bank executive who, relatively late in life, undergoes an identity crisis.

From the age of 6, Dwayne has been raised with an African American family. His crisis occurs when he is abruptly reunited with his Vietnamese birth mother (Kieu Chinh) to the dismay of his African American adoptive mother (Mary Alice).

Lo has assembled a potent ensemble cast to give heft and wings to his little tale of love and angst among various ethnic groups. Dwayne’s adoptive father, Harold, is played with wit and poignancy by Paul Winfield. The supporting cast includes Tzi Ma (“Rush Hour”), Sanaa Lathan (“Love and Basketball”) and Lauren Tom (“Joy Luck Club”), who plays Dwayne’s equally conflicted big sister, Mai, who protects him and longs for a reunion with their lost Vietnamese mother.

The film has won numerous prizes on the festival circuit. Lo’s script for “Catfish” won the best screenplay award at this year’s Newport Beach Film Festival; it won the Grand Jury Award at the 1999 Florida Film Festival and best feature film honors at the Worldfest-Houston International Film Festival. “Catfish” also picked up the audience awards at both Florida and Houston.

The film stands out because of an ambitious script, with talking cats, brawling transvestites, Vietnamese opera stars and a smack-down between two loving moms among the curiosities.

“I don’t think I am that much of a good writer. I am more of a director-writer,” Lo says. “I do think that my characters are well [structured] because of my acting background. There is no [other] way I am going to get actors like Paul Winfield, Mary Alice and Kieu Chinh on the budget I have.

“But my background is acting and I understand what actors think and want. And what every actor wants is a piece that will allow them to do great work.”

‘It’s All About People’

Lo explains: “All my characters have selfish and attractive traits, but race is secondary. We are a lot . . . smarter about race in our Generation 2000. I’d rather be annoyed with you because you are an [expletive] than annoyed with you because you are black. That’s the point. After all, it’s all about people.”

“Catfish” satirizes America’s obsession with race and appearances and endows the hyper-hip Dwayne with all the foibles and affectations of America’s prevailing cultural sensibility: hip-hop.

Dwayne speaks a quirky blend of Vietnamese and African American slang; he lives and works in a black community; and he is in love with a sweet, old-fashioned African American girl (Lathan), whom he understandably wants to marry.

“‘And, remember,” says Lo, “he [Dwayne] has his identity crisis at a very old age--at 26--when he realizes, ‘Wait a minute. I’m not black!’ ”

Lo’s own true story contains an oddly similar epiphany. His American journey began in 1975, when he was 6, and his family fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. “One of the wonderful things about being a child is you won’t remember bad things unless it’s very harsh or traumatic for you,” Lo says. “All I remember when we were leaving Vietnam were a lot of explosions. My mother said there were 500 people on the boat, and we floated for 28 days.”

After near starvation on the boat and further ordeals in the refugee camps, Lo’s parents with their 10 sons and three daughters were moved to the U.S., sponsored by the Jewish League of America.

“The United States government decided there were three places where a Vietnamese could go: to Pennsylvania, Texas and California,” Lo recalls. “My family chose Pennsylvania, and they dropped us off in Philadelphia. That’s west Philly--totally African American. I had been brought up seeing American movies, and the only time I saw [blacks] it was in Africa. As a child, to me America meant white--period. We never knew how it really was, and so it was a total culture shock.”

Soon Lo began to adopt a distinct African American sensibility. “My friends were only African Americans. I had African American girlfriends and surrogate mothers.”

During this time Lo began to gravitate toward theater. “I started as a kid of 11 wanting to be an actor. It was the only thing I was good at. I went to the High Schoolfor the Performing Arts, Temple University for two years, then got a full scholarship to the American Conservatory Theater, one of the top drama schools in the country.”

Lo, however, soon felt alienated at A.C.T. “I was the only Asian actor, period, not only at A.C.T. but in every school I went to. A.C.T. is a very expensive school, but what they were cranking out was white actors. And by my second year, I was saying, ‘Excuse me. Excuse me. Why am I learning a Cockney accent?’ ”

After leaving A.C.T., he began to get roles in television and movies (“The Relic” and “Vanishing Son”); still there were seldom any parts that plumbed the lurking ambiguities behind the American monolith of race. “It’s really unfair because African Americans should learn Jamaican accents and South African accents. I should learn Vietnamese accents, Chinese accents, Japanese accents.

“But when I got out of school, the only roles offered to me were playing ‘an Asian.’ So, I learned to make the accent changes myself, because there is a big difference between a Japanese person speaking English and a Vietnamese person speaking English.”

Such frustrations and insights eventually resulted in his writing “Catfish.”

He peddled his unconventional script for more than two years. “They all said they loved the script, but I got turned down right and left. The [studios] were saying, ‘Love the story but, Chi, you’ve got a movie with an older couple, and you’ve got blacks, you’ve got Asians and the one white character you have in the movie might be gay. Are you crazy? You can’t make this movie.’ ”

Rejection fostered obsession. “The more I got involved as a filmmaker, the more passionate I got. I couldn’t sleep anymore,” Lo recalls. “I realized that if I didn’t make this film, I probably could not function. I went to my brothers, since I have nine of them, and told them what I wanted to do. They did not ask to read the script, they only said, ‘Why don’t you just tell us what it [is] about?’

“And I told them my film is about African Americans and Vietnamese Americans and Vietnamese, but beyond that, it’s a universal story. It’s a story of a mother and child, a story about relationships. And [I said] that I’m not doing this because I want to break the glass ceiling or move my career up a notch, although it would be nice.

“I’m doing this film because I have to tell this story. My objective is to entertain; if people walk away with something deeper, without my being brazen about it, then I will be very blessed. That was my pitch. I used my skills as an actor, and that helped a lot, and when I finished, they said, ‘OK. You’ve got your chance.’ ”