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Tell me a little bit about your training in film.1 When I came back from Taiwan and I started film school, there was not very much written on black women. I felt I had to start writing, because if I did not, there were going to be other black women showing up at these film schools not able to learn about their own history and how they fit into film history. In fact, I was the first black woman to get an MFA in film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. When I began the program there, they did not own any work by black women; they did not teach black film at all. Black women’s work had never occurred to them. By the time I left, there were films in the collection and articles about black women’s film in course packets. I demanded it, and that is why it happened. Actually, I ended up spending a lot of time in the video department, because the video department dealt with race and identity. I also worked with the Video Databank to increase their distribution of work by black lesbians. Between 1990 and 2000, there was an explosion of work by black lesbians that came into distribution . Could you talk a little bit about the genesis of Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself [1995]? I wanted to do a film about my experience in Taiwan. I did not know what it was about the experience in Taiwan that I wanted to make a piece about, but I knew I wanted to do something. I was doing a workshop in Montana, and the opening prologue just popped into my head! I said, “This is it! This is the start!” Interview with Yvonne Welbon (Chicago, Illinois, March 10, 2000) 98 Chapter 4 It took me two and a half, maybe three, years from that moment to finish the film. I made other work in between, but I was still not clear about what story I was going to tell. I spent six years in Taiwan, and so much happened in that time. I had to grapple with the question of what story I was going to tell and how to tell it. How did you decide on the parallel stories between yourself and your grandma? When I returned from Taiwan, I came home to reconnect with my family. I had been away from home for ten years. I had spent four years at college, at Vassar, and then six years in Taiwan, so I felt I needed to get to know my family again. I was taking a video class, and I had access to equipment, so I decided to start videotaping my grandmother telling family stories. As I was working through what story I was going to tell about my Taiwan experience, there were a few things that stood out. A lot of this involved reactions to my experience of living in Taiwan. People were often surprised: “You lived in Taiwan; you speak Chinese?” It was almost as if it was something they could not believe. I took it to be because I was black. I wondered, “Why is this not strange to me?” I realized it was because I had grown up in this family where my grandmother left home, which was Honduras , at the age of twenty-two, and she moved to a foreign country. It did not seem weird that I was going to do something that my grandmother did. I mean, Lord! If your grandmother can do it, you certainly can do it! Grandma ended up in this story to explain that. In hindsight, I can see that a lot of people do not pick up and leave the country and go elsewhere. The average American does not pick up and go live in another country, so it is unusual. I was taken aback, because I felt it was because I was black. Do you think if you were going to Africa or the Caribbean people would have had a different reaction? Yes, definitely, like it was checking out my roots. In my case, I really wanted to be fluent in another language. It is one of my personal life goals. I had tried a number of languages, and Chinese was the language that was a lot of fun. The best way to learn a language is to go live there. Why did you choose Taiwan rather than the PRC...

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