The essay has two main purposes. The first is to survey various aspects of Asian American women’s life in Grace Lee’s documentary, The Grace Lee Project (2005), and thereby, to interrogate how the liminal experiences of Asian American women reaffirm or resist their stereotyped identities in American culture. Making the filmic journey around the US and Korea, The Grace Lee Project unfolds a panorama of the life of Asian American women whose names happen to be Grace Lee, including a newscaster, a pastor’s wife, a teenager, a hearing-impaired single mother, an activist in the black-power movement, and a lesbian activist. Their first name Grace is popular notably in the Asian American communities for its associations with both Christianity and Grace Kelly, the legendary Hollywood actress of the fifties, the qualities of which their first generation parents wished them to have. Between these two images, the name Grace Lee is another name for the stereotype of the typical Asian American woman. This cultural clich about the image of Asian American women is liminal because their American identity is unavoidably intertwined with their Asian identity within the racial margins. The second purpose is to discuss my own experience of introducing this issue to the students of cultural studies courses. The students’ comments about the film were mostly concerned with how a name is generally related to the identification of a person, rather than how the name Grace functions as a stereotyped image of the ordinary Asian American women in the American society. What they enjoyed in the film was the hilarious way that the director introduced various lives of Asian American women and built them up as a panorama of cultural portraits. However, they also transposed the film’s issue from its original American context to a generalization which was vaguely hovering in their mind. To avoid this happening, it is important to guide students through the comparative perspective to work out the contextual understanding of American society to which they are outsiders.

The essay has two main purposes. The first is to survey various aspects of Asian American women’s life in Grace Lee’s documentary, The Grace Lee Project (2005), and thereby, to interrogate how the liminal experiences of Asian American women reaffirm or resist their stereotyped identities in American culture. Making the filmic journey around the US and Korea, The Grace Lee Project unfolds a panorama of the life of Asian American women whose names happen to be Grace Lee, including a newscaster, a pastor’s wife, a teenager, a hearing-impaired single mother, an activist in the black-power movement, and a lesbian activist. Their first name Grace is popular notably in the Asian American communities for its associations with both Christianity and Grace Kelly, the legendary Hollywood actress of the fifties, the qualities of which their first generation parents wished them to have. Between these two images, the name Grace Lee is another name for the stereotype of the typical Asian American woman. This cultural clich about the image of Asian American women is liminal because their American identity is unavoidably intertwined with their Asian identity within the racial margins. The second purpose is to discuss my own experience of introducing this issue to the students of cultural studies courses. The students’ comments about the film were mostly concerned with how a name is generally related to the identification of a person, rather than how the name Grace functions as a stereotyped image of the ordinary Asian American women in the American society. What they enjoyed in the film was the hilarious way that the director introduced various lives of Asian American women and built them up as a panorama of cultural portraits. However, they also transposed the film’s issue from its original American context to a generalization which was vaguely hovering in their mind. To avoid this happening, it is important to guide students through the comparative perspective to work out the contextual understanding of American society to which they are outsiders.