The Grace Lee Project

by Charles Nguyen, SDAFF writer

Shakespeare’s Juliet delivered the classic phrase “A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” Filmmaker Grace Lee is putting a modern ethnic spin on it.

“Actually, I did not know that Grace Lee was a common Asian American name until I became an adult,” the SDAFF alumnus joked.

The population of Lee’s hometown in Columbia, Missouri wasn’t exactly a diverse population.

“I was one of the only Asians in my school so I always thought I was special.”

Unfortunately, Lee’s unique claim to her name in Missouri didn’t hold true in the rest of the world. When she left her childhood home for New York, and later California, Lee found that she shared her name with hundreds of others. It dawned on her than “Grace Lee” was the quintessential Asian American female name.

Lee’s newest film, “The Grace Lee Project,” documents the lives of women who share her generic name and has begun premiering around the U.S. The mosaic of Asian female lives is cast in both humorous and dramatic light, all wrapped around the name “Grace Lee.”

Over the course of meeting other “GL’s,” Lee, the filmmaker, realized that her name carried unwanted connotations.

“Most of the time these other Grace Lees were only faintly remembered,” she explained on her website. “They were ‘good girls’ who listened to their parents, violin prodigies, 16-year-old Harvard freshmen, devout Christians.”

Lee’s fear of being lost in a sea of geniuses and musicians spurred an investigation of her alter egos. Fortunately, her fears were false, and Lee found countless personalities within her namesake. Subjects in the documentary ranged from Grace Lee the lesbian activist to Grace Lee Boggs the social reformer.

Still, some similarities were striking. Lee established a website to track and establish contact with “GL’s” around the world. According to her website survey, 61 percent of Grace Lee’s are Korean and 52 percent are in their twenties. 49 percent have had five or more years of piano lessons.

“Despite the differences it quickly became clear to me that there was a genuine sense of community among those of us interested in discovering our Grace-Lee-ness or lack thereof,” Lee said. “Another thing that really surprised me was how many Grace Lees ended up visiting my site because they had Googled themselves.”

Lee first appeared at the San Diego Asian Film Festival with her short film “Barrier Device,” starring Sandra Oh. Lee and Oh will rejoin in “Smells Like Butter” - a sort of “Sex and the City” in reverse.

In the comedy, Oh plays a desperate single woman who travels across the world to find and arrange her own marriage. Lee was so taken with working with Oh in “Barrier Device” that she wrote “Smells Like Butter” with the actress in mind.

“I love Sandra,” Lee said. “She's so compelling to watch and just as dynamic, intelligent and complex in person.”

But before Lee can even begin filming “Butter,” she has to finish a busy nationwide tour premiering her “Grace Lee Project.”

Lee visited the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, where her film debuted for a sold-out audience. Two days later, Lee flew down to Austin, Texas, for a successful premiere at South by Southwest. Even then, Lee was just happy audiences were compelled by her and all the other Grace Lees’ stories.

“People laughed in the right places,” she joked about her film. “Thank goodness!”