The Grace Lee Project
Grace Lee began her project with a notion that a vast majority of Asian Americans (chosen via the common name Grace Lee) are all so very unfortunately alike. Through Grace Lee's journey, both in digital and physical respects, she seeks to find out if there is any universal truth to to these uncanny similarities.
Grace Lee begins her project by interviewing apparently random people she comes across, asking what they know about "Grace Lee." To her astonishment, they all respond with nearly identical responses (though we should keep in mind, the makers of this documentary get to choose what to include and exclude). All Grace Lees seemed to be quiet, smart, gentle, shy, etc. Grace was very unsatisfied with this result; she was concerned that every Asian-American Grace Lee was destined for the same path. Her response was to embark on her mission via the internet. Her digital beginning united Grace Lees from all over the world, sharing whatever they could with one another. Though Grace found some differences to spark her physical road journey, there were also a lot of confirmations of the identical responses that interviewees gave her about the Grace Lee that they knew, not coincidentally.
However, after bringing so many Grace Lees together as a group, our narrator realizes the best way to see vivid differences is to actually see the individuals. This is where she embarks on her physical road journey. On this path, she encounters several Grace Lees with very vivid differences. She finds a lesbian activist living outside the country, a very old woman helping an African-American movement and helping youths become active in society. Grace finds another Grace who is a pastor's wife, and another who is a pastor's kid. She finds a Grace who is still in school - a painter with a very dark imagination, who contrasts a great majority of her school and neighborhood. Grace Lee finds a Grace Lee who takes care of her family AND another she is helping out. When she was finding this Grace Lee's story, she tells us that she was so immersed in how great this was that she had completely forgotten about the name Grace Lee. Our narrator even hears of a Grace Lee who tried to set fire to her school.
There were so much more substance to each of these Asian-American women that she hadn't been able to receive while interviewing others and finding quick information posted online. Even a "normal" Grace Lee would have so much difference in her lifestyle or character from one to another, even if it doesn't shine through every day.
Through this, Grace Lee deconstructs the stereotypes about Asian-American women. Though there were often striking similarities, a lot of this obviously comes from having a comparable background - from ancestry down to their name, these women began with a lot in common. However when Grace Lee was able to take the time to get to know some of these women, she found that the brilliant differences among them generously outweighed any of the similarities. Simply because a group of women could find commonalities (that were often focused on by the general public - which frequently happens when people feel the need to group so many people together), that doesn't mean they were truly alike in the least. This was an important message that Grace Lee could take home from her journey. Her identity didn't need to match that of others simply because they shared certain characteristics, but every individual has their own path because they are their own person.