In March, when Jeff Yang was preparing for the release of his book “Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now,” he and his co-authors, Philip Wang and Phil Yu, found the moment somewhat bittersweet. Their work, a celebration of Asian American pop culture, was arriving right when it seemed like a new chapter of that history was unfolding in real time. That same month, for instance, the Michelle Yeoh-led “Everything Everywhere All At Once” would be released and go on to become both a blockbuster hit and an Oscars darling.

杨紫琼自己会写前言“The Golden Screen: The Movies that Made Asian America,” Yang’s wide-ranging new book that, amid a burgeoning golden era of Asian American cinema, serves as a kind of colorful mixtape examining the many works that have shaped our understanding of the AAPI community. The author spoke to the Chronicle about his book, what it says about Asian America, and the limits of representation.

Q: What was your process in culling together the films included in this book?

A:There are 138 movies in the book. I’d probably watched at least two-thirds before, but a lot of them so long ago and in such different circumstances that I felt I had to rewatch them. And then there were films that I’d never seen, films that I hadn’t seen just by circumstance or because they were difficult films to get access to. By bringing in other people to talk about their experiences watching films, I essentially created a community of movie watchers who kept on bringing up their own movies that weren’t on the list.

Q: That really speaks to how many obscure gems of Asian American cinema there are. What were some of those recommendations about films that stood out to you as undiscovered but seminal?

A:There are films that really deserve wider distribution and more visibility that were important because they were the first. They represented a milestone in terms of anchoring a perspective or a segment of our community. Those films include works like “Chutney Popcorn,” which arguably was the first film by a South Asian director, certainly by a South Asian woman director, to focus specifically on an American-born, Indian American character.

When you look at these films, for a certain segment of our community, watching these films was not just notable, it was life-changing because they affirmed that they belong, because it gave them context. And “Chutney Popcorn” isn’t just an Indian American film, it’s an Indian American queer film.

Q: The book is not a straightforward history of Asian American cinema — the films are organized by chapters broken up into themes. Did you notice a pattern or evolution of themes in Asian American storytelling?

A:It made sense to look at larger narratives and say, how do people imagine immigrants? How do people think about the relationship between men and women or among families, and how has that evolved in the telling on screen?

If you actually just watch film 1 to film 20 or 25 in each of these chapters, what we’ll see is a gradual shift in expansion and accretion of new ideas. Sometimes it’s steps forward, sometimes it’s steps back, but within each of these chapters, these films are arranged chronologically, so you can see that evolution, and moreover, you can map it out to history.

Q: The historical context that undergirds the book is the systematic exclusion of Asian stories and faces from the screen, but seeing this great breadth of works compiled together, there’s a sense of both a bigness and a smallness. Did this book reveal something about the shape of Asian America?

A:I’m sure I’m paraphrasing something here, but Asian America is a tale that grows with the telling. Every single time somebody has gone out and created something new or taken something old and remixed it or brought something from abroad and made available here, they’ve added to this larger story, and that story really is about us finding ourselves, inventing ourselves.

When you bring so many works from so many different places, representing so many different cultures and contexts, a full diversity of our diaspora, what you start seeing is that we have a lot in common, a lot more than people think. A book like this, all it’s doing is saying, hey, there are a lot of stones in that foundation, guys. As you step forward, you’re standing on something else — take a look around.

Q: While the last several years have constituted a sea change in diverse storytelling in Hollywood, there has also been discourse about the limits of representation and whether there’s an over-focus on it as a political project. How does a book like this fit within the conversation?

A:We needed to get to a point where not only did we think it was important to be counted, but that we could actually show up and be visible. We’re in a place where that isn’t the primary thing we need to concern ourselves with. We need to now start thinking about moving into a space where it’s about agency, intersectionality and telling stories that have integrity, and I would say critiquing them. (In the past) there was such a pressure to just celebrate everything if it was Asian, simply because we had so little.

We’re finally at a place where there are enough stories starting to come up that we can be a little bit more discerning about the things that we personally love, not root for as a community.

Brandon Yu is a freelance writer.