Author: Craig Simpson

By Andy Brown

A love of documentary films that began in K’s English program has turned an alumna into an award-winning producer and an ally in raising underrepresented voices in show business.

Christine Cho ’17—a Korean-American producer, writer and graphic artist living in Los Angeles—served as the producer of Lakutshon’ Ilanga, or When the Sun Sets, as a part of her graduate thesis at Chapman University in Southern California, where students choose from specialties such as directing, cinematography, producing, editing, sound design and production design. The film is a short drama about Lerato (Zikhona Bali), a young Black nurse in South Africa in 1985, as she begins a journey to look for her missing brother. Her brother, Anele, played by Aphiwe Mkefe, is involved in the resistance against apartheid when he disappears.

Based on a true story, the film is written and directed by Phumi Morare, a native South African filmmaker and peer of Cho. When the Sun Sets earned several well-known awards including the 2021 HBO Short Film Award at the American Black Film Festival, the NAACP Image Award in the Short Film category, and Narrative: Domestic Schools category honors at the Student Academy Awards. The film was also shortlisted for the 2022 Academy Award in the Live Action Short Film category, and its additional award nominations included Best Student Film at the 2021 Austin Film Festival, Best Live Action Film at the 2021 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Student Awards, Best Short Narrative at the 2021 Blackstar Film Festival, and special mention for Best South African Short Film at the 2021 Durban International Film Festival.

The film’s success has, at times, been overwhelming for Cho.

“It’s been a lot to wrap my head around for me and the whole team,” she said. “We’ve gotten way more than we bargained for. To sum it all up, I’m eternally grateful for all the opportunities that we’ve had and the opportunities that we were given. It feels like it’s gotten to be an extended education, for myself and for the rest of my team.”

Before production, it was Cho’s responsibility as a producer to hear pitches from film writers and directors in the Chapman graduate program before selecting which project she wanted to pursue.

“I was getting started on the film toward the end of my first year at Chapman in 2019,” she said. “When I started speaking with directing students about their scripts, they would pitch their film to me and I would just talk through their ideas for it. This film just stood out to me from the rest.”

When the Sun Sets stood out to Cho partly for the proposal itself, which incorporated actors of color, and partly because the writer and director wanted to shoot abroad. The film takes its title from a song of the same name written by Miriam Makeba, a South African singer, songwriter, actress and civil-rights activist who was sometimes known as Mama Africa until her death in 2008. Makeba is associated with Afro-Pop, jazz and world music as well as her own fight against apartheid.

“During the development of a film and in pre-production, a producer tends to be very hands-on, although everyone has their own style,” Cho said. “For some people, the role isn’t very clear-cut. Sometimes the role is as a financier. Other times, the producer can be one of the first people brought on board to the project or they could be the person who found the script to begin with and worked with the screenwriter. From that point, maybe they hired the rest of the crew, including a director and cinematographer.”

With her production, Cho was responsible for ensuring that the film’s behind-the-scenes logistics were running smoothly, which was a tough job considering the challenges of funding the film.

“It was a long process of raising funds to shoot the film, taking into account travel costs and everything else that we would need to secure once we were out there,” Cho said. “All the drafts of the budget that we were putting together were quite high, so we spent almost a year raising funds, applying to grants, writing proposals and pitching the project to various people. It was a long thinking process.”

Plus, the COVID-19 pandemic nearly forced the entire production team to go home indefinitely.

“I took my introduction to documentary film class with Dhera Strauss before she retired after a long teaching career at K,” Cho said. “I learned so many fundamentals through Dhera and really found my initial spark for filmmaking through her class. When I went on to take the advanced documentary filmmaking class with Danny, I was intrigued at being able to learn from two very different filmmakers. Danny helped me to really stretch my visual storytelling boundaries. After completing Danny’s class, I went on to become a teaching assistant and I worked shifts in the edit lab to assist the current students of his class with editing their films. I also worked with the other TAs to organize the quarter-end film festival for the class, and we wrote and directed a silly teaser intro video for the festival with the students of the class per the yearly tradition.

“The Sabella interview was my very first on-set experience for a work that was going to be broadcast,” she added. “It was amazing of Danny to provide us the opportunity to attend and observe the production. We were working with our own equipment, so we could focus on engaging with Jeremy, finding the right compositions for the frame, and filling new roles that we hadn’t encountered before, like marking the clapper before each take. Thinking back on it now, it’s so nostalgic because I hadn’t realized at the time that it would become my first on-set experience out of many more to come.”

Those experiences and more gave Cho the encouragement and foresight to seek success in filmmaking through graduate school. She is grateful to Strauss and Kim for shaping the beginnings of her filmmaking journey and supporting her advancement to Chapman University with their recommendations.

“After graduating from K, I was thinking back to my experiences there, and how I had taken the documentary film classes that were offered,” she said. “I was able to reflect on what I really wanted to do. That propelled me to apply to Chapman and move out here to California, so K really helped give me the push I needed, and the culture itself, just shaped me as an individual.”

As for Cho, she hopes to continue working in filmmaking while continuing to elevate themes similar to those explored in When the Sun Sets, such as racism and marginalized identities. She considers herself to be a proponent for social activism and diverse representation and is interested in presenting multi-dimensional and layered people of color as characters who subvert expectations and reshape the way audiences relate to the human condition.

“It’s pretty important for this industry to keep pushing forward with underrepresented identities,” Cho said. “We’re through the apartheid era, but there’s been this idea that racism is over. I think a lot of people can say that that’s not the case. It’s still very present in that it lingers in the generations. There are a lot more stories to tell from that era, and more broadly, in the stories of people of color to begin with.”

Alexandra Leonard ’09 heals and builds community, one tile at a time.

By Fran Czuk

A series of ceramic casts of heads and bodies, a short story, and a documentary film served as senior year course work and a Senior Integrated Project, as well as the beginning of self-created art therapy after a traumatic year for Alexandra Leonard ’09.

Art proved a way of beginning to process, heal, connect and build community for Leonard after a time in her life when everything seemed to fall apart. Now she is helping her community heal from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and rebuild as they participate in the creation and installation of mosaic tiles in her grant-funded project in downtown Lansing, Michigan.

A native of Mason, Michigan, Leonard grew up hearing about Kalamazoo College from her father, David Leonard ’71. She chose K for its small size and integrated study abroad program. Her study abroad experience in Nairobi, Kenya, was a turning point in her life.

“It was the best and worst experience of my life,” Leonard said. “The first five months were everything you want from study abroad—cultural immersion, living with a great host family.”

Then, after the December 2007 presidential election in Kenya, accusations of vote rigging erupted into two months of violent protests, police use of excessive force, ethnic-based killings and reprisals that left more than 1,000 dead and up to 500,000 people displaced, according to Human Rights Watch.

“We were in lockdown for a month, couldn’t leave the apartment,” Leonard said. “At one point, we had to shut the windows because tear gas was coming in. I lived close to downtown, across from a park where protests turned violent. I was watching this place I’d fallen in love with crumble.”

Before the election crisis, Leonard had taken a class at the University of Nairobi. “The professor told us to watch this election carefully based on what we’d learned about the history of Africa and colonialism. He said, ‘You walk around and this looks like a peaceful country. But Kenya is a sleeping lion and you will see how this comes out and everything is just under the surface.’ Then it was so much worse than people were anticipating.”

While the political events unfolding around her engulfed Leonard in shock, at the same time she learned that a childhood best friend had died violently under mysterious circumstances.

“To this day, they don’t really know what happened to her and the facts between sources vary,” Leonard said. “I realized death is much harder to process when you don’t actually know what happened.”

By the time Leonard returned home, she found her other childhood friends had moved past the desire to talk about her friend, further isolating her as she struggled to share her experiences in Africa.

“I didn’t know a lot about therapy or PTSD back then,” Leonard said. “I didn’t realize I was dissociating a lot to cope. I hardly felt any emotion and I thought, ‘I guess this is how I am now.’”

Leonard found some relief in art. For her SIP, she created eight ceramic casts of the heads and bodies of human models. Each piece featured a viewing portal to various materials and scenes Leonard had arranged inside. Her SIP title, Things Fall Apart, referenced the well-known novel about the effects of colonialism in Africa by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, her feeling that her own world had fallen apart, and the reality of working with ceramics, which can fail, break or explode in the kiln.

The night before her SIP exhibit opened, Leonard was in the Light Fine Arts Building setting up. Across the room, behind her back, one of the heads suddenly fell and smashed on the floor.

“It had been sitting there for two hours, and I thought, ‘This would happen. I named the thing Things Fall Apart; did I make that happen somehow?’ It was terrible at the time, but now I consider it a bit of a spiritual experience—probably partially from sleep deprivation.”

Leonard stayed up all night epoxying the sculpture together. “I was thinking about ancient Greek sculptures and how little shards are always missing, and that’s what that one looks like now,” Leonard said. “I love it, actually, a lot more than I did before.”

Her SIP also included a short story she wrote for English Professor Emerita Gail Griffin’s creative nonfiction class.

“I wrote out the story of the Kenya saga in different flashbacks juxtaposed with what my friend was like, what I wanted to remember about her, what we knew happened,” Leonard said. “It gave some language to the deep feelings I couldn’t speak.”

Simultaneously, Leonard found more healing in making a film about her friend for a documentary filmmaking class.

“I interviewed her mom and a number of close friends, and I had that time talking about her that I had never gotten,” Leonard said. “To me, that was all I could do to hang on to her, while also trying to let go. I’d spend all day editing video and feel like I had spent the whole day with her. It was really beautiful. That’s grieving.

“I think I beat myself up for a long time about my grief and how long it felt like it was taking. I had some very kind professors at K who were understanding of the fact that it was hard for me to talk about and yet I wanted to talk about it, too.”

After graduating with a degree in art, Leonard needed a break. She moved to the Lansing area, working first in the hospitality industry and on her family’s farm, then in financial planning with her father, while participating with Sunset Clay Studio in Lansing. She traveled extensively around the country and the world with a focus on art. In 2018, a uniquely high-ceilinged gallery space spurred the creation of a 200-section hanging sculpture which she then entered into arts competition ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“It was about 10 years after my experience in Kenya and the first time I’d done body casting work since my SIP,” Leonard said. “I had a lot more of my feelings processed in healthier ways. That sculpture was about my friend, and a tribute and an honor to the ways we grieve, the ways we process our feelings, and the ways our trauma houses itself in parts of our bodies. It was a hard journey to make. For me, I want to not block my mind from those things. I also don’t want to keep reliving it over and over.”

Now, Leonard works sometimes in the restaurant industry, currently for The People’s Kitchen, and in custom residential tile work with Heritage Flooring. Owner and lead tile installer Paul Torok has served as a mentor, teaching her about tiling and encouraging her artistic involvement in mosaic tile projects.

Since 2020, her time and energy have been devoted to the Shiawassee Street Mosaic Project.

The community art installation on the wall of the Shiawassee Street Bridge in downtown Lansing’s Rotary Park brings Leonard back to a trajectory she began her sophomore year at K, when she delved into community organizing with a community-based sociology course connected to Building Blocks, a nonprofit organization that empowers residents to enhance the quality of life in their own neighborhoods.

The 650-square-foot mosaic on the Lansing River Trail features tiles made, glazed and installed by more than 2,000 community members during many workshops orchestrated by Leonard in venues all over the city. Funded by a $75,000 City of Lansing Arts Impact Project Grant, the mosaic was originally intended to be a six-month project in 2020. However, the impacts of COVID-19 and the reality of the multi-step process extended the project another two years.

One of her favorite parts of the project has been engaging people who do not consider themselves artists and did not initially want to participate.

“A couple would come up and one person would be really into making a tile and the other person is just waiting for them, or a dad might be waiting for his kids to make tiles,” Leonard said. “I’d just put a tile in front of them, and tell them, it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece; they all look beautiful when they get glazed.”

The tiles tell thousands of stories. One section serves as a memorial for a good friend of Leonard’s who died in July 2021 and includes both tiles made by the friend and tiles inspired by her, crafted at a memorial workshop.

“That brought me back to when I was working on my SIP, where that was art therapy for me and I could pour myself into the work and speak things in nonverbal ways,” Leonard said. “When people have told me stories about their tiles, it’s often in memory of people they love, and that to me is such a beautiful thing.”

In the future, Leonard plans to tend and touch up the mosaic as needed. She also intentionally designed it to allow for the possibility of expanding the mosaic. In addition, she is interested in expanding her technical tilesetting and mosaic skills as well as returning to more sculptural art.

Leonard loves that ceramics is both an ancient and impermanent art form.

“Ceramics can be artifacts that teach us about humans thousands of years ago. We uncover mosaics that are pristine under dirt and rubble. And yet, you can crash your sculpture on the ground, and then this piece you’ve poured yourself into is ruined. You take your precious artwork, and load it in a 2,000-degree oven where, who knows what’s going to happen to it? I’ve had sculptures explode in the kiln and you open it and there’s just dust left.

“I hang on to things so hard. And I love ceramics as a practice of surrender. When something breaks of mine, it has to be fine. I can’t do anything about it. I put a tile up one day when it was 85 degrees out and sunny and our mud was drying so quickly. It was this beautiful tree with individual leaves and everything. And five minutes later, it fell off and broke into five pieces. Well, this is life; things fall apart. We puzzle it out and put it back together as best we can.”

The Process: From Bags of Clay to Community Mosaic

By Andy Brown

A torch is being passed in Kalamazoo College’s Department of East Asian Studies as it continues a tradition of excellence in teaching and guiding students toward global citizenship. Two of its foundational members, professors emerita Madeline Chu in Chinese and Roselee Bundy in Japanese, passed away in 2022 and 2021 respectively. Their scholarship, service and leadership have set up students and their colleagues, now and in the future, for remarkable success as the department looks ahead toward recruiting new students, achieving classroom success and preparing graduates for a global workplace going forward.

Chu accepted a professorship at Kalamazoo College in 1988 and served the College for more than 28 years. At K, she was an endowed chair and received K’s Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship award in recognition of her outstanding classroom teaching. Her calligraphy class was popular with students across campus. Off campus, she was elected president of the Chinese Language Teacher’s Association, a national organization dedicated to promoting and advancing the quality of the teaching of Chinese.

Bundy served the College for nearly 30 years, teaching Japanese literature in translation from all periods, Japanese women’s literature, Asian-American literature and Japanese language courses. In 2009, she earned K’s Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship Award for Excellence in Scholarship in recognition of her outstanding achievement in research and publication.

Both were known nationally as exceptional teachers and scholars who were dedicated to their students and subjects. Current and former faculty are reflecting on that dedication while forecasting what’s next for East Asian studies students.

Looking back:

Chu ‘made the whole place better’

Tim Light is a former College trustee and faculty member who became provost, and eventually, K’s acting president in 1989 and 1990. When Light arrived at K, no Japanese or Chinese programs were offered. He was the one who pursued the initial fundraising to launch the programs. He also was the provost who recruited Chu in 1988 before forming a long friendship with her.

“She was always on top of things and really did a good job,” Light said. “She had a personal approach to people and cared about them. She made the whole place better by the time she left.”

Yet it wasn’t just her teaching that left a lasting impression on Light and on K. Her financial know-how established long-term funding sources for two tenure-track positions within East Asian studies, including hers. Plus, her efforts were imperative in assuring study abroad programs in Asian cities such as Nanjing and Beijing.

“The languages began with French, German and Spanish, and the whole study abroad program was first arranged for them,” Light said. “Eventually, we needed something for Chinese. Madeline was the backbone to that study abroad program.”

Wen Chao Chen Professor of East Asian Social Sciences Dennis Frost shares Light’s admiration for Chu’s devotion, a compliment he extended to Bundy.

 “A lot of times I’ve heard students say just how great Madeline was as a teacher and how focused she was on students, while making sure that their Chinese was as strong as possible,” Frost said. “This was also true of Rose and her students. The reason we have two tenure-track lines in East Asian studies is them. They worked really hard so those positions could build up the program.”

Bundy funds student travel abroad

In 1991, K hired Bundy, who many current faculty members remember fondly, partly for the team she was a part of, the achievements of her students and her dedication to them.

“In January 2009, I became a finalist for a position teaching Japanese and came to Kalamazoo College,” Associate Professor of Japanese Noriko Sugimori said. “Roselee Bundy was the chair of the search committee. At the time of the job interview, I had a chance to talk with many faculty members who were very happy. That was the moment I wanted to join the College and join more of these conversations.

“I was impressed by Kalamazoo College students’ high motivation to learn Japanese,” she added. “Part of my job interview was to demonstrate my teaching, and I was so impressed by the high level of speaking. I was also impressed that Roselee Bundy knew so many details of students’ lives. It gave me the impression that students and professors are very close. I had taught at big schools where I didn’t see such connections.”

Bundy’s efforts continue to benefit today’s K students. Sugimori said Bundy was practical and careful with her finances in life, making possible funds that benefit students with limited resources who want to study abroad in Asia.

Enter the Roselee Bundy Student Travel Fund to Asia and the Roselee Bundy Study Abroad Travel Scholarship Fund. The programs, launched last year, provide benefits for students to perform Senior Integrated Project (SIP) research, provide conference presentations, seek some types of internships, and—in some cases—receive travel expenses, living expenses and archive fees related to distinct research projects in Asia.

“Professor Bundy was devastated to see excellent students give up study abroad for financial reasons,” Sugimori said. “She expressed her wish that everybody could study abroad in Japan. These funds were just announced, and all faculty members of East Asian studies, including me, are exploring the best way to publicize and receive student proposals.”

More tangibly, a book collection donated by Bundy also bears testimony to her dedication to students. “Our students went to her house when she sold it to help carry all of her books to our East Asian studies suite, and we now have a special Roselee Bundy collection,” Sugimori said. “Those books will continue to help scholars who specialize in this field in the future.”

Looking ahead:

New faculty helping new students

Going forward, new faculty will help students for years to come, thanks in part to the legacies of Bundy and Chu. Take, for example, Assistant Professor of Chinese Yanshuo Zhang, who arrived at the College in January 2022, joining Frost, Sugimori, Assistant Professor of Japanese Brian White and Assistant Professor of Chinese Leihua Weng in the department.

Zhang arrived from the University of Michigan, where she was a postdoctoral research fellow in its Center for Chinese Studies. She said she immediately heard from colleagues at other institutions about Chu upon accepting her job at K.

“Many mentioned to me that they had participated in some programs that Professor Madeline Chu had organized back in the 1990s and early 2000s,” Zhang said. “It was delightful to hear that Professor Chu was actively organizing Chinese studies, conferences and workshops, and she left a legacy in the field beyond K.”

That makes predecessors such as Chu in Chinese and Bundy in Japanese role models for her and her future colleagues in East Asian studies, where students learn about some of the world’s most ancient and complex cultures, and the region’s influence in global trade, finance, popular culture and geopolitical interest.

“I’ve always been thinking about how to best serve the academic community, and Professor Bundy and Professor Chu exemplified this great effort to combine their scholarly expertise with their service and their teaching,” Zhang said. “Professor Chu and Professor Bundy organized East Asian studies not only for subject matter but as a doorway for students’ cultural curiosity so they could be interculturally competent and internationally savvy. I think that’s a core component of our liberal arts education and a reason why it’s important to have a foreign-language component and even study abroad. It’s not just another area of knowledge, but it’s core to global citizenship.”

To provide an example of how she seeks to follow in their footsteps, Zhang said she’s secured a book donation through another professor, much like Bundy provided a donation of her books for East Asian studies, to build those donations into a departmental library.

“I think it’s a wonderful story of everything coming full circle and seeing our legacy extending beyond the College and to younger generations. To see the branches of our program internationally and intergenerationally has been really inspiring for me as a new assistant professor in our program.”

‘Don’t ignore a small deed’

Looking across campus, influences such as Chu’s and Bundy’s are distinctive and inspiring in East Asian studies, yet not unique at K. Most departments have leaders and teachers like Chu and Bundy, and that’s an important detail to affirm as East Asian studies, and the entire College, continue providing excellent educations in the liberal arts.

“If we can tell future students about them, I think we will say that Professor Bundy and Professor Chu were great examples of the vast majority of professors here at K who are sterling scholars and published writers,” Zhang said. “And their names are known in the fields of their academic studies. But our professors are integrating their life’s work into their career and their work at the College. It’s not separate. It’s one full package our students will get from our faculty because the scholarship faculty are developing will translate into course materials, class activities and the things we teach our students.”

And no matter how small the messages from those materials and activities might seem at the moment they’re sent, faculty never know what might spark the inspiration that leads to further research, scholarly efforts or even a career in a field such as East Asian studies.

“To borrow a lesson from Chinese culture, don’t ignore a small deed because it’s small,” Zhang said. “It could grow into a big enterprise in the future.”

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East Asian Studies Widens World View

This fall, I started my first year at Kalamazoo College. I have always had an interest in history, but my high school had not offered me any classes on Asian History, just American and European history.

Following my interest, one of the first classes I took was Professor Dennis Frost’s lecture on modern Chinese history. Dr. Frost’s lectures focus on Chinese history from 1911 to the present. He speaks about the changes that the Chinese society and government have been through in the past 111 years and the broad history of Modern China, while the outside readings focus on singular lives of Chinese people during this time. Outside of class, we read an autobiography about a woman soldier during the unification of China under the Guomindang, also called the Chinese Nationalist Party, and another autobiography from the lens of a failed scholar.

This class has widened my worldview and knowledge. Before Dr. Frost’s class, I knew almost nothing of China and its people. Through his coursework and his required readings, I have gained a new understanding of China as a whole. This new understanding has provided me with a glimpse into Chinese culture and history. My horizons have been widened to include the experience of Modern Chinese people. This will help me be a better citizen of the world and understand others’ plights. I do not yet know what I want to major in, but Dr. Frost’s class will help me no matter what I choose.

Faith Bacon-Angevine ’26

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