In Overland Park, Kansas, in the 1970s, there weren’t many Asian-Americans around. But Abraham Lim, whose parents immigrated from Korea in the 50s, didn’t feel threatened by racism until 1984, when he got a summer job with a local road crew in order to “figure out what it was like to work for a living–really work.”
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There was one African-American man on the job, Daryl, and Lim was assigned to his crew. The two became friends. “The only time I’d get flak was in the lounge before or after work,” Lim says. “I’d hear ‘ah-so’ or some ‘ching-chong’ saying that generically stupid white guys do.” But Daryl was regularly called derogatory names and was the target of racist literature and other forms of harassment.
Production on the film took six years, and Lim and his skeleton crew made dozens of trips from New York to Kansas. Over the years the actor playing Daryl, Gregory Sullivan, gained 20 pounds and Lim went through three directors of photography.
