INTERVIEW: HELIE LEE

FILMMAKER’S CALLS TRANSGENDER EXPERIMENT ‘THE MOST HUMBLING EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE’

After returning from a triumphant mission wherein memoirist Helie Lee rescued nine of her relatives from North Korea, you would imagine she felt on top of the world. Instead, she couldn’t help but feel like a second-class citizen—imprisoned by her own gender.

“Coming back from North Korea left me with a lot of really bitter feelings. I thought life would have been better if I had been born a boy,” she recalled. “I would have received privileges that I would not have to earn because I was male. That’s how I decided to live as a guy.”

For six months, Lee kept her hair pixie-short, bound her chest, and wore boyish clothes—all to prove her hypothesis that men had it better across the board, regardless of what culture they were from. She documented her transformation and then created a one-woman show to narrate her journey, both of which are captured in a film called MACHO LIKE ME. The film is screening at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival on Wednesday, May 5 at 9:15 PM at the Downtown Independent. BUY TICKETS

Lee knew she wanted to record her experience of becoming a man, so she hired two camerawomen to follow her around 24/7. At the beginning of the project she worried about the cost of feeding her crew and acquiring the proper equipment, but on the day that she transformed herself into her male alter ego, Harry, she realized she had much bigger things to worry about.

“My biggest concern was that I would be outed as a woman,” she recalled, knowing that she looked something like a butch woman in the beginning. But as she continued her journey and eventually began to pass as a man, her emotions changed. “Toward the end I was more fearful of being looked at as less than a man, not man enough. I was more afraid that guys would judge me as being too feminine for a guy.”

It was realizations like this that caused her to rethink her original hypothesis. Rather than seeing how easy life was for men, she began to see how stressful the expectations heaped upon boys and men could be.

“There was a lot of stress that I never thought men went through. I have to tell you it was the most humbling experience of my life,” she said. “I never knew how difficult men had it. And a lot of them don’t complain because men aren’t allowed to complain.”

Another change in perspective came when she started viewing the documentary footage that her crew had shot, and reflecting on the experience. She knew that the few usable clips and segments wouldn’t work as a straightforward documentary, so she began experimenting with other forms.

“I started writing about the experience as a memoir, and I had thought it was a pretty deep piece. But when I shared what I had written, I realized everyone kept laughing at the tragic experiences I kept having,” she said. “When I inserted the live footage people were laughing even more. I wasn’t sure what was going to manifest, but it turned out to be a one woman show. I never would have envisioned that.”

She was excited by the prospect of the instant feedback and energy that a live show would bring—even though she was five months pregnant when the final version of the film was shot last summer. The birth of her twins provides a poignant coda to her story, which is largely premised on the idea that as a woman she was failing to live up to her parents’ expectations of settling down with a nice man and providing them with grandchildren. Even though she eventually did just that, she doesn’t want anyone to think that marriage and motherhood have to be the answer for everyone. Rather, the experience simply allowed her to understand who she was, and who she could be. Her desire to help make the world a better place for her daughter and son became part of that discovery.

“All of this has led up to me being a better human being,” she said. “If I had not done that, I probably would have not gotten married and had children. Not that you have to become a man to be happy, but it opened my heart, softened me, got me in touch with my femininity. It allowed me to break down the barriers that were encasing my heart and open up and be available for love once it hit me.” BUY TICKETS

-Lori Kido Lopez