Ask Los Angeles filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peņa about Asian American film and she thinks of cleaning products. "When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, I remember seeing a floor wax commercial on TV," she says. "There was one Asian face in it, and my entire family came running out to see this one-minute commercial -- even my grandmother on her walker." Much later, in 1980, when she was just out of college, Tajima-Peņa was to remember that rare "Asian sighting" as she became part of a surging societal ferment for a greater Asian American presence in television. The result of that activism, San Francisco's National Asian American Telecommunications Association, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Annie Nakao reports for the San Francisco Chronicle.
