The last impression that I have of George Lin was of that of an uninhibited party animal. This certainly wasn't due to observing him in his element as the architect of the screening program of the annual San Diego Asian Film Festival, for which he served as program director beginning in 2002 after jump-starting Washington DC's Asian American Film Festival in 2000. Due to my work and travel responsibilities, I stopped regularly attending SDAFF after its inaugural year in 2000, and in recent years could only drop in on a "stealth" basis, long after the busy weekends, award dinners and late-night karaoke parties that have become a hallmark of that festival.

During those occasions, I'd observed George as a popular, if low-key mainstay of the festival organizing team. While executive director Lee Ann Kim was and remains SDAFF's manic and energetic leader, Arnold Marquez its diffident kindred spirit, and Dallas import Mye Hoang its organizational anchor, it was always George who I perceived as SDAFF's resident gambler, the one willing to take some risks with individual, less obvious programming selections. He wasn't the only one, of course -- I remember Arnold taking chances with programming gambits during his tenure with the festival. But I have to believe that SDAFF's growth and programming acumen was a direct result of George's moving west in 2002 to assume programming duties for the festival. How I ever got the notion that a party animal resided in George? More on that later...

I first met George Lin in the year 2000. Way back then, George and Gene Huh, one of his associates of the newly re-christened DC APA Film Festival sojourned to San Francisco to glean knowledge and insight from the veteran programmers and film festival directors who converged each March on the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. The DC APA organizers assumed the challenge of resurrecting a venue for Asian Pacific American film from the ashes of the former Asian American Arts & Media, which had organized DC's film festival the previous twelve years, and for George and Gene, San Francisco presented a valuable opportunity to assimilate a set of "best practices" and dos and don'ts in their efforts to re-institute the film festival in the nation's capital.

I never did really did get to chat with George at length -- I sat on a panel with a group of other film fest directors during which there seemed to be more fumbling around than anything resembling a passing down of useful knowledge on the subject of instituting and growing APA film festivals (one lady in the audience had the teremity to publicly confront me and Brian Lau, SFIAAFF's then-festival director, as to why her feature documentary was excluded from our respective program line-ups). Yet there was George and Gene in the front row, soaking up whatever kernel of knowledge and experience they could gather from that talk. And George, as the leader of that DC contingent, was the one most eager to learn how to make a festival work, and to make daring and dynamic programming choices. And how to make those choices work for his audience.

The years after that first quasi-meeting went by in a blur: a couple of years after the first DC APA Film Fest, George decided to quit his government job in a DC-area lab and move west to join SDAFF for its 2002 edition. In short order, he moved into the programming director's position, took up uniquely SoCali endeavors such as surfing, and eventually left his former life as a scientist (if anyone remembers, George's picture posing with his first longboard became the iconic graphic of SDAFF's 2004 edition, much like Jerry West's "Mr. Clutch" silhouette was long ago adopted as the NBA's logo).

In 2005, George joined SDAFF's artistic director Sam Chen on their first trip to Park City, Utah to help organize the APA Filmmakers' Experience Reception along with staffers from Visual Communications, Asian CineVision, and the Center for Asian American Media (by then, George had adopted the absolutely annoying habit of constantly logging onto his SideKick, and seemed to live his life by it the whole weekend). Our whole group attended a screening of Alice Wu's feature-narrative debut, SAVING FACE, and I remember George and Sam's chattering about the film after the house lights went up -- how their absolute love for the film was tempered by the challenges of imagining how a film with such overt lesbian sexuality could pass muster with their board and sponsors as an SDAFF Opening Night offering.

In 2006 and 2007, George attended Closing Night of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, marveling at Film Fest closers AMERICANese by Eric Byler, and THE REBEL by Charlie Nguyen, and expressed hopes that the filmmakers would see fit to accept his invitations for their films to play at SDAFF. My 2007 Closing Night encounter with George was significant for the cane he was leaning on, the first physical manifestation I observed of his years-long battle with a tumor that over the years would chew away at the bones in his neck and would render him incapacitated at some of the most inopportune times. For instance, he had to cancel his 2007 trip to Park City when his condition flared up while on a group outing, and I would hear from time to time about other incidents where George would go in for treatment. Yet George never missed an edition of SDAFF, and by 2008 he was well enough to make the trek to Park City one more time to help organize the APA Experience Reception and to look over possible programming for this year's SDAFF. While the photo of him above waiting for a shuttle bus showed George at his most pensive, in fact he was having a ball. While some of us were viewing films at press screenings and sweating out the delivery of items for filmmaker and guest gift bags, George spent the first full day snowboarding, passing out event postcards, and stargazing up and down the Sundance Film Festival's main drag on Main Street. Ironically, I threw out my back out shortly after arriving, and spent the first day or so crawling around with heating pads strapped to my belt and cursing the prospect of getting around hunched over like an oldtimer.

One night, after the APA Filmmakers Experience reception was completed, over and done with, the group decided to play drinking games back at the condo we were staying at. Being an avowed lightweight, I declined to join in but remained a casual observer as I sat nearby working on my laptop. Armed with bottles of hard liquor including a liter bottle of brand-xxx Absinthe, the group proceeded to play drinking games. Jeff Liu suggested a supposed Maori drinking challenge in which individual drinkers would throw down a shot and yell out a chant -- "Puki-na, BLAHHH!" I don't know if this whole thing was authentic or not, or if it wasn't just another one of Jeff's old college drinking games, but I remember thinking three things: one, a LOT of liquor was consumed; two, George really started getting into this game, and in fact won a few challenges -- he was becoming a bit feral and actually started to scare me, and; three, contrary to what I feared, George actually came out of the whole evening in relatively good shape. Instead, it was one of our other staffers, Eric, who got the worst of it. I'm not going to go into the sordid details of the morning after (don't ask -- please), but for the rest of the trip I couldn't shake the notion that maybe, just maybe, a chronically-ill person as George Lin had just drank a bunch of party animals under the table.

George isn't around anymore -- his tumor having spread once again at summer's end, he finally passed away last Tuesday afternoon, October 14, 2008, with father by his bedside, just as SDAFF '08 entered the home stretch. To many, kicking the bucket at age 37, with so much already accomplished and so much more to conquer, would seem cruel, a waste, certainly premature. Yet I think that George spent a good portion of his lifetime learning about and becoming enthralled by the broad range of his community's creative expressions, and through DC APA and SDAFF, found a means by which people could learn about what excited him, and in turn get excited themselves. It's too late to challenge him to a drinking game rematch; as it is, I don't think he'd settle for anybody coming to the table with fake Absinthe or any other kind of libation. George Lin was always about the really real, whether it was shaping an APA film festival program, or winning at frat-boy drinking games. And I don't think he'd settle for anything less.

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Some of George Lin's friends and colleagues have established a Facebook page for those who would like to share their thoughts and reminiscences. Visit that page here. And click on the respective link to visit the homepages of the DC APA Film Festival and San Diego Asian Film Foundation.