A Word On Asian Representation
Published September 23, 2021
Finn Laubscher
As if it hasn’t been talked to death already. Or maybe I just have a really specific Instagram algorithm? Asian representation in film media is a hot topic right now since the hugely successful theatrical release of Marvel’s latest movie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Now, uh, disclaimer. I’m a terrible Asian American and I have failed to yet see the movie. Movie theaters still freak me out, okay? So until I gather the courage and funds to shell out the twenty bucks to go watch this blockbuster, here’s a brief recap on some of the more prominent Asian representation in North American media in the past decade.
(I start with the past decade because before that, Asian American representation is pretty depressing. I leave the 20th century out of this essay save a bright vignette: Mickey Rooney’s heavily-prostheticized, -bucktoothed, and -accented portrayal of a Japanese busybody with anger management issues in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Ah, classic film.)
Main cast of Fresh Off the Boat. Image via Walt Disney Television.
If you’ve taken a CAT class with Phoebe Bronstein, you’ll know that television has often broken the barriers of representation before feature films have dared to. (See: George Takei as Sulu in Star Trek in 1966; do not see: J.J. Abram’s 2009 blockbuster reboot which features the same number of people of color as the four-decades-old television show.) And the first piece of media that I personally remember getting really excited about in terms of this was the 2015 premiere of the ABC show Fresh Off the Boat. It’s a family comedy, a-la Modern Family or Black-ish, about a Taiwanese-American family moving from D.C. to suburban Florida. It’s based on celebrity chef Eddie Huang’s memoir.
It was pretty much the first primetime television series since the 90s to feature an all-Asian main cast, and I ran around telling absolutely everyone I knew to tune in on Wednesday night for the pilot. (Ah, remember network television?) The thing with mainstream Asian American media is that it has to do well. I know I always sound paranoid, telling all my friends, family, and acquaintances, “Hey, watch this show! Hey, go see this movie! If it does poorly, they won’t let us on air again!” But, uh, it’s not unheard of. Viewership of Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl crashed after a few seasons in the mid-90s, and they didn’t give us another sitcom until… yeah, until 2015.
So Fresh Off the Boat was huge, in terms of letting non-Asian America know that, hey! These people are normal people, just like us! Which to me, growing up surrounded by my Asian family, was never a problem. But, hey. We’re a racial minority in the United States with a long and complicated history of exclusion and alienation. I get that, uh, maybe some people need a reminder. And for avid ABC viewers, Fresh Off the Boat was just that.
Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M Chu. Image via TED Conference.
Then 2016 saw Jon Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians, the first big Asian-led Hollywood blockbuster since 1993’s Joy Luck Club (the latter of which I also haven’t seen, because I am, as I said, a terrible Asian American). Crazy Rich Asians starred Constance Wu, whose career had gotten off the ground with Fresh Off the Boat, and Henry Golding, B-list representative of the burgeoning category of whasian heartthrob. Crazy Rich Asians was a production design daydream, a beautiful work of absurd ambition that pulled out all the stops with aplomb. It was a big-budget Asian rom-com, and it smashed the box office. It put out a little signal to the big studios: hey, Asians can make us money, after all!
Of course, it wasn’t without its controversies. Like, why did the film, set in Singapore, feature a cast of characters who were all Chinese, failing to represent the Indian and Malay ethnic groups of the island? Why does Awkwafina speak with a blaccent, to comedic effect? Why was the dashing love interest Nick Young played by a half-white actor, when the character is fully Chinese? These criticisms are all valid, of course; the thing is, when all Asian Americans have by way of feature film representation is one movie, of course people are going to leave disappointed. Yes, we are on the big screen — but are we all on the big screen?
I’ll only say a word about another of Henry Golding’s recent roles. He played a Chinese-English mobster in Guy Ritchie’s 2019 flick The Gentlemen. I regret to say that I despised this film more than I have ever despised any piece of media. I have much to say on the topic, but I’ll leave it with the quippy epithet attached to the introduction of Golding’s character Dry Eye: “Ricence to Kill.” This film was, for me, a sobering reminder that for every victory Asian creators score, there are a dozen big-budget movies rife with violent prejudice getting pushed through the Hollywood machine. Sigh.
But there are victories. I’ll briefly mention 2016’s critically-acclaimed film Lion, starring Dev Patel, also known as the movie that was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, and I was like, “Hey this movie I haven’t seen is going to win all the Oscars,” and then it didn’t win any. There was also Nahnatchka Khan’s 2019 romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe, also known as The Asian American Rom-Com. Everyone agrees Keanu Reeves was excellent in it.
Then there was the controversial live-action version of Disney’s Mulan which came out in 2020. There were… a lot of problems with this film, reportedly. Of course, you can guess by now that I didn’t see it. I was on one of my self-righteous movie boycotts, which usually have more to do with me being cheap than with any real moral character. But come on, it was like $30 on Disney+. This film boasted an all-Asian cast, something which should not be remarkable in a movie about Imperial China, and yet… hey, is that Matt Damon fighting aliens on the Great Wall of China?
But behind the East Asian faces of the film, the production team was predominantly white, including the writers, director, cinematographer, editor, and costume designer. Representation does not start or stop with actors, but needs to be carried through every step of production. How can non-Asians faithfully write about the Asian experience? (And make no mistake, although Mulan is a historical-fantasy action film, the original animated movie is arguably allegorical for the Asian diasporic experience, and inarguably relatable to scads of second-generation kids.)
Exterior set of Kim’s Convenience. Image via flickr.
Let’s circle back to Shang-Chi. One of the more popular quarantine binge-shows has been Kim’s Convenience, a Canadian sitcom about the misadventures of a Korean family in Vancouver. Like Fresh Off the Boat, it explores the family dynamics all-too-familiar to many Asian Americans — the immigrant parent/second generation child culture clash, the emotional reticence of Asian parents, the industriousness of the immigrant generation. The breakout star of the series has been the actor Simu Liu, who plays the estranged son Jung Kim in the show and the eponymous Shang-Chi in the new film.
There’s been some weirdness with the writer’s room, though, which started with Korean creator Ins Choi and, somewhere along the way, ended up… predominantly white? Um, oh. We all thought we were laughing with the Asian writers, but were we laughing at the Asian characters? The show frequently banks on aspects of Asian culture and diasporic Asian patterns of speech. When I thought the show was written by other Asian people, I had no problem with the reliance on shorthands of stereotype and the humor created by subversions of these stereotypes. But knowing that the writer’s room apparently lacked East Asian representation… hey, who told you guys that you were allowed to make those jokes?
Which leads us back to Shang-Chi. This film is remarkable not only for its all-Asian main cast, not only because it’s literally the second time that Marvel has let Asian actors play, um, human characters, and not only because Simu Liu looks really, really good in the promotional photos. But also because the Asian perspective does not start and stop with Liu. Shang-Chi is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose name belies his half-Japanese ancestry. (Hey, me too!) And despite the fact that it seems like Simu Liu was single-handedly handling the promotion of the film, the new Marvel movie busted box office records. Diversity of creators can only benefit the quality of media output, and that starts on the ground level. Unlike many big-budget directors, Cretton is not the product of nepotism (I’m looking specifically at J.J. Abrams, here). His success is the product of his skill, and if the critics and my mother are to be believed, Shang-Chi is a pretty darn good movie, as far as flashy superhero action films go.
The reason that Shang-Chi is so exciting to me is that it crosses off one more media first for Asian Americans. Is anyone else excited for the day when an Asian-led Marvel movie can be, well, just another crappy Marvel movie? In the meantime, though, we take our first-super-hero-movies where we can get them. And I swear, I’ll get around to seeing it. Soon.