Ten minutes into Randall Park’s deftly brilliant film adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s dark and bitter graphic novel “Shortcomings,” I was suddenly convinced that Asian Americans have finally arrived where we’ve always belonged — and where we might have been a century ago, were it not for the decades of relentless stereotyping, exclusion and erasure we’ve faced in Hollywood.
The movie’s opening should be instantly familiar to many viewers. It’s a riff on the famous first scene of “Crazy Rich Asians,” the movie that crashed the gates of Hollywood for our vastly underrepresented Asian American community. In it, a glammed-up Stephanie Hsu and Ronny Chieng are turned away from a high-end hotel by a snide and vaguely racist white clerk, only to inform him that they’ve just purchased the complex out from under him, and now he works for them.
As Hsu and Chieng commemorate the victory they’ve seized from the jaws of bigotry with an elevator kiss, the camera cuts to another Asian American couple, Miko Hayashi (Ally Maki) and Ben Tanaka (Justin H. Min), sitting in a college film-festival audience as the movie’s closing credits roll. Miko is clapping deliriously along with the rest of the mostly Asian crowd; Ben, a failed indie auteur turned failing arthouse theater manager, is deeply and visibly unimpressed. When Miko expresses her annoyance that her crank of a boyfriend can’t simply celebrate a rare moment of joy for their community, Ben grouses back:
“It’s depressing to see a room full of people lose their minds because of representation, or whatever.”
This very meta moment reflects a real and needed debate within Asian America today. Because from a certain perspective, Ben is right — mere representation on its own is not enough. For decades, we’ve picked out actors in minor roles and hoisted them onto pedestals, lauded our token inclusion in vast multicultural ensembles, seized on works that, even if they weren’t made by Asian American creators, felt authentic enough to borrow as victories for our community — hello “Harold and Kumar” and “The Last Airbender” — because little else that reflected our faces, our talent and our urgent yet untold stories.
And, yes, we’ve sometimes found ourselves cheerleading mediocre or problematic productions made by Asian American creators — suppressing even our best-intentioned, good-faith challenges of flawed works, out of awareness that the slightest perceived lack of support for our own stories might lead to them being taken away. A replacement for more candid critiques: what my friends and frequent collaborators Phil Yu, Joanna Lee and Jenny Yang have dubbed` the “rep sweats,” a state of silent, clenched-jaw dread over whether a new Asian American work might end up embarrassing us as a collective community.
So congratulations, Ben Tanaka, you fatuously self-righteous jerk! You’ve got a point. Cheering for representation is depressing! Why should we be delighted over mere visibility? Isn’t seeing ourselves projected in mall multiplexes just a Dolby-driven participation trophy?
On the other hand, Miko Hayashi is also right: Representation absolutely matters when you don’t have it. And for over a century, Asian Americans mostly haven’t.
Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the iconic Anna May Wong’s debut in 1922’s “Toll of the Sea.” In it, she plays a tragic lotus blossom who takes her own life to ensure that her son can be brought to America by his U.S. Navy father — perhaps the earliest screen version of the unkillable racist tale of “Madame Butterfly.” Wong would go on to portray a mix of tragic victims and femmes fatales, over a heartbreaking career in which she was denied the showstopping roles her resplendent talent warranted.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of silent film great Sessue Hayakawa’s decision to leave the U.S. and act in Europe and Japan instead, places where he was seen as a leading man and a sex symbol, in contrast to the leering, rapacious villain characters Hollywood studios reserved for him. Though his portrayals of these fiendish cads caused American women to swoon in theater aisles, they never led to the opportunity for him to stand in the spotlight as a romantic hero, because Hollywood’s Hays Code barred depictions of miscegenation onscreen (and in 1931’s “Daughter of the Dragon,” the one movie in which he was cast with an Asian love interest — naturally played by Wong — both of them died before they could so much as clutch hands).
Next year marks the 100th anniversary of pulp novelist Earl Derr Biggers’s creation of Charlie Chan, the “Oriental detective” who’d go on to become Hollywood’s most famous Asian character — though in the dozens of popular feature films inspired by Biggers’s books, he was portrayed only by white men wearing yellowface makeup.
So it’s taken 100 years for us to get to a place where we finally have enough rich, nuanced and varied representation that we can feel assured that we can have opinions without being ushered out of the room.
Since “Crazy Rich Asians” broke through in 2018, we’ve seen an abundance of stories displaying the diversity of tastes and perspectives within and around Asian America, across an array of genres, old and new: Immigrant family dramas, like “The Farewell,” “Minari” and “Tigertail.”
Immigrant family comedies, like “Definition Please,” “The Fabulous Filipino Brothers” and “Easter Sunday.”
Rom-coms, like “Always Be My Maybe,” “Fire Island” and the animated “Elemental.”
Rom-drams, like “The Half of It” and “Past Lives.”
Coming-of-age stories, like “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “Never Have I Ever,” and coming-to-terms-with-loss stories, like “Yellow Rose,” “Umma” and “Driveways.”
We’ve seen musings about the frontiers of technology — the terminally online thriller “Searching” and the ruminative robot tale “After Yang” — and explorations beyond the limits of humanity — superhero tales like “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Ms. Marvel” and “Eternals.”
And we’ve seen a plethora of bold reinventions of the martial arts genre, the first to bring Asian heroes to American audiences, from the loving old-school homage “The Paper Tigers,” to the CW’s reboot of “Kung Fu” featuring an Asian American woman lead, to over-the-top actioners like “Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins” and the latest cinematic take on the videogame “Mortal Kombat,” both remade with Asian American protagonists; to Justin Lin and Shannon Lee’s brilliant interpretation of her father Bruce’s dream TV project, “Warrior.”
And then, the wild, uncategorizable, sometimes shocking works, beginning with “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” that much-awarded masterpiece featuring Michelle Yeoh as a multiversal martial-arts matriarch, and continuing with Ali Wong and Steven Yeun’s addictively dark and scabrous Netflix revenge drama series “Beef”; Disney+’s Technicolor rendition of Gene Luen Yang’s classic graphic novel “American Born Chinese”; the brash, bawdy, balls-out (ovaries-out?) girls trip “Joy Ride,” the directorial debut of “Crazy Rich Asians” screenwriter Adele Lim; and “Shortcomings,” with a screenplay by Tomine, who mellowed the tone of his 2007 book into a hilariously cynical and angry exploration of the sexual politics of race and reframed it in a more contemporary setting and context.
Not all of these works have been perfect. But all of them have expanded the ways that we are seen, and that we see ourselves, onscreen — taking us beyond just “representation” and delivering complex, nuanced and, yes, messy depictions that center us as human. And just as important, though not all of them have been critical or commercial hits, we no longer feel we have to pin all of our hopes on the success of any single work.
Could it be that we’ve finally achieved the ultimate form of parity with white creators — the right to occasionally be mediocre, without being framed as devastating failures?
Let’s hope so. At the very least, we should have the chance to let the rep sweats towel dry.
Jeff Yang is co-author of “Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now” and the author of the forthcoming “The Golden Screen: The Movies That Made Asian America.”
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August 19, 2023 at 06:03PM
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