How Asian-American Directors reframe cultural discourse in Hollywood
From top left to right: Ang Lee - Gregg DeGuire/Stringer, Yasujiro Ozu - Kyodo News, Alice Wu - J. Vespa, Wayne Wang - Mark Ralston, and Jon M. Chu - John Shearer.
While the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians was a massive Hollywood hit and was celebrated for its all-Asian cast, it also propagated Asian American stereotypes through its General Tso’s chicken-style rom-com chick-flick tendencies. Asian American films in Hollywood, just like all other fetishized groups, try to break these stereotypes and create a brand-new impression that is more foot on the ground and close to the Asian-acclaimed reality. The best way of doing this is the same as breaking any fetishization: to represent Asian Americans as humans instead of as symbols of their race.
As part of the Hollywood context is dominated by the Academy Awards, films with an Asian identity have been reduced to a single dimension that catered to the western world’s gaze that mirrors their imagination of Asian culture and identity. Looking back at the Asian films in the history of Oscars, during the entire Cold War period, Japanese films dominated the Asian film pantheon and took almost all the spots left for Asian cinema among Academy Award nominees. The only exceptions were the Indian films Mother India and Salaam Bombay! On the eve of the end of the Cold War, The Last Emperor swept the Oscars and had a sensational impact on the world. Although the theme of it followed the typical Asian ideology embedded in a dramatic period that happened in the forbidden city, the combination of an English-speaking cast and an Italian auteur greatly compromised the Asian purity of the film. During this period, all Asian cinema was Japanese in the eyes of the Academy and American audiences.
What is more noticeable is the ignorance of the academy to Asian actors. As a biopic, The Last Emperor swept the Oscars, but there was no one in the cast that got a nomination for their acting. According to the convention of nominees for the best actor, films that win or are nominated for Best Picture would usually show up in the acting nominations. This convention didn't adapt to The Last Emperor under the premise that the film speaks English.
The circumstances for non-English speaking films are tougher. So far, Rinko Kikuchi is the only Asian actor who has been nominated for academy awards for acting in a non-English performance. Coincidentally, Rinko Kikuchi acted as a girl who was dealing with a disability and emotional trauma in the movie Babel. There are examples of Asian actors who speak English and were nominated, like Cambodian actor Haing S. Ngor, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Killing Fields, but for an actor who doesn’t speak English and wants to get nominated, acting aphasia is a good way to go.
In a circumstance like this, catering to the stereotypes of Hollywood’s gaze on Asians seems like a realistic approach in order to generate a more fruitful conversation. Adding Kong fu gimmicks in acting became popular with actors like Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan. This mastery of martial arts can be categorized as physical superiority with which they transcend to a better life, similar to John Travolta in Saturday Night Live and Jenny Beales in Flashdance. However, their Asian counterparts are unlikely to ever have any sexual encounters with female protagonists.
How can we bring Asians into the mainstream narrative? Starting with films that focus on “the family” is a good start. Dating back to Yasujirō Ozu, Asian films attract the mainstream spotlight by generating a narrative depicting family dynamics that are exclusive to the Asian discourse. Directors including Ang Lee, Alice Wu, and Wayne Wang all made their debut in the States with films centered around a subtle familial relationship that were retrospectives of their pasts.
Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club (1993) is the last major Hollywood film before Crazy Rich Asians with a majority Asian cast set in a contemporary background. 25 years passed after it was released until Crazy Rich Asians. Serving as a chronicle with many retrospectives on the first-generation immigrant, it observed Chinese women with a gaze that combined western imaginations with oriental traditions, which expanded the diversity of its audience. After The Joy Luck Club, Wayne Wang directed Chinese Box, an interracial romance melodrama set in Hong Kong starring Jeremy Irons that attracts audiences, including worldwide fans of Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, and Maggie Cheung’s. The film has the appeal for audiences with a curiosity of Life in Hong Kong, with the metaphor that each character symbolizes the UK, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. He utilizes these characters to develop a conversation about Hong Kong’s handover after 1997 but didn’t succeed in generating novelty in his narration. His later work A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, adapted from Yiyun Li’s novel of the same name, shared a similar theme that talked about the generation gap and single society, but he expanded his theme into a wider discussion of contemporary communication alienation.
Depicting the LGBTQ+ community is also a way many Asian-American directors break the generalization of the community, whether intentionally or not. While Ang lee’s The Wedding Banquet explores the compromise and the struggle, with the protagonist wobbling between following tradition and following his heart, a relationship often depicted between Chinese parents and their children. The film developed its tension with Ang Lee’s exclusive ability in capturing details, with a parallel narration from both the gay man and the woman who agreed to marry him, leaving some mysteries unsolved that kept humming in the background. Alice Wu, whose films are always focused on LGBTQ+ groups, started her storytelling journey with Saving Faces, where she used five years to write and polish the script. After graduating from Stanford and working in Microsoft, she found her passion was elsewhere. Wu then signed up for a 12-week screenwriting class at the University of Washington, where she spent 40,000 dollars covering daily expenses and becoming a full-time writer. In an interview, she talked about her writing path. “There must be a purpose when you are making a movie,” she said, “because there are already too many films that have been made which easily drown out your own voice.” Telling her own story, through which she can expand the human capacity for empathy, is also one of the impulses that brought her detailed storytelling with an uncanny ability to cast with accuracy. She demands specific sensibilities of her actors in relation to the story. That’s one of the reasons why Ellie Chu can remain nerdy and stereotypical on the surface, while the actress Leah Lewis who played Ellie is straight, with a sexy and popular look in real life and on Instagram.
But still, Asian-Americans are facing a lot of limits in writing stories, not just from the outside but also from their own community. Wayne Wang, after directing Coming Home Again, was asked if he felt a kind of bond with other Asian-Americans. He replied, “It’s like a burden carried on your back. None of the production companies want to make authentic Asian-American films. These days, there are a lot of ‘pseudo’ Asian-American films, but it’s like ‘fake news.’ The burden is becoming heavier and heavier.” It’s hard to define what are and what are not real Asian-American films. Films that satisfy Americans will not persuade Asian audiences including those outside the states because of the gap that lies between outsiders’ imagination and insiders’ observation. To get more exposure, compromises are still needed when Asian filmmakers negotiate with the studios or market to audiences who consider films of Asian-related themes as niche. Even when Crazy Rich Asian started the routine with the all-Asian cast, other titles, including reality shows such as Bling Empire, are produced to cater to white audience’s wish to seek novelty and to fulfill their curiosity for subculture. The fetishizing and consumption of the community didn’t end just because of some awards and critics’ acclaim. However, they have already made their first step to getting more exposure, no matter regarding the content or gimmicks in the media. With the hope that the Asian community can one day become a part of mainstream appreciation, there’s a long way to go.
