‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is more than Asian enough
Walking into an advance screening of “Crazy Rich
Asians” last week, I felt like the evil food critic of “Ratatouille,”
Anton Ego. I fully expected the movie to be one of overblown expectations and
misguided support.
Ever since I got into entertainment as an actor 10 years ago, I’ve had
trepidation watching Asian American produced content; it has the stigma
equivalent to a random Silver Lake hipster friend telling you to check out
their one-man show. Chances are it’s not going to really be that good, but you
have to watch it anyway to support them because who will — white people?
This unfortunate bias is a consequence of a Catch-22: Asian Americans
don’t have the infrastructures or support systems in place to nurture talent,
not even to the extent other minorities such as the Black and Latinx
communities do. As a result, a lot of the stuff we make apart from the white-dominated
media machine is messy, underfunded and lacking in craft. Hollywood
decision-makers expect us to fly when we’re still learning how to crawl, and
sometimes the weight of those expectations can crush us before we even get a
chance to try.
I am very aware of this bias because I experienced
it firsthand with an ambitious project I self-financed and produced last
November called “Just Doug,” a TV dramedy pilot that
highlights the systemic biases in Hollywood against Asian Americans. While
navigating my project through the Hollywood machine, in a way, I was Rachel
Chu, the main character in the movie, an American who goes to Singapore and
discovers that her boyfriend comes from an extremely rich family. Like Rachel,
who is played by Constance Wu, I was alone and unwanted on an island in a world
I was unfamiliar with and the rules of which I was learning on the fly.
While trying to get the support of Hollywood is difficult enough, I
didn’t realize that the Asian American community was even harder to crack. My
project faced intense scrutiny from producers, actors and critics, ranging from
Asians who totally embraced it to the point of tears to others who withheld
support because it didn’t fit their particular agenda, and still others who
thought it was unfair that I even had the resources to self-finance, as if I
“skipped the line” of paying my dues.
But despite all that, my show was featured on Facebook Watch and
DramaFever and enjoyed positive press. While the silence of many Asian
organizations and journalists I had reached out to was deafening, I knew in my
heart that what I created reflected my own unique truth and that I had made an
impact. Looking back now, I would do things differently, but it went how many
first-time Asian American projects go — it only breathed through sheer force of
will.
I’m going to tell you a little secret about “Crazy
Rich Asians.” The film adaptation for the movie was not
originally intended for Asian audiences. The book was a massive hit with white
women; indeed, it almost reads in the vein of the escapist romantic fantasy
genre that has been very popular this side of the millennium (see: “Twilight”
and its fan-fiction spinoff “Fifty Shades
of Grey”). The original adaptation of the screenplay was written by
a white man, Peter Chiarelli who had his own questionable past of ghostwriting
“The Proposal” under a
female name.
When discussing the movie adaptation, author Kevin Kwan was even
approached by a producer who suggested the Rachel character be white. While
this is not just offensive in that it’s yet another attempt at whitewashing,
the underlying purpose of this change would be to give the escapist fantasy to
primarily white women, the book’s primary audience.
So it’s with these thoughts that I went into the theater, expecting the
movie to fall under the weight of its expectations, acutely aware of all of the
compromises and flaws made in its production before watching it. And like Anton
taking his first bite of Remy’s ratatouille, I was instantly taken back to my
own childhood and experiences when I first was introduced to the escapist
fantasy of film itself. There’s a special extra oomph when one sees oneself
truly represented on screen. One of the most positive comments I’ve gotten on
my own project was when a friend proclaimed after watching it: “Is this what
white people feel like every time they go to the movies?”
I had an eerily meta moment within the movie, when Michelle Yeoh’s
character, Eleanor Young, the disapproving mother of Nick Young, tells Wu’s
character, “You will never be enough.” It’s a very Asian American-themed
concept, not quite being Asian enough or American enough, or enough of a
success to be visible.
“Crazy Rich Asians,” a rom-com, is not going to win any Oscars (though
who knows with the new category for best popular film), it doesn’t push the
envelope of filmmaking in any sort of groundbreaking way, and it wasn’t even my
favorite movie of the year. But I found myself laughing, even tearing up (I’m
not crying, YOU’RE crying), when I fully expected that my eyes would be
constantly rolling.
For the first time, I saw Asians free to live their best lives, to be
heartthrobs, jerks and everything in between, with true emotional lives outside
of the Eye-of-Sauron-like white gaze. The characters in “Crazy Rich Asians”
reflected real people I’ve encountered in my own life: I remembered my
attraction to Asians with British accents watching Gemma Chan, who plays Nick
Young’s childhood friend; compared my bromance with my best guy friends with
Chris Pang and Henry Golding’s; and even bemoaned the presence of the
overcompensating douchebag in Ronny Chieng, who plays Young’s cousin, a
personality type that I’m all too familiar with from my time in the finance
industry. It made me feel something, which is more than what I can say for my
emotional investment in watching Tom Cruise sprinting for two-and-a-half hours.
My TV show, despite personally trying to check all the boxes, failed for
being too “Korean,” not enough about (insert particular Asian ethnicity here),
too Asian male-centric. I have seen similar types of criticisms about CRA, for
not properly representing a specific issue, or even for possibly perpetuating
the harmful Model Minority myth. But CRA has worthwhile social commentary,
while at the same time being fun. It’s not supposed to encompass every
single concern of Asian America. It’s a piece of a puzzle that’s still being
constructed.
That doesn’t mean CRA is free from criticism. We
cannot blindly usher in works without a critical eye, like we have in the past:
“Miss Saigon”
and “The Joy Luck
Club” were works celebrated simply because they increased Asian
American visibility but in many ways promoted harmful stereotypes and
narratives about us. But I’m grateful that CRA exists because we can start
having these conversations as we start to messily define the Asian American
identity and experience.
The Asian American narrative in Hollywood will
always at some level be co-opted by white voices until Asian Americans realize
that they can take control of their own narrative and build those networks and
the infrastructure to support Asian American creatives. But “Crazy Rich Asians”
is unique because it does have Asians at most of the relevant levers of the
production process (source material written by Kevin Kwan, screenplay
co-written by Adele Lim, directed by Jon M. Chu, and starring…Asians). That was
only made possible by Kwan and Chu’s willingness to turn down a
boatload of money to be able to retain creative control.
When projects like CRA exist and become successful, they not only open
doors to additional projects like it being greenlit (full disclosure of my
self-interest in this project), but they also inspire the next generation of
talent who see themselves on screen to join the industry and help us build the
Asian American-run studios, production companies and networks that we need.
They also inspire minorities to tell their own unique stories, before they get
lost in the fabric of history. If you care about Asian American diversity in
media, this is a way to support it and have a pretty fun time, too.
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