Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

 

Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li - these were some of my earliest memories of seeing someone who looked like me on my TV screen. My father shared his appreciation of martial arts movies with me at an early age, and I continue today to have a deep love for the genre. I was too young at the time to understand the power of media portrayals of Asians, but I remember warming up before a game with my town youth soccer team when a white teammate of mine casually asked me if I knew karate. I immediately brushed him off and said no, but that moment still sticks with me. That question reduced me down to my appearance, and I realized that my black hair and small eyes communicated something about me that wasn’t true. I started to feel a strange love-hate relationship with my favorite martial arts films. As empowering as it was to see faces like mine, I felt constricted and defined by something beyond my control. 

 

As I got older, I began to take more notice of the limitations of Asian representation in the American shows and movies I watched. First, Asians were never cast in lead roles or part of the main cast. You would occasionally see them for a scene or two, with only a few lines if any - and usually when their racial identity served the purpose of the plot. For example, I think of how almost every police procedural show, like any of the iterations of Law and Order, has an episode where the main characters have to investigate and explore the seedy underbelly of a city’s Chinatown, and unfortunately that would be only one of the few times I would see Asian characters. And of course, those characters fit the usual roles. In that Chinatown episode, you’re bound to see some Asian sex workers, aligning with the pattern of Asian female characters often portrayed as exotic and submissive, a stereotype most infamously reinforced by Vietnam War set movies like Full Metal Jacket. In addition to them being two-dimensional kung fu experts, Asian males have also been cast as socially awkward and emasculated nerds, either asexual or just non-desirable, best exemplified by the character of Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles. Another example is Jet Li in the 2000 film, Romeo Must Die, where he and R&B star Aaliyah are supposed to be the romantic leads but get no scenes of intimacy through the entire movie, not even one kiss!

 

However, there were a few exceptions during my teenage years, and for me, two movies really stood out for how they portrayed Asians, specifically young Asian American males. The first is Better Luck Tomorrow, in which a group of Asian American high school friends, who check every box on the model minority checklist with their academic successes and overloaded extracurricular schedules, decide to start acting out against the perfectionism that had been ingrained into their lives and begin committing an escalating series of crimes. The second is Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. The titular characters, played by John Cho and Kal Penn, wrestle with challenges of the Asian American experience, for Harold struggles to speak out at his office, surrounded by overconfident and demeaning white peers, while Kumar tries to find his own desires and motivation for his future while being pressured by his parents to become a doctor. All the while, the movie is also a buddy-road trip-stoner comedy, a genre usually reserved for non-Asian actors (I will take this moment to acknowledge that Tommy Chong is half-Chinese!). Though I did not consider going into a life of crime or experience wacky adventures in pursuit of getting burgers from White Castle, for the first time, I saw characters that felt incredibly relatable.

 

Progress has been slow, but things have gotten better in recent years. We now have Asians in romantic comedies like Crazy Rich Asians and Always Be My Maybe and in Marvel superhero movies like Shang-Chi and Eternals. Having more Asians, and more individuals from other underrepresented groups for that matter, isn’t just a numbers thing, but it ultimately allows for better storytelling. When there are few, every Asian character must carry the burden and expectations of being the sole voice of an entire people, and this limits them. When there are many, Asian characters can transcend those limitations to be whatever the story needs them to be - the witty best friend, the groan-inducing goofy parent, the complicated high school teen, or the gorgeous lead of a rom-com. They can carry their identity with them but no longer have to be defined by it.

 

Two very recent films, Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All At Once, are excellent examples of this. Though both have Asians as main characters, their stories are not necessarily focused on their race, as one a story of a young girl navigating new emotions and relationships with friends and family as she enters adolescence and the other about a woman encountering a mid-life crisis while learning that she may be the one to save the entire multiverse. These plots aren’t dependent on the characters being Asian; however, both movies integrate their Asian identities into the stories so that who they are still matters.

 

I hope the financial and critical success of these recent releases reminds the movie industry and major media companies that they can only benefit from greater diversity in the content they make. But most importantly, diversity benefits the young viewers, whoever they may be, just trying to find a piece of themselves reflected back to them on a screen.