A scene from Crazy Rich Asians, a 2018 American romantic comedy film directed by Jon M. Chu, starring (from right) Constance Wu, Henry Golding and Michelle Yeoh. (Photo: China Daily)
Tracking the community's on-screen journey, from Fu Manchu to Crazy Rich Asians
The Asians, particularly the Chinese, have arrived in Hollywood, and how! It has been a long journey, from being ridiculed to being accepted, sometimes as crazy, sometimes as rich, sometimes both.
Movie goers in the United States will have noticed that in the past two years, Hollywood has made more news about Chinese themed movies than ever before. In 2018, Crazy Rich Asians - about an American economics professor who goes to meet her super-wealthy boyfriend's family in Singapore - grossed $238.5 million worldwide, against a production budget of $30 million. It is also the first all-Asian Hollywood film in 25 years since the 1993's The Joy Luck Club.
The movie's success also helped propel Nora Lum, known professionally as Awkwafina, from being a YouTube rapper to mainstream actress, all in just two years. She first landed a breakout role in Ocean's 8 and then the scene-stealing turn in Crazy Rich Asians.
This year the Chinese American actress has won critical appraise for her role in Lulu Wang's The Farewell. The movie has so far made $17.2 million, "impressive" by industry standards, for an independent film with all-Asian cast, and mostly subtitled, in the US.
The Farewell is based on a true story about director Wang's family, of a Chinese American woman who returns to her home country with other expatriates in her family to attend a wedding, but with the true intent of seeing the family matriarch before she dies.
"The Farewell is a bittersweet Chinese tragicomedy that has the potential to become an Academy Award winner for Best International Feature Film," an IMDb review wrote. "The movie portrays the differences between Western and Eastern cultures cleverly and also how the Chinese society is changing."
From Disney's Mulan to Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the China craze is spreading further in Hollywood this year. Insiders believe the films have helped Hollywood promote racial diversity in the film industry.
Gold Rush begins
Hollywood movies with Chinese themes date back to the mid-19th century, when the first significant Chinese immigration to North America began with the California Gold Rush from 1848 to 1855. It continued subsequently thanks to large labor projects like the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad. But the immigrations caused job losses. That and the great cultural differences made xenophobia rear its ugly head, subjecting the Chinese and other ethnic Asians to discrimination.
Stereotypes about the Asian people - yellow skin, uneducated and barbarous - already existed in American society. Next, fearing that Asians will shake up the society, culture and status of white people in the US, a phenomenon called Yellow Peril was spread, to persecute Asians in politics and pop culture. So Fu Manchu in the 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu was a villain with pointed eyes and thin beards.
The Chinese embassy in Washington protested, singling out for strong criticism the speech where Fu Manchu tells his followers to "Kill the white man and take his women!"
By the time the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed, a new batch of Asian immigrants had arrived. Over time, the Asians' screen image has evolved. They are now showcased as hardworking people playing supporting roles in society, but lacking "inner charm". Although the yellow race is not depicted maliciously now, the image of Asians on screen remains flat.
So, the depiction of the Young family in Crazy Rich Asians as rich, skilled and self-made is a big step toward enhancing the Chinese-American's screen image.
Kung Fu tide
In the second half of the twentieth century after the immigration tide, Bruce Lee set off a wave of kung fu movies by starring in Hollywood's first martial art film Enter the Dragon (1973). It diversified the image of the Chinese in the Western world but unfortunately, it was Lee's final completed film appearance before his death on July 20, 1973 at age 32. Chinese movies, which had just became a hot topic in Hollywood, soon went off the boil. Till 1993, when the Hong Kong born American director Wayne Wang once again brought Chinese faces onto the mainstream screen with The Joy Luck Club.
Although The Joy Luck Club achieved commercial success, back in the 1990s the voice of the audience could not be easily spread as it can today thanks to the internet.
In 1998, Disney released an animated film, Mulan, based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan. But its box office returns didn't match those of Disney films of the early 1990s like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King and Hollywood once again stopped investing in Chinese themed movies.
With the growth of the second generation of Chinese immigrants and the rapid economic development after China's reform and opening-up, however, more Chinese filmmakers have emerged and more funds from China has flowed into Hollywood.
Insiders believe the "excellent" performance of more Asian directors in Hollywood such as Ang Lee, Justin Lin (Fast & Furious) and James Wan (Aquaman, 2018), has made the entire Western film industry more open to Asian artists. The Academy Awards' political correctness in recent years seems to have accelerated this process.
But films like Crazy Rich Asians also benefited from the achievements of Chinese Americans in the fields of literature and art. It was adapted from Kevin Kwan's 2013 best-selling novel of the same name.
Kevin was born in an established Chinese family in Singapore and moved to the US with his family at age 11. In 2014, The Hollywood Reporter named Kwan as one of the "Five Writers to Watch" on the list of Hollywood's Most Powerful Authors. In 2018, he made it to Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people and was inducted into The Asian Hall of Fame, a project of the Robert Chinn Foundation established in 2004.
The Joy Luck Club was based on the eponymous 1989 novel by renowned Chinese American writer Amy Tan.
Best-selling handicap
Devoid of such a best-selling original story, The Farewell had to struggle for finances. It was only after it was officially released that help poured in. Chinese Canadian actor Simu Liu bought out a theater in Toronto, so that fans could support The Farewell. It all started with the #GoldOpen movement when numerous Asian American celebrities and groups bought out theaters in support of Crazy Rich Asians.
Earlier this year, Liu was cast as Marvel's first Asian superhero Shang-Chi in the upcoming movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021).
"The reason that films like The Farewell (and yes, Shang Chi) are so important to me are because they speak to the differences between Eastern and Western raised Asians," Liu wrote in an Instagram post.
Born in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, in 1989, Liu immigrated to Canada at the age of five.
"It is my genuine hope that these movies will bring us closer by opening a dialogue through which we can share culture with each other, and with the whole world," Liu wrote. He further said that while he was proud of his heritage, he felt "very out of touch" with developments within China and could not speak of the experiences of "my brothers and sisters" across the ocean. "In turn, I feel that it's probably true that many native Chinese have difficulty understanding the struggles of identity and belonging that defined my formative years in Canada," he wrote.
The upcoming film, Liu said, will hold special "significance to both West and East-raised Asians" and he looked forward to exploring more of his own roots.
The film has resonated well with a large number of Chinese audiences and insiders believe in future original Chinese stories will find more opportunities in the US.
If Crazy Rich Asians is considered a milestone for Chinese commercial films in Hollywood, then The Farewell is a milestone for Chinese-independent films in Hollywood.
The Farewell made a loud announcement to the Western film industry that Chinese-American audiences have complex humanities and diverse cultural needs. What they need is not only a superhero of the same skin color, but also more mortal stories about people of the same skin color.
"What we have right now that we didn't have 25 years ago is not only a new generation of young Asian men and women, but also the community from instant global connections," Chinese American actor James Chen wrote in an email to China Daily.
Chen played the recurring character Adrian Sung in the crime series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the character Kal in AMC's The Walking Dead since the sixth season. He said there is definitely a positive upward trend in the number and quality of roles for Asians, "who have been notoriously underrepresented in American TV and film". But "it's just the beginning, there is more work to be done", he wrote.
In an interview to San Francisco Chronicle, Lulu Wang said she knows the film will be a meaningful and emotional experience for Chinese Americans viewers. But it can also be the same for everyone else. "I hope that the rest of the world is able to see universality through our stories," she says. "I hope that a white guy in Middle America will watch it and see his own relationship with his own grandmother in Billi's relationship with her grandma."