Freed from narrative boxes
Productions like ‘Joy Ride’ and ‘Beef ’ are finally exploring all dimensions of the Asian American experience
“I’m not trying to break a stereotype. I’m trying to show the truth of what my reality is.” — Actor Ashley Park, one of the stars of “Joy Ride”
Ashley Park did not tell her mother much about the drugs, the sex or any of the other debauchery in “Joy Ride,” the over-the-top comedy in which she co-stars.
So perhaps it was understandable when, at South by Southwest, just before the Lionsgate film was set to premiere, Park’s mother approached one of the screenwriters, Teresa Hsiao, with a question: If swear words were removed, would the movie still have to be rated R?
“Teresa was like, ‘Oh, I don’t even know how to explain it,’ ” Park recalled in an interview.
With the film in theaters, moviegoers are now able to decide for themselves. Compared with “The Joy Luck Club” and “Crazy Rich Asians” — in which the most egregious transgressions involved earning poor grades or simply being middle class — the threesomes and cocaine reveries of “Joy Ride” are eye-popping. Arriving in the months after “Everything Everywhere All at Once” made Oscar history with its best picture win, “Joy Ride” is one of several film and TV projects to present Asian American characters who are both deeply flawed and fully fleshed out.
The people making and watching the work agree: It’s about time.
In April, Netflix released “Beef,” a series about two ragefilled Asian Americans surreptitiously seeking to destroy each other. The comedy “Shortcomings” played at the Tribeca Festival in June and introduced viewers to Ben, a self-hating, mopey, movie theater manager played by Justin H. Min. And the world is now joining Park and her friends on a business trip to China that goes off the rails in “Joy Ride.”
Taken together, these productions represent an important moment in the relatively short history of Asian American lives on screen. For decades after the 1993 drama “The Joy Luck Club” proved a landmark hit, the handful of movies with Asian American casts mostly offered family-centric stories filled with generational hardship, sacrifice and culture clash. But now, in part thanks to the 2018 blockbuster “Crazy Rich Asians,” audiences are finally getting to see all dimensions of the Asian American experience — even the weird, bad and raunchy parts.
“Being Asian American is a part of who I am, but it’s not all of who I am,” said Randall Park, who is making his directorial debut with “Shortcomings” and sees himself in Ben.
“What I’m conscious of are these other things that make up my human experience — those imperfect things, those everyday things,” he added. “And I feel like to be able to share those stories, that’s what we’re aiming for.”
Margaret Cho was among the first Asian American women to go onstage and talk openly about race, sexuality and other topics that some had deemed taboo.
Ticking off a list of things she didn’t excel at — “I don’t have martial arts skill. I was not a professional skater. I was not a good student” — Cho said in an interview that she was “very much not fitting in with what was Asian American at the time.”
Still, even though she also was not, as she put it, “a ‘Joy Luck Club’ girl,” the success of that film led to a big break both for her and for Asian Americans writ large: a starring role in a TV sitcom centered on a Korean American family. “All-American Girl” debuted on ABC in 1994, though it lasted only 19 episodes.
Jeff Yang, a co-author with Phil Yu and Philip Wang of “Rise: A Pop History of Asian America From the Nineties to Now,” said “we wanted to tell stories that were somehow meaningful to everybody, and the perception then was that the only way to do that was to water those stories down to make them as generic as possible.”
There would not be another Asian American sitcom for 20 years, when Yang’s son, Hudson, starred with Park on “Fresh Off the Boat.”
The intervening years were a period of “narrative scarcity,” Yu said. There were so few Asian American stories emerging — save occasional indie breakouts like “Better
Luck Tomorrow” — that the “initial stabs” had to “be kind of like our best foot forward, putting on our best face, showing them what we can do.”
In 2018, the rom-com “Crazy Rich Asians” delivered the box-office triumph ($238 million worldwide) that many had longed for, proving definitively that a movie with a nearly all-Asian cast could bring in huge audiences and big money.
In interviews with more than a dozen Asian American actors, filmmakers, executives and scholars, many cited the comedy as a milestone that made it easier for more such stories — including “Everything Everywhere” — to get the go-ahead.
As the fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the nation, Asian Americans reiterate that they are not a monolith. Still, they acknowledge that much of the mainstream conversation remains heavily focused on East Asian stories, even as South
Asian film and TV projects are becoming more prevalent and many marginalized groups remain hungry for exposure.
One promising development, creators say, is that the narratives being greenlit seem to increasingly showcase different slices of the Asian American diaspora that have seldom been seen on screen. Mindy Kaling’s TV series “Never Have I Ever” took viewers to California’s San Fernando Valley to spend time with a modern-day Indian American teenage girl. The film “Yellow Rose” centered on a smalltown Texan Filipino American with country music aspirations. Even “Minari,” which chronicled the toils of a Korean immigrant family, offered a rare look at Asian American life in rural Arkansas.
Now “Beef,” “Shortcomings” and
“Joy Ride” have helped further emphasize the not-a-monolith refrain, in part with even greater specificity. If it feels like Asian American stories are suddenly everywhere, all at once, it may be because they actually are.
“In the next few years, we’re going to see a lot more diversity in terms of what we mean by AAPI,” or Asian American and Pacific Islander, said Jeremiah Abraham, a co-producer of “Yellow Rose” who runs a marketing and communications agency specializing in Asian American projects. “There is more talent out there than we are giving access and opportunities to.”
To the extent that
“Crazy Rich Asians” made a resounding business case, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” showed that Asian American stories could also win the highest form of critical acclaim.
Now, new projects are providing a kind of thematic “boldness and outspokenness” that comedian and actor Sherry Cola finds refreshing.
“As a community, especially Asian women, we’re expected to be submissive and not rock the boat,” said Cola, who co-stars in “Joy Ride” and plays one of Ben’s longtime friends in “Shortcomings.” She added, “I actually make it a point to be the loudest person in the room because I don’t want anyone to think that I’m timid.”
For Ashley Park, who, in addition to starring in “Joy Ride” also appears in “Beef,” the excitement about the new stories isn’t so much about retiring tired tropes about Asian Americans.
“I’m not trying to break a stereotype,” she said. “I’m trying to show the truth of what my reality is.”
Cho has a similar goal in mind when she describes herself as a “bad Asian,” explaining: “I’m allowing all of my humanity to be viewed. Better to be ‘bad,’ because then we are allowing people to see us in the totality of our being. We’re actually human. So to be ‘bad’ is to be there.”