PERSPECTIVE
Fernanda Ly’s fight for inclusion in pop culture.
“ I’ll never forget meeting with modelling agencies in New York – who usually had a total of one Chinese model on their books – and being told, ‘We aren’t looking for another Asian.’ Modelling really opened my eyes to the lack of diversity in media, and then I started noticing it in all pop culture. Once you realise it, you can’t ignore it.
The majority of people on earth are Asian, yet we have always been a minority in popular culture. Growing up, the only actress I remember who looked like me was Lucy Liu. I definitely don’t remember seeing any Asian models. There were a lot of male martial-arts masters – no-one that I could relate to.
You could say I found success as a model because people saw beyond my non-whiteness and believed in me. I definitely feel the pressure as one of the few Asian models who openly speaks about our representation – or lack thereof – in the general media. I don’t want other people of Asian heritage to feel like they don’t exist in the world because they’re not seeing accurate depictions of themselves in pop culture; and I don’t want to see our culture being used as a sprinkle of decoration on an otherwise whitewashed film. One thing that inevitably comes up in conversation with first- and second-generation Asian people living in Western countries is about how our culture has either been misrepresented or erased from Hollywood altogether: traditionally Asian roles have been rewritten for white actors wearing yellow face.
Despite our multicultural society, it’s still such a battle for Asians to be represented on-screen, which is why the film adaptations of two novels – Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians and Jenny Han’s To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before – have been so widely celebrated. Crazy Rich Asians is the first Hollywood film with an all-asian cast in 25 years [since 1993’s The Joy Luck
Club], and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before has a female Asian lead. I don’t know why it’s taken us until now to start seeing Asians in major roles – ones that aren’t the stereotypical know-it-all geek, the kung-fu master or the mysterious geisha – but it feels like change is finally happening. As the director of Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M Chu, said, “It’s not a movie. It’s a movement.” We can finally watch these films and think, ‘These characters really do look and act like I do.’ Constance Wu – star of
Crazy Rich Asians – wrote an open letter about the significance of the film, which has since been quoted over and over. She wrote: ‘My friend Ava Duvernay says, ‘I work in an industry that really has no regard for my voice and the voice of people like me and so, what do I do? Keep knocking on that door or build your own house?’ My dear Asian-american friends, we are building our own damn houses. We got the tools, the ability and we definitely got the style.’
I want to use my platform to build our house; to support and advance Asian representation in Western pop culture, and I want to see it flourish. Our generation, Asian or not, needs to fight for inclusivity. Everyone needs to see these films, and not only that, to see the relevance of them. Start to notice when our culture has been misrepresented and speak up about it. We also need non-asian culture consumers to speak up so that those at the top of the industry hierarchy will accept us as being no different from themselves. The media needs to represent the people who consume it, and that is all of us.
There is a movement happening. And as long as we have people like Kwan – who turned down a huge pay cheque from Netflix so he could reach wider audiences in the cinema – championing our representation, and actors and actresses like Wu imploring us to build our own houses, next time a film with an all-asian cast appears in a Western cinema, we can
” finally call it normalisation rather than cause for celebration. E