Asians make the scene in Hollywood
Chinese director Chloe Zhao’s recent win at the Academy Awards is a high point for Asian-American talent in the US, after decades of being ignored, or ridiculed and caricatured in film and television productions
Over the past 30 years, we have risen from invisibility to some level of relevance JEFF YANG, AUTHOR
Asian-Americans have been the butt of jokes for so long
CHRISTINE CHANG, ACTRESS
For decades in Hollywood, AsianAmericans were largely absent from television and film. Lucy Liu was the only Asian-American female who got any attention.
In 2021, Asian-Americans are having a moment. Beijing-born, US-based Chloe Zhao became the first Asian woman to win an Oscar for directing; her Nomadland also named best picture at
the Academy Awards ceremony last month.
The CW’s Kung Fu, a reboot of the David Carradine 1970s show, debuted to strong ratings in April
with an Asian-American female lead. Ken Jeong is zany comic relief on Fox’s hit reality competition show The Masked Singer. There are not one but two reality shows about rich Asian-Americans: Netflix’s Bling Empire and HBO Max’s House of Ho.
Steven Yeun, whose career began in Atlanta on The Walking Dead playing the likeable Glenn Rhee, was nominated for an Oscar for best male actor in a feature film for his role as a Korean immigrant starting a farm in Arkansas in the well-received film Minari.
“We’ve come a long way,” says Jeff Yang, a Wall Street Journal contributor and the co-author of an upcoming book Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now. “Over the past 30 years, we have risen from invisibility to some level of relevance.”
Yang, 53, says the term “AsianAmerican” didn’t even exist until the late 1960s. He says he is part of the first generation of AsianAmericans “carrying this burden of trying to fill in the gaps of what it meant. We had to invent it. By the time we got into positions as journalists, authors, executives, directors and actors, we were finally able to capitalise on all that hard work, not just in Hollywood, but across industries.”
In the early years of Hollywood, the few Asian-American actors played stereotypical roles as coolies, spa and laundry workers, waiters, gangsters and kung fu masters. And there was “yellowface,” where white actors like Katharine Hepburn, Mickey Rooney and Lon Chaney would don make-up to look Asian, mostly in unflattering ways.
Pat Morita was practically alone on television in the 1970s as a restaurant owner on Happy Days, then as the iconic Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid films in the 1980s. At the same time, the 1984 film Sixteen Candles featured Japanese American actor Gedde Watanabe as an exchange student with the ridiculous name Long Duk Dong, a portrayal that many Asian-Americans to this day find offensive. (Every time he showed up on screen, a gong sound went off.)
The 1990s brought signs of light. The 1993 film The Joy Luck Club was the first major American film with a largely Asian-American cast and it generated US$32.9 million at the box office.
In 1994 ABC debuted the first television programme with an Asian-American lead and cast with All American Girl. Margaret
Cho played a rebellious daughter of Korean-American bookstore owners in San Francisco. Cho had zero creative control and critics panned the show’s writing and tepid humour. It lasted 19 episodes.
Emily Chang, a Los Angelesbased actress who got her first major role on The CW’s The Vampire Diaries in 2014, remembers the only Asians of note in Hollywood while she was growing up were Lucy Liu (Kill Bill, Charlie’s Angels) and Jackie Chan (Rush Hour, Rumble in the Bronx).
The next two decades featured a handful of Asian-American stars like Daniel Dae Kim (Lost), B.D. Wong (Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) and Sandra Oh (Grey’s Anatomy). The 2004 comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle starring John Cho and Kal Penn was a breakout hit and led to two sequels.
Chang began acting in 2010 and she was excited to audition for a spoof film. Then she read her part: an Asian masseuse giving a massage to a fake Brad Pitt and George Clooney with a heavy accent and “me love you long time”-style lines.
“I called my agent and said, ‘I can’t say this!’,” she recalls. “He said, ‘You’re confirmed. You have to go in.’ I had a terrible agent. Anyway, you often get the roles you don’t want. So, of course, I got it. I thought I could maybe turn this around. I did the stupid accent, then improvised a few funny lines without the accent. The director said he loved it but please drop those lines and just do the accent. I left. The casting director was livid and said I’d never work in this town again. Thank goodness that wasn’t true.”
In 2015, ABC tried again with another Asian-American sitcom, Fresh off the Boat, created by Iranian-American Nahnatchka Khan. Yang’s son Hudson was in the cast, which featured Randall Park and breakout star Constance Wu as the parents.
It was a conventional family comedy set in the 1990s that received decent reviews and ratings, lasting six seasons. Park has since gone on to star in a Netflix romantic comedy with Ali Wong, Always Be My Maybe, and is in both Disney+’s WandaVision and NBC’s Young Rock.
Wu used her Fresh Off the Boat fame to nab a lead role in the hugely successful 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians.
Chang says that over the past five years more female lead roles have become available, along with more ethnic-blind casting.
“You know it’s progress where you don’t feel pressure to only show positive depictions of AsianAmericans,” Chang says. She cites Jason Mendoza’s character on NBC’s The Good Place, where Filipino-Canadian actor Manny Jacinto plays a lovably dopey reprobate with poor impulse control.
One problem that persisted until only recently was “whitewashing”. This is when a character in a book or comic, originally Asian, is rewritten in a film to be white, the excuse being that the project needs an A-list actor to get financed. It happened well into the 2010s.
Emma Stone, for instance, played a part Asian-Hawaiian in the 2015 film Aloha. Tilda Swinton was The Ancient One in Marvel’s Doctor Strange in 2016 and Scarlett Johansson in 2017 portrayed a Japanese anime character in Ghost in the Shell.
One of the most popular characters of the past decade on television was Glenn on The Walking Dead, the biggest cable show of the 2010s. Steven Yeun was an unknown actor in 2010 when his pizza boy character Glenn saved Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) from becoming zombie meat in downtown Atlanta.
Glenn became a beloved character, exuding humanity and falling in love with farmer’s daughter Maggie (Lauren Cohan), who happened to be white. When he was killed off at the start of season seven, the outrage on social media was intense and millions stopped watching the show.
Christine Chang, who plays a doctor on NBC’s medical drama New Amsterdam, says she found Yeun’s characterisation of a struggling immigrant in Minari powerfully authentic.
“Asian-Americans have been the butt of jokes for so long,” she says. “Steven’s role is so quiet. It’s a very Asian-American performance. There was a controversy a few years ago when a casting director said Asian-Americans were not expressive enough. In acting classes, you are told to be yourself, to let your humanity, your simplicity come out.”
The progress in Hollywood is happening while attacks on Asian-Americans have been rising since the pandemic began.
Chang herself was verbally attacked at a grocery store last year for being Asian-American soon after the virus shut down much of the world. She told New Amsterdam executive producer and writer Y. Shireen Razack, who adapted her story. Chang, who plays Dr Agnes Kao, treated a Filipino-American patient experiencing PTSD from a hate crime.
Yang says invisibility in Hollywood for Asian-Americans is no longer an option. In fact, the greater prevalence of AsianAmericans on reality shows, on talk shows, on scripted projects, means films and television shows can founder and executives won’t say, “Oh, that Asian-American movie didn’t work so no AsianAmerican movie will work.”
“We as Asian-Americans are now allowed to fail,” Yang says. “We’re allowed to go away. There are enough of us around. White people have had that privilege forever.”