Progress, hope for Asian Americans in TV and film
Absent for decades, the community has moved beyond stereotypes to relevance
For decades in Hollywood, Asian Americans were largely absent on TV and film. For every Mr. Miyagi, there was Long Duk Dong. Lucy Liu was the only Asian American female who got any attention for years.
But in 2021, Asian Americans are having a moment. “Nomadland” director Chloe Zhao has been an award show favorite, winning several trophies. Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari” also garnered several award nominations this season. The CW’s “Kung Fu,” a reboot of the 1970s show, debuted to strong ratings with an Asian American female lead. Ken Jeong is zany comic relief on Fox’s “The Masked Singer.” There are two reality shows focused on rich Asian Americans: Netflix’s “Bling Empire” and HBO Max’s “House of Ho.”
“We’ve come a long way,” said Jeff Yang, a Wall Street Journal contributor and co-author of an upcoming book “Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now.” “Over the past 30 years, we’ve risen from invisibility to some level of relevance.”
Yang, 53, said the term “Asian American” didn’t even exist until the late 1960s. He said he is part of the first generation of Asian Americans “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 capitalize on all that hard work not just in Hollywood but across industries.”
He feels portrayals in film and TV matter because “it’s really kind of a mirror of our culture. It’s the thing that both reflects us and confirms to us that we are human, that we are normal.”
In the early years of Hollywood, the few Asian American actors played stereotypical roles as spa and laundry workers, waiters, gangsters and kung fu masters. And there was “yellowface,” where white actors such as Katharine Hepburn, Mickey Rooney and Lon Chaney would don makeup to look Asian.
Pat Morita was practically alone on TV in the 1970s as a restaurant owner on “Happy Days,” then as the iconic Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid” films in the 1980s. The 1984 film “Sixteen Candles” featured Japanese American actor Gedde Watanabe as an exchange student named Long Duk Dong, a portrayal that many Asian Americans to this day find offensive.
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, generating $32.9 million at the box office. ABC in 1994 debuted the first TV program with an Asian American lead and cast, “All American Girl.” Margaret Cho played a rebellious daughter of Korean American bookstore owners in San Francisco, but it lasted just 19 episodes. Neither led to a spate of new Asian American stories on TV or film.
“It didn’t flip a switch,” Yang said. “People weren’t ready. Hollywood wasn’t ready.”
The next two decades featured a handful of Asian American stars such as Daniel Dae Kim, B.D. Wong and Sandra Oh. The 2004 comedy “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” starring John Cho and Kal Penn was a breakout hit and led to two sequels.
In 2015, ABC decided to try again with another Asian American sitcom, “Fresh Off The Boat.” Yang’s son Hudson was part of 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. While it never became “Seinfeld” or “Friends,” its impact was pronounced. Park has since starred in a Netflix romantic comedy with Ali Wong, “Always Be My Maybe,” and has roles in Disney+’s “WandaVision” and NBC’s “Young Rock.” Wu nabbed a lead role in the hugely successful 2018 film “Crazy Rich Asians.”
Actor Emily Chang said 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 Asian Americans,” Chang said. She cited Jason Mendoza’s character on NBC’s “The Good Place,” where Filipino Canadian actor Manny Jacinto played a lovably dopey dirtbag. Chang’s character on The CW’s “The Vampire Diaries” was a nice girl until she became a rampaging vampire. “There was nothing specifically Asian about it,” she said.
The “gatekeepers are changing,” Chang said. “The writers, the producers and the network executives are getting more diverse. This means no longer making decisions, say, to have a token Asian on a show and checking a box.” Not that it’s a level playing field yet, she added, “as people are at least trying to make the effort.”
But a problem that persisted until well into the 2010s was “whitewashing,” when a character in a book or comic, originally Asian, is rewritten in a film to be white. The excuse was that the project needed an A-list actor to get financed.
“That subtle dodge is no longer acceptable” in 2021, Yang said. “We’re feeling our oats a little in our ability to push back on representation that feels false.”
However, all this progress in Hollywood is happening while attacks on Asian Americans have been on the rise.
Christine Chang, who plays a doctor on NBC’s medical drama “New Amsterdam,” was verbally attacked at a grocery store last year for being Asian American soon after the virus had shut much of the world down. She told “New Amsterdam” executive producer and writer Y. Shireen Razack, who adapted her story into a recent episode.
Chang said watching the recent Atlanta spa shootings was infuriating and found the initial media coverage of the accused assailant’s excuses boggling. She played a spa worker in an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” last year with Cho as the madam. “I don’t know what it’s like to be a real-life spa worker, but I did delve into that through this role,” said Chang. “I was so heartbroken hearing these victims’ stories and how they lived their lives in such an invisible way.”
Yang said invisibility in Hollywood for Asian Americans is no longer an option. In fact, the greater prevalence of Asian Americans on reality shows, talk shows and scripted projects, means movies and TV shows can flounder and executives won’t necessarily say, “Oh, that Asian American movie didn’t work so no Asian American movie will work.”
“We as Asian Americans are now allowed to fail,” Yang said. “We’re allowed to go away. There are enough of us around. White people have had that privilege forever.”