In illustrated history ‘The Golden Screen,’ breadth is freedom
Jeff Yang’s look at films that have shaped Asian America covers the full spectrum of artistic representation, including mediocrity
In second grade, fighting back tears, I brought home a subtraction timed test with a red “F” scribbled across the top. Unlike addition, subtraction had always eluded me. I found it difficult to count backward: It represented a reduction, a regression — something that was never permitted in my own life. As the daughter of Indian immigrants who expected the best from me, each day was about making progress, achieving more. Maybe that’s why addition came to me so easily.
That day, my mother shook her head and cut narrow strips of white paper to paste over my incorrect answers. She made two photocopies of the test and timed me as I took it again, and then again. By the second attempt, I’d made enough progress to at least earn a B.
This story may sound familiar to many Asian American kids who grew up in families where anything less than perfection wasn’t enough. Growing up in the early 2000s, I expected the same from pop culture representations of the Indian American community. Though I loved the Disney Channel, I was disappointed by Baljeet on “Phineas and Ferb,” Ravi on “Jessie,” and an ethnically ambiguous (but presumably South Asian) character named Meena on “Cory in the House.” We shared cultural backgrounds and even a name, but these characters spoke with grating accents and clung to stereotypes that only reaffirmed how the white gaze viewed our community, keeping us in a chokehold.
My lifelong thirst for linear progress colored my reading of Jeff Yang’s “The Golden Screen,” an illustrated history of films that have shaped Asian America. I phrase it this way because the movies Yang includes aren’t all Asian American. Some feature an all-white cast, like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), and others aren’t even American — they originate from Asia or diasporas in Canada or Britain, like one of my favorites, “Bend It Like Beckham” (2002).
In line with my “always achieving” mentality, I half-expected Yang’s book to chronologically illustrate the progress the industry has seen, beginning in the early 20th century through the present, revealing how over time, depictions of Asian Americans on the silver screen have improved, increasingly bucking stereotypes.
But in “The Golden Screen,” Yang refuses to succumb to my internalized expectation of linear progress. Instead, he groups the films thematically, placing the good and the bad side-by-side and punctuating his pithy summaries of each movie with reflections from Asian American writers, activists, and artists.
A chapter called “The Dark Side” features both films that were constructed as “tools of war” against Asian Americans, such as the 1942 movie “Little Tokyo, USA” (intended to gather support for Japanese American incarceration); and those that feature Asian Americans prominently in roles that reclaim criminality in a subversive way, such as “Better Luck Tomorrow” (2002). As Renee Tajima-Peña comments, this film’s depiction of underachieving Asian Americans involved in petty crime “dispenses with the Asian American burden of representation — respectability filmmaking be damned.”
The result of Yang’s effort is a bricolage of films that feels raw and uncut: “The Golden Screen” doesn’t sugarcoat history nor does it claim that the present is flawless. Rather, in juxtaposing cinematic successes and scourges across time and place, he stays true to his words: “Darkness can be frightening and foul, but without it, we can’t see the light.”
A couple years ago, the writer Jean Chen Ho wrote an essay about the Asian American reality show “Bling Empire,” which she argues is “fantastically mediocre,” and that “the phenomenology of its middling ordinariness is exactly what makes [it] worthy of celebration.” Indeed, there is something beautiful about being average in a community that has held itself to perfection for so long.
“The Golden Screen” rightfully celebrates mediocrity, cataloging films that are neither paradigms of success nor crosses to bear for Asian Americans, like “Fire Island” (2022), a “Pride and Prejudice”-inspired film that Yang writes is “far from a perfect movie, but it’s fun, clever, and proud of what it is.” Other films, like “Come See the Paradise” (1990) and “Umma” (2022) weren’t box office successes, Yang explains, but nevertheless offer food for thought.
For me, the most endearing part of “The Golden Screen” is its inclusion of the Disney-Pixar 2009 film “Up,” whose iconic 10-minute opening sequence illustrating the love story of the elderly couple has become a hallmark of the film’s success. Watching it still makes me cry, just as it did when I saw the film in theaters when I was 9 — about the same age as the film’s adorable sidekick, Russell. But until I read “The Golden Screen,” I had forgotten Russell is Asian American.
“That fact is never really mentioned or addressed; he’s just … a kid,” Yang writes. “Which, for kids who’ve grown up rarely seeing themselves on-screen, is sometimes enough.”
To see an Asian American character like Russell just being a kid, his Asianness incidental rather than influential, was moving to me as a kid growing up in a mostly-white suburb of Tucson. It gave me hope that one day, I could just be, my strengths and weaknesses — perfectionist tendencies included — not necessarily perceived as tantamount to my Indianness but just part of who I am.
And “The Golden Screen,” in showcasing the breadth of Asian America, reminds me that I, too, can simply move through the world as a person, my racial identity neither subtracting from who I am nor adding expectations of who I ought to be.