‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Doesn’t Try To Break Stereotypes — And That’s Good
Crazy. Rich. Asians. Every adjective in the title ofCrazy Rich Asianssounds loaded at best, distasteful at worst. When trailers forJon Chu’s movie started hitting the web, cries of racism inevitably began to surface. Why did it have to beAsians? Doesn’t that generalize an entire population of people? And does this mean that they’re crazy? Or crazy rich? What about poor Asians?
Asian-led projects are so rare in Hollywood that it becomes unavoidable that every movie, TV show, or media property will undergo intense scrutiny for how well it represents a minority group that makes up 5.6% of the U.S. population. Sure, every now and then a blockbuster will feature an Asian character (cue grumbles that it’s to appease the growing Chinese movie market), but they rarely appear as more than a supporting character orgasp, a token.
So immediately,Crazy Rich Asiansis in a lot of hot water. While its protagonist is an Asian-American NYU professor, it mostly centers on the privileged Singaporean elite whose wealth and jet-setting lifestyle couldn’t feasibly represent every single Asian and Asian-American. And it doesn’t help that its tawdry title immediately calls to mind the abundance of stereotypes associated with Asians. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Everything For Everyone
Asians have been the butt of far too many harmful stereotypes. For much of Hollywood history, Asian men have found themselves emasculated (hello Long Duk Dong), portrayed as sadistic pigs (Madame Butterflyand its still-running successorMiss Saigon), or portrayed as inscrutable,magical masters— when they’re not reduced to a comic buffoons in yellowface. As for women, there are just as many to count — either they’re submissive sex puppets, prickly “dragon ladies,” or abusive tiger moms. And all this while they’re dealing with the myth of the model minority, which only serves to further divide Asians from other minority groups and leave Asiansout of conversations when it comes to diversity. There’s a reason whyno one blinked an eye whenGet Out, a film that so shrewdly tackles anti-black racism, featured an Asian man bidding at the auction.
Asians themselves have spent virtually the entirety of Hollywood history as nearly invisible. The few Asian-American movie stars from the silent and Golden ages of Hollywood like Anna May Wong or Sessue Hayakawa found themselves passed over for high-profile movies featuring Asian characters, while we were stuck with caricatures of the desexualized Asian man or exotic Asian woman. It wasn’t until 1993 that we would have a film that came even close to accurately representing the Asian-American experience:The Joy Luck Club. But evenThe Joy Luck Club, a tender melodrama that chronicled the fraught experiences of two generations of Chinese immigrants and their American-born daughters, faced itsshare of criticismfor not capturing the entire scope of the Asian-American experience.
So there’s an immense pressure onCrazy Rich Asiansto be everything for everyone. Before it even opened to the public,Crazy Rich Asiansfaced criticisms that it wastoo Asianornot Asian enough, or it was feeding into Eurocentric beauty ideals by casting a male lead who was half-white, half-Malaysian.
But it’s clear once you go intoCrazy Rich Asiansthat it doesn’t care for your sky-high expectations. The film is based off Kevin Kwan’s frivolous, gaudy ode to the Singapore elite, and goddammit, if it’s not going to deliver the cinematic experience of that. And in the format of a romantic-comedy — a genre not especially known for its nuance —Crazy Rich Asianswill deliver on the stereotypes too.
It Was All Yellow
Towards the end ofCrazy Rich Asians, singerKatherine Hosoftly croons a Chinese-language cover of Coldplay’s hit song “Yellow.” It took me a while to recognize the song, but when I did, I chuckled, wondering if the song choice was some tongue-in-cheek nod to the long history of racist connotations with that color. It turns out, it was.
“[The word ‘yellow’] has always had a negative connotation in my life … until I heard your song,” director Jon Chu wrote in a letter to Coldplay persuading the band to let them use “Yellow” in the film. “We’re going to own that term,” Chu toldThe Hollywood Reporter. “If we’re going to be called yellow, we’re going to make it beautiful.”
Crazy Rich Asiansdefinitely owns the culture in which it’s embedded. And that means playing up some of the stereotypes that have plagued Asians for decades. Because a stereotype might be a widely-held, often derogatory perception of a general group of people, but for a stereotype to form there may be some truth to them. TakeJimmy O. Yang’s blowhard character Bernard Tai, for example. He’s loud, ridiculous, and definitely not sexy. His cartoonish and crude character is like a nightmarish realization of every stereotype about Asian characters. But in a sea of fleshed out, complex, good-looking Asian men, he is just another character. This is further emphasized by the fact that, in a conscious reversal, all of the white characters in the film are either props or background characters appearing in service of the Asian protagonists' stories.Crazy Rich Asiansis not trying to retire these stereotypes, starConstance Wupoints out. They’re trying to make them more than a stereotype. “I do not want to see any stereotype retired from Hollywood. I want to see the people who have been stereotyped given their own story. Because the danger of the stereotype is that they’re one-dimensional,” Constance Wu said in an interview withVariety. She added:
By virtue of being an all-Asian cast, the stereotypes inCrazy Rich Asiansaren’t stereotypes. Because they’re given center stage in a two-hour feature film, the Asian stereotypes we’re used to — that have the dragon lady, the effeminate nerd, the quirky best friend, the submissive sex pot — become breathing, living characters.Michelle Yeohin particular gives a layered, vulnerable performance as the intimidating matriarch Eleanor Young, and would-be dragon lady in this situation. She has an arc, agency, and even a bit of a tragic backstory. Now I’m not going to say they’re all the most nuanced depictions (Ken Jeong’s ludicrous “new money” patriarch andFiona Xie’s bimbo actress both fall flat), but in large numbers it doesn’t matter. In the words of the immortal Coldplay, it was all yellow.
