A Space for Asian Nuance
The summer of 2018 changed the game for Asian representation in Hollywood. Jon Chu assembled a star-studded cast for his adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s book Crazy Rich Asians. Watching Crazy Rich Asians in the summer of 2018 was the first time that I and many of my Asian-American friends felt like we were finally being represented on the silver screen as real characters. No longer reduced to just being the awkward friend, or some dehumanized trope — men could be romantic leads, and women could be more than just shy and nerdy or some insanely acrobatic dragon lady. Asian culture, and notably Asian-Americans, finally had a place on the big screen.
It’s difficult to capture the impact that media representation has on the psyche. The summer of 2018 felt like the beginning of an uprising of Asian Americans demanding to be seen, demanding for their stories to be told. I remember watching The Incredibles 2 in theaters in the summer of 2018 as well, and unexpectedly watching the animated short film Bao before the movie. Unused to seeing people who reminded me of my parents on the big screen, as soon as I saw the animated Asian-American mom and dad appear on screen, the father grunting to communicate and the mother furiously cooking up feasts to express her love, I began sobbing.
2018 felt like the year the dam broke loose, and Hollywood finally recognized that Asian representation in movies was long underserved in the market. Crazy Rich Asians was the first film by a major Hollywood studio with a majority Asian cast that had been released since The Joy Luck Club in 1993–25 years earlier. However, since 2018, there have been films either featuring Asian leads or centered on Asian and Asian-American stories every year. In 2019, Awkwafina carried the wave of publicity from Crazy Rich Asians into her film The Farewell, while Parasite (albeit a foreign film) swept awards seasons and critics’ hearts. In 2020, Minari won over audiences with the slice of life portrayal of a family trying to find their footing in rural Arkansas. 2021 brought more fantastic Asian representation in the animated film Raya and the Last Dragon, as well as Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, featuring Simu Liu as the first Asian superhero in the Marvel universe. 2022 gave us Everything Everywhere All at Once which swept awards and dominated awards season hype, redefining what could be achieved by a lower-budget film. In 2023, Joy Ride provided raunchy comedic relief, but Past Lives took a turn from the path of escalating fantasy and absurdism in Asian films to capture the deeper more nuanced pains of living in between two cultures and processing relationships and emotions from your past. Then, 2024 brought us Didi.
Anecdotally, since 2018, Everything Everywhere All at Once was the film that captured all of my friends’ hearts. I have many friends, both Asian-American and not, who declared that Everything Everywhere All at Once is their favorite movie, or the best movie they’ve ever seen. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the directors) covered a broad range of delicate emotions relatable to many audiences but especially so to Asian Americans such as the denial or censoring of queerness in Asian families, frustration at unrealized American dreams, and struggling to find the space to express the love you feel amidst all the errands, complexities, and trivialities of day to day life. However, for me, the quiet of Past Lives centered on the interactions of a much smaller cast packed a more powerful punch. In my experience, in Asian families, the silences are often more pregnant with unspoken emotion than the words actually vocalized. Although quotes from Everything Everywhere All at Once dominated vernacular (and probably greeting cards and Halloween costumes) for months, I still think about some of the lines from Past Lives even now.
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Spoiler Warning: The rest of this article contains spoilers for the movie Didi.
Then, last week I watched Didi, directed by Sean Wang, in theaters. Some friends had watched it and I had heard the normal rave reviews of “it’s good” and “yeah it was kind of absurd.” So, walking into the theater, I told my friends “I heard that this is just slice of life, I don’t think it’s that emotional, so we don’t have to worry about crying!” 2 hours later I found myself with my face and collar soaked with tears, trying to find my footing to leave the theater emotionally intact. I have never seen a film that so intimately captures what it felt like to grow up in a suburb like Fremont in the era of increasing social media and Internet prevalence. From the tutoring sessions in some random garage in the suburbs, to the constant comparison of every child’s academic achievements and prospects by the parents, to struggling to embrace your own culture for fear of standing out or not assimilating as well, all of this captured in slice of life moments in the playgrounds, parking lots, and monotonous sprawl of suburbia both in physical and digital interactions, Sean Wang captured so much of the angst that I and many of my peers experienced coming of age in the suburbs. But, above all, Joan Chen delivered a truly outstanding performance. Joan Chen plays the mother to the protagonist of the film, Chris “Wang Wang” Wang, and his sister, Vivian. The mother spends her days caring for her two children, dreading the day her first child finally leaves to move to college, trying to pursue her dreams of being a painter in between familial obligations, all while being nagged and blamed by her mother-in-law, who pampers Chris as the only son, and blames anything vaguely negative on the mother. At the climax of the film, Joan Chen’s character tells Chris that she sometimes dreams and wonders what her life might have been like if she didn’t become a mother, and instead moved to New York to commit to pursuing her dreams of becoming an artist. But, having seen her two children grow up in California, she tells Chris, her dream has evolved, and her children have become her dream.
A common thread in many of the movies that I’ve mentioned is that life doesn’t always happen the way that you envision. More often than not, life ends up being simpler, harder, and much less grandiose than you may have once dreamed. Things happen, plans shift, some plans get pushed back so far they never happen. But, at the core of all the chaos and unpredictability, you find love, peace, and happiness in your family, whether born or chosen. This message prevails in all of the movies, from the most absurd to the quietest slice-of-life films. However, seeing the minutia from my own life captured so perfectly in every detail of a film like in Didi, from the Chinese calendar used in so many Chinese-American households, the common phrases, and even the exercises that the elderly do to maintain fitness (shuai shou gong, literally translated to waving arm work), the messages of the film cut deeper. I love the movie Didi and I am so grateful for all of the films that came before it in the past few years that paved the path to create the space for these quieter Asian-American slices of life. However, for all of the progress towards telling Asian, mostly East Asian, stories, other underrepresented communities have not experienced the same growth in representation.
In 2023, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative published a study that revealed that from 2007 to 2022, the percentage of films with Asian characters in speaking roles grew from 3.4% to 15.9%. However, most underrepresented groups have experienced little to no growth. The percentage of films with black characters in speaking roles onscreen grew from 13.0% to 13.4 % over 16 years, while the percentage of films with Latino characters in speaking roles onscreen grew from 3.3% to just 5.2%. Meanwhile, the percentage of female characters with speaking roles rose from 29.9% to 34.6% and while 19% of movies in 2022 included a woman of color compared to 1% in 2007, the percentage of women of color in leading roles has not grown significantly.
Movies tell stories, showing us the nuances of lives and experiences that we ourselves may never experience. I am so grateful that my own experiences are starting to be reflected on the big screen, and cannot wait to see what other Asian-American stories will be told, and that following generations of Asian-Americans might be able to grow up watching. However, other underrepresented groups deserve the same push that Asian representation in film has received.
