Mar 9, 20234 min read

Asians in Hollywood: Representation or Tokenism?

By Taylor Shoda

UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity report found that Asians make up 5.6% of leading roles and 6.4% of the overall cast among 252 films analyzed as part of the study (socialsciences.ucla.edu). The data is distressing, especially considering the rise of Anti-Asian hate in the past years prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hope isn’t completely lost, however. According to PR Newswire, AAPI representation in streaming has doubled, showing a promising rise in roles and storylines for Asian Americans in the entertainment industry. While Hollywood shows real progress toward a more inclusive chapter of movie-making, is the representation we’ve been given enough?

Tokenism is “the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups to give the appearance of racial equality within a workforce” (Oxford Languages). With the rise of the representation of Asian roles, critics and film analyzers fear that “Hollywood is doing the bare minimum” (backstage.com) by stereotyping Asian characters and providing them with limiting and contorted storylines that give Hollywood the control to “create a world where they are in control of creating a definition for [Asian] cultures” (Yaghmai, Changing the Definition). Whether serving as the punchline of a joke, like Long Duk Dong’s character in Sixteen Candles, or perpetuating stereotypes of Asian experience being solely made of destiny, fate, or family destiny (Yaghmai), we must question the intentions of Hollywood’s “representation.”

Below is a list of popular media, both of recent release and from the past decades, that demonstrate the films/shows that broke the mold and, conversely, the unfortunate others that “[took] Eastern cultures and [warped] it to fit in with an American perception and belief system” (Yaghmai) of the Asian-American reality.

Missed the Mark:

Aloha (2015), directed by Cameron Crowe

Ghost in the Shell (2017), directed by Rupert Sanders

Cloud Atlas (2012), directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), directed by Blake Edwards

Racist casting has long existed in Hollywood (history.com) – shown here are just a few examples of yellow-face or white-washing of Asian characters by hiring white actors to play the roles instead. Emma Stone’s character in Aloha is supposed to be of Chinese, Hawaiian, and Swedish descent, while the movie casts a white actress instead of an Asian woman. Similarly, Scarlett Johansson played the lead role in Ghost in the Shell, the film adaptation of the same-named Japanese manga. Cloud Atlas and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, spanning more than 50 years apart, both feature disturbing yellow-face, the white actors’ faces made up with prosthetics and makeup to appear “Asian.”

On Destiny, Family Legacy, and Fate:

Recently, Hollywood has boasted a strong rise in Asian-led films. Many of these films are both Asian-led and directed and steer clear of common stereotypes and cheap humor at the expense of Asian American culture. However, there is a common theme in each of these films that Amanda Yaghmai points out in her article, Changing the Definition of the Orient through Hollywood. She states that the issue is with “the way that the East is portrayed in Hollywood. Instead of taking the time to research the culture and background of these actors and actresses and the roles that they are casted to play, Hollywood simply boils them down to the exotic nature of their appearances” (Yaghmai). This problem exists primarily in older films, such as Crouching Tiger and The Karate Kid, where Asian characters are tokenized with “ancient wisdom” and only focused on fate and destiny. Yaghmai writes that “the primary problem of Orientalism is that it misrepresents the culture being featured, discredits those who are a part of that culture, as well as perpetuates and encourages stereotypes of both the culture and its people that others start to believe and adopt themselves” (Yaghmai). Asian-led movies of the past “commercialize their piece for a larger [white] audience, [with] the intent of the media to create something that does not stray from what their audience already understands” about the Asian-American experience (Yaghmai).

Modern Representation:

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), directed by Destin Daniel Cretton

The Farewell (2019), directed by Lulu Wang

Crazy Rich Asians (2018), directed by Jon M. Chu

Turning Red (2022), directed by Domee Shi

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018), directed by Susan Johnson

Always Be My Maybe (2019), directed by Nahnatchka Khan

Never Have I Ever (2020), created by Mindy Kaling

The Big Sick (2017), directed by Michael Showalter

Minari (2020), directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Many of the Asian-led movies/shows released in the last decade have reinvented Asian American media and finally gave them the representation they deserved. While these films/shows focus on the unique cultural experiences of Asian Americans, such as immigration, familial responsibility, and racism, they also feature Asian people in “normal” roles. Ali Wong in Always Be My Maybe is a celebrity restaurant owner, Lana Condor in the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy is a high-school teenager who falls for a jock, and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan in Never Have I Ever is not only defined by her Indian culture, and reflects on real, teenage issues beyond cultural othering. While some of these films/shows fall into Yaghmai’s concern with too much Asian media revolving around stereotypical “exoticism” with destiny and fate (Shang-Chi sees Simu Liu’s character complying with his family legacy and birthright and Turning Red revolved around a similar issue), their stories are being told by their cultural owners — fellow Asian directors and writers.

Hollywood is slowly moving in the right direction, with the last fully-Asian cast before Crazy Rich Asians (2018) being thirty years ago in The Joy Luck Club (1993). With massive media conglomerates like Disney finally providing space for Asian Americans to tell their stories, we can hope that inclusive representation continues to prosper.

Sources: