Mark Tseng-Putterman, Aug 23, 2018<\/p>\n
In F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby<\/em>, the transformation of the working-class Jimmy Gatz into the upper-crust socialite Jay Gatsby is made possible through the assimilating veneer of decadence. Behind his impeccably tailored suits and grandiose parties, Gatsby masks his ambiguous ethnic origins, playing the part of an old-money Anglo-American elite to ultimately tragic results.<\/p>\n Watching the gauche opulence on display in Crazy Rich Asians, <\/em>it\u2019s hard not to think of Fitzgerald\u2019s musings on the perils of conspicuous consumption. The new film (adapted from the 2013 novel by Kevin Kwan) follows the Chinese American professor Rachel Chu (played by Constance Wu) as she\u2019s whisked away into the world of Singapore\u2019s 1 percent to meet the family of her billionaire boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding). Replete with money shots of multimillion-dollar estates, super-yacht bachelor parties, and skyscraper-rooftop pools, the film flirts with messages about privilege, immigrant striving, and the disconnect between Asians and Asian Americans\u2014before ultimately abandoning such ideas for a fairy-tale ending that cements the movie as a celebratory work of affluence-porn<\/a>.<\/p>\n Just as Gatsby\u2019s soir\u00e9es marked his ascendance to the stage of Long Island\u2019s upper class, the extravagance of Crazy Rich Asians <\/em>reflects a self-conscious announcement of the Asian American arrival on the Hollywood stage. Heralded as the first major American studio film to feature a majority-Asian cast in a contemporary setting since The Joy Luck Club<\/em> nearly 25 years ago, Crazy Rich Asians<\/em> has been met with impossible expectations: If this film flops, audiences are told<\/a>, who knows how long Asian Americans may have to wait for another shot at the spotlight.<\/p>\n That pressure may have lessened after high audience turnout and celebrity theater buyouts<\/a> helped the movie successfully rake<\/a> in $34 million in its first five days. And while the film\u2019s defenders have<\/a> admonished<\/a> critics<\/a> for expecting one work to fill the cultural void left by decades of Hollywood exclusion, it\u2019s noteworthy that this<\/em> is the sort of story that industry advocates and audiences have coalesced around\u2014one that eases collective anxieties about Asian and Asian American difference by adopting the universal aesthetic of the ultra-rich.<\/p>\n Though it has been trumpeted<\/a> as a landmark victory in the fight for Asian American visibility in Hollywood, Crazy Rich Asians<\/em> enacts a remarkable disavowal of certain forms of Asian representation. In one notable scene, Goh Wye Mun (Ken Jeong) plays up an affected Chinese accent, repeating Rachel\u2019s surname until it devolves into a parody of the \u201cching-chong\u201d stereotypes of Hollywood\u2019s past. Then, the payoff: \u201cJust kidding,\u201d Wye Mun says in an assuredly American accent: \u201cI went to Cal State Fullerton.\u201d The scene stands in for the prevailing spirit of the film: We\u2019re not <\/em>those kinds of Asians<\/em>. Gone are the \u201cOriental\u201d accents and broken English, replaced with the sophisticated air of Golding\u2019s British tongue, Wye Mun\u2019s familiar all-American vernacular, and Goh Peik Lin\u2019s (Nora Lum a.k.a. Awkwafina) contrived \u201cblaccent<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Later in the same scene, Wye Mun scolds his young daughters to finish their chicken nuggets: \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of children starving in America.\u201d The barb\u2014which turns a classic white American parent\u2019s chiding on its head\u2014drew raucous laughter from the mostly Asian audience at the screening I attended. But the punch line also rejects the \u201cwrong\u201d kind of Asians. Look<\/em>, the joke seems to say, we\u2019re not the third-world farmers or factory workers you might have imagined. We\u2019re just as good as you. <\/em>Or, more accurately: We\u2019re better\u2014and richer<\/em>.<\/p>\n Despite the film\u2019s all-Asian cast, and Kwan\u2019s refusal to accept industry suggestions<\/a> to cast Rachel as a white woman, Wye Mun\u2019s jab suggests that white, Western expectations still cast a long shadow over the movie. Take the opening scene, whose drama hinges on Eleanor Young (Michelle Yeoh) triumphantly distinguishing herself\u2014in the eyes of a white hotel manager\u2014from the kind of Chinese who might stay in London\u2019s Chinatown. While viewers are compelled to cheer these moments as subversive, such scenes stage a certain kind of respectability politics for a presumed white audience (or, these moments assure Asian American viewers that they are, in fact, the \u201cright\u201d kind of Asians).<\/p>\n But it\u2019s unfair to single out Crazy Rich Asians <\/em>for its apparent concern with white standards of respectability. The arguable crowning<\/a> of media representation as the defining Asian American issue points to some deep concerns about how we are perceived. While many speak<\/a> of the legitimate importance of seeing people who look like themselves on-screen, the investment in mainstream <\/em>depictions in particular\u2014often to the marginalization of a thriving Asian American indie-film circuit<\/a>\u2014implies a preoccupation with not only (or even primarily) how Asian Americans see ourselves, but also how others see us.<\/p>\n Like the wider fight for diverse representation, Crazy Rich Asians <\/em>struggles with the conflicting pursuit of a universalism that \u201ctranscends race<\/a>\u201d and a specificity that reflects Asian and Asian American lived experiences. More often than not, it errs toward the former. While the film\u2019s many Chinese-Singaporean cultural details are heartwarming and refreshing\u2014wrapping dumplings at the family table, a climactic conversation over mahjong\u2014at times they feel oddly tacked on, almost ornamental to an otherwise westernized story. In fact, the director Jon M. Chu has been forthright about his desire for the film to transpose Asian faces onto a quintessentially Hollywood\u2014which is to say, white American\u2014story. In an interview<\/a> with IndieWire<\/em>, Chu said he wanted the movie to convey \u201cthis idea that old, classic, Hollywood movies could have starred Asians with just as much style, just as much pizzazz.\u201d It\u2019s no surprise, then, that the film drips with an art-deco aesthetic, nodding to American cinema\u2019s black-and-white days with one party scene\u2014which rivals Gatsby\u2019s finest\u2014where women in flapper fashion swing and twirl to a Singaporean jazz band.<\/p>\n Chu\u2019s approach implies a fungibility between white and Asian faces that attests to a broader consensus about how Asian Americans should be portrayed in mainstream pop culture. If the pernicious Hollywood trends of whitewashing<\/a> and yellowface have positioned white actors as fit for Asian and Asian American roles, the dominant corrective has been to propose that Asian and Asian American actors are fit for roles traditionally played by white people. It\u2019s a thesis that\u2019s been visually achieved through the viral hashtags #StarringJohnCho and #StarringConstanceWu, in which the digital strategist William Yu and other Twitter users employed Photoshop<\/a> (and later deepfake<\/a>) to place the likenesses of Cho and Wu on the bodies of the stars of blockbusters like Captain America<\/em><\/a> and Ghost in the Shell<\/em>.<\/p>\n But what happens to culturally specific storytelling when representation means literally swapping Asian faces onto white bodies? Aneesh Chaganty, the co-writer and director of the upcoming film Searching<\/em> (actually starring John Cho), recently echoed<\/a> this ostensible goal of Asian American storytelling sans Asian American specificity: \u201cFor so long, identity has to be justified in a narrative. You always have to explain why, especially when you\u2019re casting anybody who isn\u2019t white in a movie. There has to be this element explaining what the Asian American hook is. In our movie, there\u2019s no justifying it. We are trying to not make it an issue. That\u2019s the victory to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Chaganty\u2019s critique of the way whiteness is so often conflated with objectivity in storytelling is admirable. But it runs the risk of expanding whiteness as the default by expecting Asian Americans and other people of color to abide by its cultural norms so as to not make race \u201can issue.\u201d When confined to a politics of respectability, calls for diversity in the mainstream often end up not representing difference and complexity, but proving sameness. While the unfortunate Roseanne <\/em>reboot drew criticisms<\/a> for a joke in which Rosanne reduces the diversifying ABC lineup of Black-ish <\/em>and Fresh Off the Boat <\/em>with a pithy summary, \u201cThey\u2019re just like us. There, now you\u2019re all caught up\u201d\u2014she has a point. The latter show has been excoriated<\/a> by its own creator, Eddie Huang (who himself has faced criticisms for cultural appropriation<\/a> andmisogyny<\/a>), who called the show \u201cpasteurized network television with East Asian faces\u201d that pacified potentially skeptical white viewers by saying \u201cwe\u2019re all the same.\u201d<\/p>\n Given the context, it\u2019s ironic but not particularly surprising that Crazy Rich Asians <\/em>at times embraces a message of white-Asian equivalence by distancing itself from the \u201cwrong\u201d kind of Asians. If the film puts Asian America in thespotlight<\/a>, it does so for a very slim portion of that demographic. While the cast includes a mix of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean diaspora actors of various nationalities, besides Golding (who is of Iban descent) it effectively excludes<\/a>South and Southeast Asians despite their deep presence in Singaporean society. Indeed, as many have pointed<\/a> out, the only South Asians that viewers can glimpse are in the roles of servants and guards. The scene in which Rachel and Peik Lin drive up to the Youngs\u2019 remote estate and are shocked by the sight of two turbaned, South Asian guards\u2014armed with what appear to be bayonets, no less\u2014seems a particularly apt metaphor for the brand of Asian American representation Crazy Rich Asians <\/em>provides: one in which too many are left on the outside, looking in.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s glamorization of Chinese-Singaporean wealth is particularly troubling given the country\u2019s own racial inequalities, which the Singaporean writer and activist Sangeetha Thanapal describes<\/a> as a system of \u201cChinese Privilege.\u201d To the extent that the movie\u2019s almost comically decadent style is an attempt to satirize these privileges, such efforts are undermined by its script. Explaining the Young family\u2019s old-money origins, Peik Lin tells Rachel that when Nick\u2019s ancestors settled in Singapore in the 1800s, the country was nothing but \u201cjungle and pig farmers.\u201d The line is played for laughs, but its colonial mentality betrays the film\u2019s inability to imagine Asian and Asian American grandeur beyond simply swapping Chinese for whites at the top of the racial hierarchy.<\/p>\n Similarly, Awkwafina\u2019s on-and-off \u201cblaccent\u201d as Peik Lin stands out in a film light on Asian accents, especially<\/a> \u201cSinglish\u201d Singaporean ones. In a world of upper-crust East Asians, Lum\u2019s approximation<\/a> of the \u201csassy black friend\u201d trope exploits blackness for cheap laughs\u2014implicitly aligning Asians (or at least the crazy-rich ones) with white people. Indeed, in a political climate in which Asian Americans are often leveraged as a minority \u201cwedge<\/a>\u201d on racial-justice issues, the film at times confirms rather than dislodges troubling conservative American aspirations<\/a> toward a white-Asian alliance.<\/p>\n Like the Roaring Twenties of Jay Gatsby\u2019s heyday, Crazy Rich Asians<\/em> arrives in a moment of brewing fears among white Americans about a coming \u201cmajority-minority\u201d country. It\u2019s an identity crisis in which Asian Americans figure in a liminal position: both perpetual foreigners<\/a> and \u201chonorary whites<\/a>.\u201d If the pursuit of \u201call-American\u201d Asian representation is seen as a necessary corrective to long-standing stereotypes of Asian foreignness, the respectability politics of Crazy Rich Asians<\/em> are a reminder that it\u2019s the latter trope that may end up inadvertently entrenched.<\/p>\n