As the delicate woodwind instruments rose to a gentle crescendo and Jasmine Chen’s soothing Mandarin tones rolled into the opening credits of Crazy Rich Asians, I felt an overwhelming lump of emotion rise up in my throat.
If you’re wondering why the initial moments of a “frivolous” rom-com provoked such an impassioned response, I’m either a massive melt (which, admittedly, isn’t far from the truth), or you, unlike me, are probably extremely accustomed to seeing people that look like you and speak like you represented in mainstream film and media.
Having heard all the hype, I initially felt apprehensive about how good the film would actually turn out to be. The furore surrounding Crazy Rich Asians has been unparalleled — it’s been heralded as a watershed moment for the East Asian diaspora, as well as the cure to Hollywood’s white-washed ails. In a report by the University of Southern California, they found that after analysing the top 100 films every year from 2007, only a minuscule 4.8% of speaking roles were assumed by Asian characters. In fact, Crazy Rich Asians is the first mainstream Hollywood film to feature an all-Asian lead cast in 25 years, following the breakthrough success of The Joy Luck Club in 1993. So, yes. It is quite naturally a VERY big deal.
Pushing aside the clichéd and excessively cheesy nature that the structure of a rom-com dictates, Crazy Rich Asians is a film which tackles a lot of the experiences that are common to a vast swathe of the East Asians who now live in the West. When Rachel’s mum says to her: “You look Chinese and you speak Chinese, but here and here [pointing to her head and heart], you are different,” it was a sentiment that really resonated with me, as I’m sure it did with other second-generation Chinese immigrants in the West. The overt display of the internal conflict between ostensibly opposing cultures within Rachel made me wish I had had films like Crazy Rich Asians in mainstream cinema when I was younger.
Growing up, Western beauty ideals were constantly shoved down my throat — an experience I share with other East Asian kids living in the West. We were very rarely given the chance to aspire to be like someone who looked like us, or who went through the same experiences as us, or who told the same stories as us. Out of necessity, we had to forcibly project ourselves onto white idols in the media in order to garner some sense of self-worth and purpose.
The only characters of East Asian descent that were granted to us when we were young were caricatures and one-dimensional, typecast figures such as Kung Fu stars and high school dorks. Of course, such characters are undeniably present in the East Asian experience, but they are most definitely not representative of the whole East Asian diaspora. Crazy Rich Asians takes token stereotypes and reclaims them by reversing the tide of the white collective gaze. East Asian individuals are the ones dictating the story of their people, rather than the perspective of an outsider overruling their own personal experiences. For example, although there are iterations of East Asian stereotypes, such as superficial, filthy-rich Asians, tiger mums and marriage-obsessed relatives, the film adds a depth to these clichés that hasn’t been seen in mainstream Hollywood films for years gone by. Crazy Rich Asians was permitted to speak for itself on its own terms, and rather than lecturing the audience about these tropes, the film instead allows the audience to create their own dialogues and ask their own questions without being subjected to a lengthy harangue.
Despite this, the film isn’t without its flaws. There have been numerous accounts detailing the frustration of some East Asians regarding the film’s pandering to a Western audience. In this way, Crazy Rich Asians is like your typical Chinese takeaway: people will eat sweet and sour pork and orange chicken and say they are authentically Chinese, but these dishes are inherently not representative of the immense depth of Chinese cuisine or culture — the same case applies for this film.
On top of this, although the all-Asian cast has been hailed as a paradigm for representation and diversity across the board, we still need to take issue with the portrayal of Singaporean minority populations in the film — an area where Crazy Rich Asians falls flat. Three-quarters of Singaporeans identify as ethnically Chinese, with the minority Malay and Indian populations being the second and third major ethnic groups in Singaporean society. However, the film places all of — and this “all” is small — the darker-skinned Malay and Indian characters in positions of servitude for the wealthy Chinese characters, be it as Eleanor Sung-Young’s house guards, or the silent, onlooking staff who open the car doors for Rachel upon her arrival at Eddie and Fiona’s wedding. It’s hypocritical for a film which claims to be breaking boundaries in terms of representation, when these minority characters are treated and presented exactly how a white, euro-centric film would have chosen to portray them.
That being said, we have to bear in mind the film’s rom-com status, which somewhat limits its ability to tackle tremendously complex issues, such as the nuances of cultural identity politics and the intricacies of a societal fabric as multifaceted as that of Singapore. This itself might be why the film chooses instead to solely focus its dialogue around the lives of the elite Chinese-Singaporean society. Furthermore, instead of critiquing Crazy Rich Asians from the viewpoint of East Asian standards, it’s necessary to judge the film in adherence to Hollywood standards because it is, after all, a Hollywood film, not an East Asian one. It would be unreasonable to expect a single rom-com to right the many wrongs of the Hollywood clique. But, by employing and manipulating the format of the normally white-dominated genre of rom-com, Crazy Rich Asians acts as a conduit for the introduction and championing of East-Asian bodies in mainstream film.
Overall, Crazy Rich Asians is a tentative but fearless step in the right direction; however, we need to ensure that our progress doesn’t stop here. The film isn’t perfect by any means, but what it has done is widen a fissure in the white-dominated space of mainstream entertainment, thus providing us with an even bigger opportunity to deconstruct old white hierarchies present in Western media, and to diversify the representation of minority groups. We can’t let ourselves wait another 25 years for a chance like this again.