You Don’t Have to Like ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ (But Please Support It Anyway)
My hapa heart is aflutter.
Tonight, I am seeing Crazy Rich Asians. For the past few months, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for this moment — devouring every interview and think-piece about the film, shoving my phone playing the trailer in the face of anyone who gave me an opening to do so. I made sure to wear waterproof mascara this morning, after remembering how I cried through the entire 113 minutes of Moana and still tear up when thinking about Kelly Marie Tran sobbing with joy on the red carpet when a young Asian girl came dressed as her Star Wars character Rose Tico. It is hard to explain, but the simple act of seeing someone who looks like me on a big screen — in a lead role — evokes a nameless feeling somewhere in between tremendous pride and sheer validation.
It is hard to explain, but the simple act of seeing someone who looks like me on a big screen — in a lead role — evokes a nameless feeling somewhere in between tremendous pride and sheer validation.
And I am not alone. There are countless articles on how the future of Asian representation in American cinema rests in the hands of Crazy Rich Asians. It’s an incredibly exciting and empowering conversation, and it is difficult not to be swept up in what feels like a milestone moment in pop culture history.
But at the same time, there is a nagging fear that I cannot seem to shake: What if the movie is bad?
To be honest, without all the buzz around the all-Asian cast or the fact that it is adapted from a worldwide bestselling trilogy, there are quite a few warning signs that this movie has the potential to be nothing but a mid-summer boondoggle that quietly exits theaters and goes on to become Delta’s in-flight entertainment “Hot New Movie of the Month.”
At its very heart, Crazy Rich Asians is simply a venn diagram of Meet the Parents or My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Gossip Girl. But this seemingly simple story of meet-the-family-clash-of-cultures is elevated by its incredibly cultural nuance and specificity of the world that it builds. This is at least true in the novels, but it seems like the same care and precision was taken for the movie adaptation as well. That said, it’s ultimately a collection of well-worn romantic comedy tropes.
While there are certainly some major heavy-hitters in the cast (Michelle Yeoh, Constance Wu, Ken Jeong among them), there are also quite a few stars with little-to-no acting experience. The director Jon M. Chu was best known for Now You See Me 2 and the Justin Bieber documentary Never Say Never. Not exactly Ang Lee material.
And while the novels are truly delicious, there are just too many examples of failed adaptations of popular novels for this to be any kind of guarantee.
There is also definitely truth to the feeling behind the fact that many people just do not want to see movies about the 1% (or in the case of Crazy Rich Asians, the .00001%). I can certainly understand the argument that to romanticize opulence is to silence those who live within yards of that opulence with barely a roof over their heads, whose stories are arguably more important to tell.
But here’s the thing: If Crazy Rich Asians ends up being a terrible, materialistic rom-com with a shoddy script and inconsistent acting — it still matters.
In fact, it might matter even more.
Films with casts and crews that represent our country’s diversity should also reflect the diversity of output of our film industry. There should be movies about black superheroes, horror movies with indigenous people, comedies with LGBTQ casts, coming-of-age dramas with Latinx teens — and there should be innocently fun rom-coms with Asians.
If Crazy Rich Asians ends up being a terrible, materialistic rom-com with a shoddy script and inconsistent acting — it still matters.
The statistic that keeps being referenced in many of the articles about Crazy Rich Asians is that this is the first American studio film with an All-Asian cast in 25 years, since The Joy Luck Club. Will all due respect to The Joy Luck Club, that just doesn’t cut it for me.
The Joy Luck Club is a story about immigration. For that to be the only example of true Asian representation is, frankly, misrepresentation. Not that black Americans have a stellar record of Hollywood representation either, but that would be as if the only film featuring black actors in the last quarter-century was Roots. Both are incredibly important stories to be told, but if the only stories about people of color are stories of how we got here, we are only propagating the perception that people of color don’t belong in this country. By only telling Asian stories about immigration, we are corroborating the perception that those are the only stories to tell.
Crazy Rich Asians turns this narrative of “the immigrant looking for a better life” on its head. Its protagonist Rachel Chu is a university professor living in comfortable upper-middle-class New York who travels to Singapore with her boyfriend only to discover his family is straight-up Asian royalty. No, this is not the experience of many Asian immigrants (or many immigrants in general) — but it’s also important to show a different kind of immigrant family, to dispel the idea that everyone coming here is leaving behind poverty and oppression, and to show that not everyone sees the U.S. as the Greatest Country In The World.
I truly hope that Crazy Rich Asians is a hit. I hope it has the laugh-out-loud comedy, dreamy romanticism, and delicious escapism that the novels had. But even if it doesn’t, I hope it does well. I hope everyone sees it, not just people who look like me or like the actors on the screen. Because we don’t just need more “Asian movies” — we need movies with Asians in them. We need all kinds of movies with all kinds of people in them.
