Crazy Rich Asians is the perfect movie for Asian Americans: It’s not good enough for anyone

Tian An Wong
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read

The recent movie Crazy Rich Asians based on the novel by Kevin Kwan has been a box office hit, grossing $26.5 million in its opening weekend, and currently rated 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie boasts the first all-Asian cast since the Joy Luck Club, which came out 25 years ago, and has been touted as a win for representation of Asian Americans in Hollywood. But the movie has not been without its criticisms. In fact, it has received criticism from so many sides that it is the perfect movie for Asian Americans: it’s not good enough for anyone.

Asian Americans hold a special place in American culture: they’ve been around a long time, but have never really been seen nor heard. Asians have been arriving on American soil much longer than most remember. The Filipinos — ”Luzon Indians” — were brought along by the Spanish since the 1500s, followed by the Japanese and Chinese migrant labourers arriving in Hawai’i and the West Coast in the 1800s, and then further migration from other Asian countries from the 1900s until today, for example places the US has bombed, like Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Syria, and Iraq.

The Asian American identity is still being negotiated, caught between the model minority myth and the perpetual foreigner stereotype. Yellow and Brown don’t quite fit in a largely Black and White understanding of US society. More often than not, brown gets coded as black (think the Paper Bag Test) and yellow passes as white (enough). As a result, Asians pass through this racial sorting hat that places them on either side of the color line, left without much of their own history or identity. Given all this, it’s hard not to feel underrepresented — or really, misrepresented — in Hollywood, all the way from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Ghost in the Shell, and to feel that Crazy Rich Asians is a step in the right direction.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, the movie isn’t perfect. Just as Asian Americans often see themselves as having a foot in two worlds, but never really a part of either, so has the movie been judged. To Singaporeans, the movie isn’t a proper reflection of Singapore. According to one review, it’s too Chinese, projecting a generic Chinese-ness through an symbols and signifiers that paint an incoherent picture. On the other hand, another report tells us that the Chinese don’t think of it as very Chinese, because the storyline is essentially a Western romcom with East Asian faces transposed onto it.

It’s not Singaporean enough because it only represents the dominant Chinese elite in Singapore, and there wasn’t enough Singlish (in fact, it was only deployed as comic relief). According to Asian Americans, it’s too black, with Awkwafina’s blaccent and performance of blackness, and also too white, embracing a message of “white-Asian equivalence”. And it goes without saying that it’s not Western, or white enough, which is the entire reason the film is such a big deal.

Actually, I agree with almost all of these analyses. The fact that there are so many differing opinions and criticisms show just how diverse and complex identities Asian and Asian American are. But this outpouring of criticism from all sides really captures the Asian American experience: it’s not good enough for anyone.

Asian Americans get this. (This is also how Rachel Chu, the protagonist Chinese American, in the film is judged to be.) No sense of belonging in America nor in Asia. Asian Americans have had to negotiate their identities and defend their existence for centuries, and continue to do so as what constitutes ‘Asian’ in Asian American evolves.

All that being said, all of this is too much pressure for a single film to handle. It is precisely because mainstream movies by and about Asian American are so few and far between that Crazy Rich Asians is held to such a high standard. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “for Asian-Americans, if “Crazy Rich Asians” succeeds, we all do; if it fails, we all do. This is what it means to live in an economy of narrative scarcity.” What we are all waiting for, is for “narrative plenitude”, enough stories about Asian Americans so that movies like Crazy Rich Asians don’t have to carry the entire burden of proof that Asian Americans exist. We need stories that aren’t just about India’s poor (Slumdog Millionaire) or Singapore’s elite; we need all kinds of stories that showcase all kinds of Asian Americans.

So whatever you think of or have read about the film, if you haven’t already, go out there pay money to see it. Do it for all of us. Let it have its day in the sun, and just for the conversation that is forcing us to have about what is Asian and Asian American, it is already worth it.