Asian-Americans might finally get the representation they deserve on screen
Crazy Rich Asians and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before are bringing Asian-American representation back to the spotlight.
Both films were released to theaters and Netflix respectively during August and received ratings of more than 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. A month later, both films continue to surge in popularity among teenagers and adults alike.
Crazy Rich Asians is the first film produced by a major Hollywood studio to feature a cast made up predominantly of actors and actresses with Asian heritage.
However, there is still a noticeable lack of racial representation among Hollywood films.
A study by USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that at least 800 Hollywood films from 2007 to 2015 didn’t feature any Asian-American or Pacific Islander characters as lead roles.
During the past few years, several U.S. films have come under fire for whitewashing several characters.
Whitewashing refers to the act of giving the role of a non-white character to a white actor or actress. In 2017, the film adaptations of popular Japanese franchises Death Note and Ghost in the Shell were heavily criticized for changing the main characters’ ethnicities to white despite both casts in the original source materials being mainly Japanese.
According to a report from the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication, casting Asian-American actors and actresses can still be a struggle despite the various discussions on Hollywood’s claims of increasing representation among its films.
Author of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before Jenny Han and director of Crazy Rich Asians Jon Chu both shared the difficulties they faced when adapting the books to the silver screen. Specifically in finding producers who were willing to keep the main lead characters’ identities as Asian-Americans.
People were interested in adapting To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before even before the book was published, Han wrote in her letter to The New York Times Opinion column. The interest, however, quickly disappeared when Han refused to change the ethnicity of the protagonist.
“One producer said to me, as long as the actress captures the spirit of the character, age and race don’t matter,” Han wrote. “I said, well, her spirit is Asian-American. That was the end of that.”
The push for diverse representations in the media has been a widely discussed issue for the past decade. But the lack of opportunities for Asian-American actors and actresses to have a shot in the spotlight is still prevalent as ever.
The Asian-American population in the U.S. has noticeably increased since 2000.
According to a Pew Research Center study, the Asian population is the fastest growing U.S. minority group, followed by the Hispanic population which increased by 60 percent during the same period of time. The former has grown by 72 percent from about 12 million people during 2000 to more than 20 million people as of 2017.
The U.S. Asian population is a diverse group, with Asian-Americans having roots that trace back to more than 20 different countries across the Asian continent. The largest groups that dominates the U.S. are of Chinese (24 percent), Indian (20 percent) and Filipino descent (19 percent).
Some may argue that the media representation of any group is proportional to the percentage that the population occupies.
But there is a disproportionate number of Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders actors and actresses that are given roles compared to the characters that are supposedly portrayed on screen. Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders make up to roughly 6.8 percent of the American population.
According to data from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, however, only one percent of lead roles in films feature leads from those descents.
Behind the scenes, directors of Asian descent are not faring any better. According to a report by Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, only 3.4 percent of 1,000 surveyed films had a director of Asian descent. 31 films were by male Asian directors while 3 were directed by female Asian directors.
In a 2017 study titled “Tokens on the Small Screen” that surveyed 242 TV series, more than 150 TV series did not have regular characters of Asian or Pacific Islander heritages.
The majority of TV series have at least one white regular character. In comparison, regular black characters make up 14 percent, regular Latinx and hispanic characters appear 5.9 percent, and regular Asian or Pacific Islander characters were in 6.9 percent of TV series.
Among those shows with Asian-American or Pacific Islander characters, 68 percent (out of 142 series) featured the token minority character who was a series regular. The token minority character refers to a singular character in a cast who is the only one with a differing heritage. However, even as regular characters, 87 percent of those regular characters are only on screen for less than half an episode.
A majority of Hollywood films continue to primarily feature straight, able-bodied and middle class white male characters.
In films with Asian protagonists, Hollywood continues to cast White actors and actresses for those roles instead. An example of this is the casting of Scarlett Johansson for Ghost in the Shell.
The success of Crazy Rich Asians and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before proves that casting Asian-American protagonists can benefit Hollywood’s industry. But more importantly, it’s giving viewers an opportunity to see their culture, friends, family and themselves on the screen.
