Asian American Empowerment - New Faces, Old Scripts

The karate-chop stereotype sells tickets, but sells us out

By Oliver Wang
©1998 AsianWeek
August 6, 1998

Is 1998 really the year of the Asian male--as in film stars? There's certainly a greater presence. From Garrett Wang's weekly appearances on Star Trek: Voyager to Chow Yun Fat's explosive Hollywood debut in The Replacement Killers, Asian and Asian American men in popular media seem at first glance to have come a long way since, say, the goofy, sex-starved Long Duc Dong of Sixteen Candles in 1984.

Unfortunately, stereotypes still abound. Take the latest installment in Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon series, whose fourth sequel debuted in early July. This time around, Lethal Weapon 4 resurrects the familiar nefarious triad gangster, mixed with another abused cliché, the kung-fu master.

Although action-film star Jet Li typically plays the hero in his Hong Kong films, his Hollywood debut in the film casts him as arch-villain Wah Sing Ku, whose mission is to reunite Hong Kong's triad gang bosses in Los Angeles. The villainous character recalls the sinister stylishness of another infamous Chinatown gangster, John Lone's Joey Tai from the much-criticized Year of the Dragon. Only this time, Li merges the imposing guile of a triad boss with the physical grace of Bruce Lee, and he's assisted by an assorted crew of Asian hoodlums who all, of course, karate chop with the best of them.

The Asian martial arts master is only one among a constellation of Asian male stereotypes that include the funny foreigner (think Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's), the wise sage (Pat Morita in The Karate Kid) and the smart but unsexy genius (Charlie Chan). These caricatures go beyond Hollywood--observe the "Asian villains" put forth by politicos in light of Clinton's Donorgate scandal, which prompted mainstream media to resurrect the specter of sly and devious "Orientals" in the form of Asian businessmen and heads of government.

For years, Asian American scholars and media pundits have been lambasting these portrayals yet, despite our age of supposed "political correctness," mainstream America seems unwilling and uninterested in deviating from them. Comedian and actor Steve Park spoke for many disgruntled Asian Americans in his much-publicized manifesto last year in which he criticized Hollywood's racist portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans. He wrote, "In movies and television, Asian characters, mostly men, are subjected to indignity and/or violence or are tokenized, while Asian women are exploited as objects of sexual desire."

Why does this happen? Jeff Yang, founding editor of A Magazine, thinks that "this is the way that majority [American] culture deals with threats. It magnifies them to the point of monstrosity--to create a common enemy--or it diminishes them to the point of invisibility."

University of Delaware professor and cinema scholar Peter Feng suggests that Lethal Weapon 4, in particular, taps into an American obsession with "China's growing pains, and the displacement of gangsters and other shady characters due to the Hong Kong handover."

Another reason why stereotypes persist: They sell. As Yang puts it, "the essential issue here is economics, not politics." Budding film director Chris Chan Lee of Yellow argues that the wheels of commerce compel studios to keep turning the same themes around and around.

"I think Hollywood and mainstream America just don't know any better," Lee said. "The stereotypes are self-perpetuating, and those people are too lazy to make the extra effort and look at the characters more critically."

Some have argued that Asia's emerging power will contribute to better representations of Asian and Asian American men. Especially in the last year or so, Hollywood has been in the throes of an "Asian chíc" affair as high-profile Asian directors (John Woo, Tsui Hark) and actors (Chow Yun Fat, Jackie Chan) have emerged as stars in American cinema.

Yang points out that trendy visibility can be dicey. "I'm not sure that exoticization or fetishization is necessarily an improvement on spite or contempt," he said. "The goal of those who seek to dispel stereotypes should be to create a textured, three-dimensional reality for ourselves, not to invent new stereotypes. I don't want to be held to the [Bruce Lee] 'dragon standard.' But I don't want to be perceived as Long Duc Dong, either."

Filmmaker Jean Juson (Swan Dive) is quick to take the air out of the Asian fascination equation. "I think it is a trend--I hope it's not, I hope it sticks around--but as far as Hollywood's concerned, it seems they're all jumping on the bandwagon," she says. Pointing out that "there have been Asian American stars before that have never been huge, like Russell Wong (The Joy Luck Club) and Jason Scott Lee (Dragon), she suggests that actors like Chow Yun Fat made it here only because they're already mega-stars in Asia.

That transplanted-star script, too, is a rerun. Bruce Lee, one of the most successful Asian men in U.S. cinema, emerged only after a blockbuster film career in Hong Kong. Still, for many Asian American men, Lee was the only positive role model that existed in the popular imagination. And he's again making headlines, given that this year is the 25th anniversary of his death and his first and last U.S. film production, Enter the Dragon.

Though Lee arguably made the most lasting impression of Asian masculinity on American audiences, he had no successor. "Bruce, for all of his greatness, projected an image that Asian American men can't live up to and wouldn't necessarily want to, anyway," says Yang, who argues that Lee's enduring image is "too narrow to accommodate all facets of Asian American maleness.

"We can admire him individually, but do we want to be held exclusively to his standard? I wouldn't think so, any more than all African American males want to be compared to Michael Jordan."

Nonetheless, movies continue to reinforce stereotypes of Asian men, as seen in Lethal Weapon 4 and Michael Crichton's Rising Sun, and Asian American viewers themselves aren't immune to their effects. Renee Tajima-Peña, whose My America, or Honk If You Love Buddha, which recently aired on PBS, confessed: "I have too many Asian women friends my age who consider Asian men ugly and non-appealing. It's a real self-hate that comes from that shit on TV."

Still, Juson says people's impressions are slowly changing, thanks in large part to smaller, independent films. Now in pre-production for a film that examines the lives of a New York Chinatown family, Juson says she's encouraged by the growing wave of "smaller, non-studio films that continue to cast Asian actors in roles that are not the waiter and the gangster. Independents put a small dent in what the public sees, but at least it's brewing in the subconscious."

That may be true--but the fact remains that there is still a perceived lack of interest among Asian Americans in films with Asian Americans. As the New York Times pointed out, the Asian American International Film Festival has had to scramble to get films from overseas to flush out its sparse selections. As Yang notes, "There has not yet been evidence that Asian American audiences have the ability to 'support' a film, the way that black and gay audiences can."

As Tajima-Peña put it: "There is an unprecedented number of new Asian American features out there. How many of us went to the theater and bought a ticket?"

If Asian Americans don't care about film portrayals, why should Hollywood? Tajima-Peña is blunt: "I think we Asian Americans should shut-up about racist portrayals until we are willing to put our money where our mouth is."

However, Feng points out that change will be slow because few aspiring Asian Americans have an in, in an industry where you have to know somebody. "I think the solution is having more Asian Americans in production roles, on set, rather than in the corporate offices, [but] there are fewer Asian Americans in these jobs, because these slots have always been filled through referral, and people like to hire people they've worked with before."

There's a glimmer of hope in the rise of more Asian Americans to prominent positions within Hollywood, with Chris Lee (no relation to Chris Chan Lee) at Tristar and producer Dean Devlin (ID4, Godzilla) being two better-known examples. Their rise heartens Feng, but the scholar remains cautious. "It makes me wonder whether they have any influence on product at all. Either they have very little witness the product we've been getting--or they have some-and we've been spared even more egregious representations!" he says.

Still, Tajima-Peña sees that the tide is turning. "I grew up in the '60s and '70s so I know things are getting better." She also suggests that American audiences aren't as impressionable as some might think. "Last year, at the height of the campaign finance investigations, there was also the hoopla over the Hong Kong turnover and the release of the Tibet movies, Red Corner and the like. But I don't get a sense that people bought into the demonization of the Chinese."

Undoubtedly, long-term change for Asians and Asian Americans in Hollywood will be a huge production. It won't be coming soon. To succeed, filmmakers must strive--almost always against economic and social odds--to make films "truer" to the Asian American experience, and Asian American audiences must respond with their consumer clout.

And if we don't, we'll likely see more of the same. As Tajima-Peña notes: "Today, the media is power, but we as Asian Americans are content with voluntary servitude."