An antique ‘looking glass.’
Photo credit:
https://wildschut-antiques.com/products/majestic-antique-french-golden-mantel-mirror.
During my senior year in high school, two prominent films helmed by Asian American casts and crews was released in theaters: Crazy Rich Asians directed by Jon M. Chu and The Farewell directed by Lulu wang. There was a significant amount of excitement from the AAPI community from the long-awaited opportunity to see their stories on the big screen. These movies, as they claimed, would constitute meaningful representation of Asian stories in America.
After watching both of these films, however, I was disappointed in many ways. They both did not reflect what I perceived to be my experience of growing up as a Chinese immigrant in North America. There was similar criticism from other members of the AAPI community who claimed that these films were far from representative of the diverse cultures encompassed within the label of being ‘Asian American’; rather, they focused solely on the experiences of East Asians and particularly the Chinese.
When stories are claimed to be ‘representative’ of a population, like both Crazy Rich Asians and The Farewell did in order to market itself to audiences, they always end up being understood or analyzed for how ‘authentically’ it actually executes that depiction. It is why I was so sorely disappointed when so little of what these motion pictures discussed actually resonated with my experience. But I have come to realize that this is always a false expectation that minority stories both purposefully lean into and the population that constitutes the ‘majority’ comes to expect. When there are so few stories about a certain demographic, anything that is released has the danger of becoming the singular story that comes to determine public perceptions of what a group of people are like.
Much of my revelations on this topic percolated throughout the writing of my senior thesis, which centered on Chinese American authors who collaborated with the US government during the Cold War. Research and then the act of writing a coherent academic narrative is always an interesting process because the things that most deeply interest you about a topic or specific moment in time unveils itself slowly. In the beginning of this project, I never imagined that I would wrestle with self-representations and receptions of those stories. But hindsight is 20/20. Upon reflecting on my own identity as a Chinese Canadian woman, such an interest in how Chinese American women past and present have been subject to the unyielding gaze of people’s expectations, and their own fealty or lack thereof to their heritage and ethnicity, appears startlingly obvious.
Through my research, I learned about early Asian American activists like Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan who were aware of the danger and power implicit within representation, which is why they so forcefully spoke out against the Chinese American female authors (such as Jade Snow Wong, Pardee Lowe, Maxine Hong Kingston) who had published novels about their life and upbringing (see “Racist Love”). They had long claimed that the dominant voice within Chinese American media being a female one reinforces the racist beliefs that Asian men were inherently feminine. To be sure, these are serious stereotypes that Asians had to contend with in the past and even now. The desire not to be pigeon-holed is completely understandable, but I found it somewhat odd to learn that they ultimately end up advocating for an overly masculinized image to replace the ‘feminized’ one they believe authors before them had perniciously aided and abetted.
What is needed is more stories, and a firm awareness and allowance that these stories written by minorities can be specific rather than universal. This phenomenon of ‘universalizing’ stories happens to almost every marginalized/minority group. I recall many years ago reading the criticism on Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl that claimed the book was ‘anti-feminist’ because the protagonist was a woman who did evil things. But why can’t women be depicted as ‘evil’? The latent fear within this type of criticism is that character sketches that don’t appeal to the better virtues of a group’s personhood will eventually dominate the public consciousness of what being a part of that group entails. Third world literature, both perpetrated by authors themselves and literary purveyors, are always viewed through the lens of being a national allegory that speaks to their subjugated position on the world stage. These books may not explicitly discuss Orientalism or other variants of epistemic violence, but they are constantly aware of how they will be perceived and how they are expected to ‘represent’ themselves.
These days, I return time and time again to Rey Chow’s question about what ‘Chineseness’ has ever meant and what it means now. I understand fully the power that ‘representation’ and box office numbers yield, and I don’t take for granted at all the virulent forms of racist perceptions that early Asian American activists had to contend with. However, I believe that a more meaningful form of resistance or just existence is tied with allowing our individual experiences to not be defined by larger categories of identities that other people will always force upon us. It is my hope that for those within minority positions either on the axis of race, gender, or class that we can move beyond the need to always ‘represent.’ It is powerful enough to just be.