With "Crazy Rich Asians" and "Always Be My Maybe", there will be a first time a generation of young golden colored people will grow up seeing a representation of themselves as being human in the USA.

I know Vietnamese are South East Asians as well, but I always felt a little shortchanged when people always point out the Vietnamese exceptions. I'm Malay and it's really hard pressed to find people that look like us on screen. I still feel like us and our fellow Filipino and Indonesian darker skinned SEAsians receive little to no representation in media. Culturally we are very different as well, where Vietnamese culture seems very East Asian and conforming to the East Asian domination of Asian American media. The rest of SEAsia is very culturally different and it feels weird when Vietnamese people are used to represent us.

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Yeah, fair point. One of the real misses of Crazy Rich Asians was how it completely erased Indians and Malays, despite the fact that Singapore is a multicultural society. I think the only Malays I remember seeing in the film was the brief scene where Henry Golding purchases food at the hawker center. Golding himself is half-Iban, of course, but plays a Chinese character.

There's still a lot of work to be done, certainly.

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Here is my reason for calling people golden. Yellow people are called Asian American in the USA. Yet white people are not called European American. It's a topic of interest because we are all in the same boat, neo Americans who came from a different continent.

With this said, I liked the two movies because for example, in the crazy rich Asians, the word "Asian" is never used once (that I know of). Yellow people were seen as just humans, and it was the first time I really saw that in a movie in the USA, and it is something white people had their entire lives, seeing themselves in characters in TV.

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Is your point just to be contrarian or to have the last word? First you say the movies only repped Chinese. Then you kinda move the goal post by saying not enough non-Asians were 'hyped' for Always Be My Maybe. It's a Netflix movie. Other than Birdbox, what Netflix movie release was there 'hype' for?

I'm not Korean or Vietnamese and enjoyed/felt represented by Always Be My Maybe. I restarted my Netflix just to watch it actually. I also watched First They Killed My Father and Kim's Convenience because I wanted to hear Asian stories and support Asian actors. I'm pretty sure more Asians than just Chinese appreciated Crazy Rich Asians.

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Not everyone who disagrees with you is just trying to be a dick. In my eyes representation is more for non-Asians than it is for us: we have to be able to show ourselves and tell our own stories for other people to understand that hey, we’re complex people and not just whatever one-dimensional bastard they believed in before.

In this respect the fact that Our Movie was a pride and prejudice remake with insanely pale and wealthy Chinese people ft. whatever the fuck was going on with the American vs. Singapore thing (do you think non-Asians are going to grasp the nuance of that?) is pretty embarrassing.

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1 day ago

 

ot everyone who disagrees with you is just trying to be a dick. In my eyes representation is more for non-Asians than it is for us: we have to be able to show ourselves and tell our own stories for other people to understand that hey, we’re complex people and not just whatever one-dimensional bastard they believed in before.

Okay, kinda wish you elaborated more earlier because I largely agree with you. I personally would hesitate to say it's more for non-Asians but I can totally see why you might feel that way.

In this respect the fact that Our Movie was a pride and prejudice remake with insanely pale and wealthy Chinese people ft. whatever the fuck was going on with the American vs. Singapore thing (do you think non-Asians are going to grasp the nuance of that?) is pretty embarrassing.

I'm not familiar with Pride and Prejudice so whatever connotations that brings up is lost on me. Not sure what you mean by 'insanely pale' though. That was the actors' regular skin tone and to me is pretty representative of what the average east asian skin tone is like? If you wanna complain about falsely pale representation, that is more appropriate for media actually from Korea and China. As for being wealthy, eh I can kinda see what you're getting at, but overall I'd say it's nbd. It's more important that the movie had a multitude of personalities represented. Was the American vs Singapore thing really that hard to grasp? I don't think there was any nuance really. At several points in the movie, they even explicitly state that Rachel is different because she's from America. Yes, non-Asians are familiar with the concept of a person not quite fitting in/understanding the place their parents/grandparents/whatever is originally from.

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Honestly, that was the worst part of the film. The whole "American" vs. "Asian" values thing was pretty hackneyed, and also, in the case of Singapore, completely inaccurate. It would have been better portrayed as a difference of class & wealth; the "middle class" Rachel vs. the "wealthy" Young family.

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2 points·1 day ago

 

^{^} It's both more immediately relevant for AAs now that there's more super wealthy Asian people around, and in my experience the biggest barrier for better friendships/relationships between ABCs and Mainland Chinese people, especially on college campuses. I'm focusing on ABCs here because that's what I know, but the area where I go to school has a very large Korean American population so I have occasionally seen similar friction between rich Korean internationals and less well-off Korean Americans.

I have zero issues getting along with middle-class/working class Mainland classmates but when it comes to the rich kids it's like. What do you mean you spent 2 grand on coke for a single weekend. I'm not going to the mall with you to shop for purses that cost the same as a small car. I'm not going to hit up the guy you know in the administration to have my class schedule changed.

The worst part is that they don't realize that this is a really weird lifestyle for most Chinese people, and most people, period. This isn't to say that ABCs will get along perfectly well with each other but regardless of how assimilated or familiar or whatever we are at the very least we have generally the same general worries and ideas about what's cool or fun to do.