August 22, 2018 | UHCL Staff
Quite a bit of buzz has surrounded the release of the movie based on University of Houston-Clear Lake alumnus Kevin Kwan’s best-selling book, “Crazy Rich Asians,” which premiered Aug 15. Fans of Kwan’s “Crazy Rich Asians” trilogy have been flocking to see the romcom, but according to UH-Clear Lake’s Associate Professor of Humanities Shreerekha Subramanian, who specializes in Asian American and South Asian literature and cinema, the movie’s impact on American entertainment culture will continue to resonate far beyond this summer.
“In the past, Hollywood has not paid much attention to Asians. The last film that really reached the masses and capitalized on Asian actors was (the 1993 film) ‘The Joy Luck Club,” Subramanian said. “That movie undid a century of stereotypes about Asian women who generally played the exotic ‘geisha’ type, or the exploited or maligned characters. That film rounded out the characters and for the first time, allowed audiences to see Asian women in powerful roles.”
Similarly, Kwan’s novel rendered into film by director, Jon M. Chu, spotlighting an all-Asian cast, are important for a number of reasons. “His novel offers us a romantic, powerful Asian male hero figure who is super wealthy,” she said. “Rather than being tokenized, Asian masculinity is center stage on the Hollywood screen.” Although the plot centers on the lives of a tiny group of ultra-wealthy Asian families in Singapore, “they’re humanized. It offers Americans a new narrative about Asian lives,” Subramanian said.
Until now, she explained, Asian literature in America has focused on the Asian immigrant narrative — their struggle to gain a foothold in a strange land and finding their place in the American Dream, all the while remaining somehow in the shadows. “This novel and the movie break away from that narrative, which by late 20th century, almost became a cliché,” she said.
Things have certainly changed. Bloomberg reports that the world’s wealthiest individuals are rolling forward with Asian billionaires in the lead. In the last year, Asian economic expansion has created, on average, a new billionaire every second day. “With that rise in capital, Asians are now driving the story about what we think about wealth and status,” she said. “This is a story about the lives of people told through the power of their money. That makes this story about Asian Americans even richer — pun intended.”
This glimpse into the lives of the super-ultra-wealthy in that part of the world has facilitated a conversation into the popular domain that has not previously taken place. Subramanian added that the American public has never encountered characters like Kwan’s — globe-trotting billionaires who are part of a culture that possesses its own supremacy and doesn’t bow to American wealth.
“One can certainly have a critique of capital and how this film might not address the disparities of wealth distribution within a very diverse Asian American population, but what the film succeeds in doing is offering representations of Asian American success in an unabashed way,” Subramanian said. “These are fully-rounded, complex characters. Kevin Kwan depicts a tiny echelon of Asian society who are the game changers, and by putting Asians in the middle, Kwan and Chu reinvigorate these erased characters in the minds of Westerners.”
And by erased, Subramanian said, she means disappeared. “There’s quite a bit of scholarship on how people of color are represented in Hollywood and how they’ve been relegated to the margins. There’s a certain active erasure of people of color that’s been at work in the structure of cinema,” she said. “Generally, the camera focuses on the hero-heroine and others, while on screen, disappear and we don’t think of them. In directing this movie, Chu’s agenda is to bring more diverse people to the center of stories, and because of his example, more people in Hollywood can start doing that as well.”
Subramanian said that while at the theater she noted many Asians in the audience who seemed to take pride in seeing an all-Asian cast on the big screen. “There was a real sense of joy in the theater,” she said. “There’s a sense of empowerment and a feeling of belonging. As an immigrant people, you know you have arrived when the screen mirrors your face back to you. It’s important for kids to see people who look like them in the movies.”
To learn more about UHCL alumnus Kevin Kwan, read an interview with him from earlier this summer.
