Chinese Hollywood by Erin Son

CHINESE

HOLLYWOOD

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll play a very different kind of role, so it explodes that stereotype.

It’s a pretty sad situation to be rejected by [the Chinese] because I’m ‘too American’ and by American producers because they prefer other races to act Chinese parts.

I feel that its important for me to be out there and to represent the face. At the same time, for me as an individual, I think the Asian-American face can be crowded with the American identity.

CHINES

HOLLY

WOOD

Arthur Dong

How Awkwafina Went from Rapping to “Oceans 8” and “Crazy Rich Asians”

Anna May Wong: Chinese-American Star

‘The Farewell’ Deserves to Be Seen as an American Drama

Constance Wu’s Hollywood Destiny

40 Jackie Chan: The Fists, the Fury, the Oscar

John M. Chu

Amy Tan

The Stakes Are High for ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ — And That’s the Point

Movie List

Why Crazy Rich Asians Could Be a Watershed Moment for Asian Representation in Hollywood

Copyright ÂŠ 2020 Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed by Blurb Inc, in the United States. Blurb Inc. 600 California St

Arthur Dong 12

Well, I was born and raised in San Francisco Chinatown. It was pretty much a self contained community, particularly back in the 1950s and 1960s. Nowadays if you walk down Grant Avenue you will find all the tourist style shops, but it wasn’t like that when I was growing up. Back then it was the place to buy all your Chinese groceries and all the butcher stores, bakeries etc catered to all the Chinese American families living in the neighborhood. It was a very tight knit community, and I guess that is what peaked my interest in Chinese American films and collect everything I could on this topic. I remember when I was a kid there were five movie theaters showing all Chinese films – so this was the environment I was bought up in. Over the years I have been reading a lot of Hollywood and general film history from the silent era till now, and I noticed that there wasn’t really a book talking about Chinese American film history, so that is why I decided to write it.

Join noted film critic and author B. Ruby Rich as she speaks with Arthur Dong about his work and legacy.

I WAS TA TO NOTHING

AUGHT DESIRE G

Anna May Wong: Chinese-American Star 16

The first thing to remember about movie star Anna May Wong is that she was an American. She was born Wong Liu Tsong in 1905 in Los Angeles, with a Cantonese American family that had lived in America since at least 1855. Her father owned a laundry shop, and as the film industry began to move west, she began to gain an interest in acting and movies. However, being an American didn’t matter in a time when people of Chinese descent were being heavily legislated against. Beginning in 1909, any people of Chinese descent entering or residing in the US, regardless of the country of their birth, had to carry a Certificate of Identity with them at all times. This was part of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (the subject of the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion), which prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers, and excluded Chinese from US citizenship. Even at the peak of her fame, Wong still had to carry papers to prove she was allowed to be here. Wong’s career also suffered from the anti-miscegenation laws of the time, which prevented her from sharing an on-screen kiss with any person of another race (even if it was an Asian character being portrayed by a white actor.) There was only one other Asian leading man at the time, Sessue Hayakawa, so Wong was often relegated to the part of the “Dragon Lady.” In 1928, Wong moved to Europe, saying in an interview, “There seems little for me in Hollywood, because, rather than real Chinese, producers prefer Hungarians, Mexicans, American Indians for Chinese roles.” However, in the 1930s, she returned to Hollywood, and starred in some of her most iconic films, like Shanghai Express and Daughter of the Dragon. Despite being barred from leading-lady status, moviegoers loved her, especially minorities who were excited to see a non-white actress gain such fame. Anthony B. Chan wrote about his parents seeing Wong in his book Perpetual Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905-1961): Like many Chinese in North America, the films they eagerly awaited, cherished, and from which they could escape the repercussions of the Great Depression and the consequences of racist acts were those that revealed people who actually looked like them. Anna May Wong was clearly one of those who looked like them. Watching her repartee with Shanghai Lily and Mrs. Hag-

garty in Shanghai Express was almost like watching one of their neighbors on the wide screen. Here was a yellow woman holding her own against two white women. It was truly an extraordinary sight that almost never happened in the icy reality of interracial relationships, in which no yellow person could think to act equally to a white person in the 1930s. That Wong as Hui Fei, a Chinese, could brazenly speak in such a witty and cool manner while exuding a controlled rationality in this mind game was even more astonishing to Chinese living in a North America that precluded and subordinated them with discriminatory legislation and overt hostility. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, but Chinese Americans (and other Asian Americans) still fight stereotypes and hostility today. There are few movie stars of Asian descent, and while there may be no room for the “Dragon Lady” in modern cinema, you rarely see an Asian-American woman in a leading role. Anna May Wong straddled the line between Asian and American, learning her roots but fighting to prove that she was as American as anyone else. For future generations, hopefully the fight won’t be so hard.

General Photographic Agency Getty Images

Biopic of Anna May Wong, First Chinese-American Star, in the Works

Constance Wu Photograph by Roy Beeson for Yahoo Style

Constance Wu’s Hollywood Destiny 20

Last summer, Wu transitioned to movie stardom, playing the lead in “Crazy Rich Asians,” an ecstatic fantasy of romance and opulence set in Singapore. The first allAsian Hollywood film in twenty-five years, it outgrossed every romantic comedy released in the past decade, and Wu was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress, making her the first Asian woman to be recognized in the category in forty-five years. When Wu was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, she became the face of a historic moment; the citation, by Lena Dunham, praised her for being “outspoken on the lack of Asian representation in Hollywood” and pointed out that, because of her ethnicity, “she is tasked with being more than just an actor.” In Hollywood terms, Wu, who is thirty-seven, came to stardom late, and at first she was refreshingly un-circumspect for a celebrity. When Casey Affleck was nominated for an Oscar in 2017, despite allegations of sexual harassment, she tweeted, “Men who sexually harass women 4 OSCAR! Bc good acting performance matters more than humanity, human integrity!” She added, “I’ve been counseled not to talk about this for career’s sake. F my career then, I’m a woman & human first.” But stardom is inevitably accompanied by scrutiny, and Twitter is nothing if not fickle. In May, in response to the news that “Fresh Off the Boat” had been picked up for a sixth season, Wu fired off a string of expletive-laden tweets grousing about what many actors would consider unequivocally good news: “So upset right now that I’m literally crying. Ugh, Fuck.” She was immediately pilloried on social media, and Jimmy Kimmel, on his late-night show on ABC, quipped, “Only on ABC is getting your show picked up the worst thing that can happen to you.” Wu took to Twitter again, explaining that the show’s reup, while wonderful (“I know that it’s a huge privilege that I even HAVE options—options that FOTB has afforded me”), would prevent her from pursuing “another project that I was really passionate about,” one that “would have challenged me as an artist.” In any minority group, the most prominent members are expected to somehow speak for the entire constituency. But, if the burden of being Constance Wu seemed to weigh heavily, it was also evidently not something that she felt she could renounce. The day of the “Simple Man” makeup session, we wandered the scruffy beachfront of Kaiaka Bay, picking our way through cow bush and sugarcane ferns to

the water’s edge. A fetid stench wafted on the breeze and flies buzzed at our ankles. On the beach were the rotting remains of a school of fish. “It’s actually a good metaphor for the movie,” Wu said, excitedly. “Of how colonization happens.” She went on for several minutes about the film’s exploration of ancestry, colonization, and death—“not just the death of the protagonist but also of a way of life,” she said. “Seeing these dead fish is kind of to see the voices of the ancestors.” All the same, she was encouraged by recent developments in representation both in front of and behind the camera, and by changes in supply and demand. On the supply side, she pointed out the ease of access to online video platforms and the power of social media as a publicity tool. “Think about just how many Asian-Americans have been on YouTube for many years,” she said, citing the Japanese-Hawaiian comedian Ryan Higa. “No one knew about Ryan, but he got this outsized, coveted YouTuber fan base.” As for demand, she had a statistic that she was fond of citing. “U.S. minorities represent $3.7 trillion in buying power, so it’s not marketing to a multicultural audience that isn’t sustainable,” she said. “The numbers don’t lie. We’re talking about the census and how in, like, 2040—in twenty years—we will be the majority.”

Photograph by JUCO

Jon M. Chu 24

So you’re building an ecosystem around these actors to make them stars, and in a way it’s almost bigger than the movie itself, because after this movie you’re creating a new lane for these actors, and Crazy Rich Asians was all Asians from all around the world. And in In the Heights, it’s mostly Latinx actors, young, some vets, but really putting them on the map so that their next movie that’s not with us, they’re a star in that movie. And that is the real power of when you make a movie with a studio that has that kind of representation, and you get to cast people who never got the chance to be in those roles because they’re always the side characters, always playing stereotypes. And [in] this one they really get to blossom, and that is the bigger lasting legacy of these movies. I believe In the Heights will have that, and that takes time. That takes a whole mechanism of a company spending tens of millions of dollars getting behind that.

Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding, center, and director Jon M. Chu on the set of “Crazy Rich Asians.” Photograph by Sanja Bucko

The Stakes Are High for ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ — And That’s the Point 26

The new film’s creators turned down a “gigantic payday” at Netflix to ensure the first Asian-American-focused studio movie in 25 years would be seen in theaters and, if all goes well, reshape the Hollywood landscape: “The biggest stage with the biggest stakes — that’s what we asked for.” Kevin Kwan’s heart was pounding. It was a Friday evening in October 2016, and the author of the breakout 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians was in his Manhattan home, on a conference call with the producers of the planned film adaptation — Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and John Penotti — and its director, Jon M. Chu, along with their respective legal teams, about 22 people in all. They had a massive decision to make. Behind one door: Warner Bros., which had outbid other traditional studios with a distribution offer for Crazy Rich Asians a week earlier. Behind the other: Netflix, the great disrupter, which had come in hot the following Monday, dangling complete artistic freedom, a greenlighted trilogy and huge, seven-figure-minimum paydays for each stakeholder, upfront. Now Warners had come back with not so much a counteroffer as an ultimatum, giving the filmmakers just 15 minutes to pick an option. Jacobson spoke up: “We’re going to go with whatever Kevin and Jon want to do.” Kwan’s lawyer, Peter Nichols, was pulled over on the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway texting his client furiously. Kwan and Chu had already tried to rationalize the cash grab: “Maybe we donate a percentage of our extra income to great causes,” Chu recalls the two having discussed the night before. “But where does that money go? Right back to trying to get to this position of getting us [Asians] on the big screen.” No wonder Kwan, 44, was nervous. “I could sense every lawyer on the call shaking their heads: ‘Ugh, these stupid idealists.’ Here, we have a chance for this gigantic payday instantaneously,” he says. “But Jon and I both felt this sense of purpose. We needed this to be an old-fashioned cinematic experience, not for fans to sit in front of a TV and just press a button.” Adds Chu: “We were gifted this position to make a decision no one else can make, which is turning down the big payday for rolling the dice [on the box office] — but being invited to the big party, which is people paying money to go see us.” And so the director and the novelist passed on the crazy rich offer — “I could have moved to an island and never

worked another day,” says Kwan — and said no to Netflix. After more than a dozen advisers hung up in disappointment, Kwan called Chu. Both were in tears as Kwan asked, “What just happened?” This is what happened: A major studio was throwing its weight behind an all-Westernized Asian cast and creator in a theatrical film release for the first time since 1993, when Disney made The Joy Luck Club, until now the only Hollywood studio movie to feature an entirely Asian-American ensemble. That multigenerational drama — a film its executive producer Janet Yang says isn’t “commercial” enough to be made today — earned $33 million ($57 million adjusted for inflation). Unlike 2000 foreign-language Oscar winner Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and 2005 novel adaptation Memoirs of a Geisha (both released by Sony), Crazy Rich Asians centers on contemporary characters. The Meet the Parents-type tale — a Chinese-American professor accompanies her boyfriend to Singapore, not realizing that he’s heir to a richer-than-God fortune — is a romantic comedy, another first in the tiny canon of Asian-American studio films, and a format that has struggled to find its way at the box office in recent years. So even with the runaway success of Kwan’s novel, which became an international best-seller (more than a million copies sold in more than 20 languages), Warner Bros. — whose chairman and CEO, Kevin Tsujihara, happens to be the first and only studio chief of Asian descent — is rolling the dice too. Early tracking has the film’s five-day opening weekend at around $20 million, a solid number that’s ahead of most recent rom-coms — and the industry is watching closely. “I don’t think any movie wants to have to carry the weight on its shoulders in terms of, ‘If this movie doesn’t work, is this a big stumbling block for this kind [of film]?’” says box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian, of comScore. “But I think studios are learning that the biggest risks can reap the biggest rewards. To have that biggest punch, you want that wide theatrical release where everyone is talking about it.”

Henry Golding and Sonoya Mizuno: “I was pulled from my own honeymoon to do the screen test,” says Golding. “I’m still making amends.” Photograph by Miles Aldridge

Gemma: “I’m reading How to American: An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O. Yang, who plays Bernard in the movie. It’s hilarious.” Photograph by Miles Aldridge

Henry: “Nick is, for lack of a better word, an Old Hollywood hero. He puts family and love first, before everything. He’s not defined by his wealth.” Photograph by Miles Aldridge

Why Crazy Rich Asians Could Be a Watershed Moment for Asian Representation in Hollywood 30

The novel Crazy Rich Asians feels hydroponically grown to be a major Hollywood blockbuster. Large sections of Kevin Kwan’s book are dedicated to dreamlike descriptions of luxury consumption, brand names catalogued in an unstable mixture of reverence and snark. It was born a textual matrix for set designers, couturiers, and cinematographers: gleaming interiors, supercars, earrings with six-figure price tags. The rest is a whirlwind of claws-bared, reality-TV melodrama, surrounding a sweetly ingenuous romance plot that touches the deep chords of all your evolved instincts. The catch is in the title: it is a book populated entirely by Asians. True, these are not the earnest, striving immigrants whose pedestrian virtues many pay lip service to while politely disdaining. (I’ll never forget the gently bemused charity with which people regarded me when I told them I was at work on a book about Asian-Americans. “What do you plan to say about that?” they’d ask.) These are the overseas Chinese merchant families who attained oligarchical wealth throughout Southeast Asia and in Singapore, where Crazy Rich Asians is set, speaking British English and living as royalty amid tropical splendor. Into this milieu walks a 29-year-old Asian-American ingénue, an econ professor at N.Y.U., who learns, following a first-class flight to Singapore, that her history-professor boyfriend is an heir to one of Asia’s largest fortunes. She will meet her prospective mother-in-law, whose steely hauteur and distaste toward her son’s would-be fiancée will not succumb to the blandishments of American-style happy endings. Eleanor Young is sure that Rachel Chu will not devote herself to the maintenance of the family’s dynastic power, rather than pursue her own individual happiness (teaching game theory to undergrads) in the manner of Americans. She is probably not wrong. Drama ensues. The last major Hollywood film to star a large ensemble cast of Asians, The Joy Luck Club (that heart-rending and mortifying memorial to the terror our immigrant mothers endured), released in 1993, aroused a fleeting hope that Asians would step into the sunlight of wider media visibility—one that was summarily dashed. In September of 2017, Michael Lewis, the author of the nonfiction best-seller Flash Boys (2014), whose film rights sold the year it was published, said that plans for the movie had stalled. “There were e-mails back and forth about how impossible it was to make a movie with an Asian lead. The problem was Brad Katsuyama,” Lewis explained, referring to the former stock

trader at the center of the story. “They don’t think there’s a well enough known Asian male actor. Which I think is crazy.” The confluence of events summoned forth a full-blown matinee idol. Henry Golding, half-English, half-Malaysian, but playing a Chinese Singaporean, emerges as a classic leading man in his first film role following a career as a television host. Golding is smoothly affable, devoid of any underlying turbulence. He lights up the screen, as if being a movie star was the most natural thing in the world for him, and as if we have always had—and always will have— Asian leading men. Will we? In May, it was reported that Netflix had acquired the rights to Flash Boys. Golding himself is slated to appear as Blake Lively’s husband in the September thriller A Simple Favor. Taiwanese immigrant mother in the ABC comedy Fresh off the Boat, the first prime-time network show featuring an Asian-American family in more than 20 years. Here she is an ingénue in a princess fantasy—a starring role in the central story our culture tells itself about love between a man and a woman. Would they be relatable, funny, sexy, smart, cool? Would they cause the decades-long sense of erasure and subtle denigration Asians have long associated with cinema (preferring to see no Asians at all to the too-often mortifying portrayals) to evanesce? The odds against any of these things happening was enormous. That all of them did can be described as an enormous stroke of fortune. After an advance screening in New York, many otherwise jaded and snarky social-media personages were not too defended to admit to the world: “I cried just seeing Asians on the screen.”

From left, Henry Golding as Nick Young: one of two star-crossed lovers; down-toearth heir to one of Singapore’s largest fortunes, Gemma Chan as fashionista Astrid Leong: buys $1.2 million earrings on a whim; money can’t solve her looming marital problem, Chris Pang as Colin Khoo: Nick Young’s best friend; reluctant star of the world’s wildest bachelor party, Sonoya Mizuno as Araminta Lee: Colin’s fiancée; loves outdoor food courts and all-gold outfits. rings, Maya Brenner Femme & shark tooth necklaces, Zoe Chicco circle necklace.

How Awkwafina Went From Rapping To “Ocean’s 8” And “Crazy Rich Asians” 32

Ramona Rosales for BuzzFeed News; Soji Solarin jacket & pants, I Am Gia jumpsuit, Evaluna boots, Aurate New York rings and earrings, Maya Brenner Femme & shark tooth necklaces, Zoe Chicco circle necklace. Awkwafina photographed on Dec. 13, 2017, in Los Angeles

“I smell a funk,” says Awkwafina, sniffing the air like a wine connoisseur, her brows furrowed. There’s a slight odor drifting about the banquet room of the cozy Taiwanese restaurant in Queens that the rapper turned actor has frequented since she was 13. “You don’t smell that?” On that brisk Saturday morning, the now-29-year-old Awkwafina, born Nora Lum, had looked right at home, plopped behind a table surrounded by customers dining and gabbing in Mandarin. But the manager, a family friend who only learned that she was one of Ocean’s 8 when she showed up at the restaurant with a studio publicist, then moved the actor to the lower level of the restaurant, away from all the other patrons. The culprit of the musty stench: a stack of bus tubs behind us. As steaming plates of pork over rice, oyster omelette, stinky tofu, sautéed spinach, and three-cup chicken appear at the table, she updates me on her life. It’d been nearly a week since the Oscars, which Awkwafina forgot to watch on television because she’d thought the awards show wasn’t for another week. Instead, she’d spent the evening playing Guitar Hero and watching Girls Incarcerated, a Netflix docuseries about teen inmates at a juvenile detention center. It was only after she’d gone on Twitter that it dawned on her: “FUCK! I missed them,” she recalled, stretching her face into a grimace. “I missed the Oscars!” Each time I met with her — the first two times in Los Angeles and once in New York — she’d insisted that there was nothing glamorous about her life, even after shooting two of this summer’s most anticipated movies: June’s Ocean’s 8 and August’s Crazy Rich Asians. “People have been saying, ‘Omigod, how has your life changed?’ since ‘My Vag’ got a thousand views, y’know?” she told me last winter, referring to the raunchy song and music video that launched her into fame across Asian America and YouTube in 2012. While it’s true that she can still appear in public without getting approached and that everyday people still treat her “like shit,” one thing has changed for the former struggling musician: She no longer has to worry about making ends meet. According to her Hollywood peers, the world will be seeing a lot more Awkwafina after her next two films drop.

“The star-making next level of her journey is just beginning and she hasn’t even realized it,” Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu told BuzzFeed News. “She doesn’t even realize the power that she has yet.” In Crazy Rich Asians, based on Kevin Kwan’s best-selling novel of the same name, Awkwafina plays the scene-stealing Goh Peik Lin, best friend to Constance Wu’s Rachel Chu, the unsuspecting Chinese American who travels to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s incredibly wealthy family. Peik Lin, whose dad made millions off real estate, helps prep and dress Rachel for the occasion. It’s one role in a large ensemble of Asian actors that Awkwafina never imagined she’d get the chance to be part of. “The star-making next level of her journey is just beginning and she hasn’t even realized it,” Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu told BuzzFeed News. “She doesn’t even realize the power that she has yet.” In Crazy Rich Asians, based on Kevin Kwan’s best-selling novel of the same name, Awkwafina plays the scene-stealing Goh Peik Lin, best friend to Constance Wu’s Rachel Chu, the unsuspecting Chinese American who travels to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s incredibly wealthy family. Peik Lin, whose dad made millions off real estate, helps prep and dress Rachel for the occasion. It’s one role in a large ensemble of Asian actors that Awkwafina never imagined she’d get the chance to be part of.

ISNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T IT WR TO LIE

RONG

‘The Farewell’ Deserves to Be Seen as an American Drama 36

With a formidable score of 99 on Rotten Tomatoes, Lulu Wang’s The Farewell remains one of the most well-received movies of 2019. Hailed as heartwarming and universal, the film follows a woman named Billi as she travels from the United States to China following her grandmother’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Still, as made clear this morning, the film isn’t in the running for the main best picture category of this year’s Golden Globes. Instead, Wang’s directorial debut is under consideration for Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language, a choice that undermines the diversity of the American audience. The Farewell will be up against Spain’s Pain & Glory, South Korea’s Parasite, and France’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Les Misérables, a categorization that comes down to the movie’s use of language. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which organizes the Golden Globes, regulates that films are considered in the foreign language category if they include “more than 50 percent non-English dialogue.” Beyond the quantifiable distinction of language usage, the quiet undercurrent is that these categories establish what’s seen as American and what isn’t. It’s implied that the “best drama” is more accessible to an American audience than the “best foreign film,” which is why, in October, Parasite director Bong Joon Ho called the Oscars actually “very local,” and it’s why, in early November, Nigeria’s Oscar entry Lionheart was disqualified from the international film category on the grounds of using too much English. When it comes to awards, language is treated as an indicator of a movie’s cultural leanings, and with The Farewell in the Golden Globes’ foreign language category, it’s clear that Hollywood still isn’t sure how to grapple with American multiculturalism. Given that Chinese is the third most spoken language in the United States, with 2.9 million speakers as of 2011, the idea that The Farewell is a foreign language movie more than it is a mainstream drama carries the implication that it’s not quite as American as, say, The Irishman. But unlike the other movies in its foreign language category, The Farewell is American, produced by American production companies and released first in the United States. Based on the real-life experiences of writer and director Lulu Wang, who moved from China to the United States at the age of six, The Farewell is pointedly Chinese American. It situates itself in and focuses on the in-between space of

It situates itself in and focuses on the in-between space of the “1.5 generation,” people who immigrated before their early teens and for whom there can be the unshakeable feeling of being not entirely American nor entirely enmeshed in cultures of origin either. At its heart, The Farewell highlights the tensions inherent in Billi’s Chinese American background. Billi, played by Awkwafina in a Golden Globe-nominated role, is culturally Chinese, but her life and self have been established primarily in the United States. She doesn’t quite relate to the norms and practices in China, and her American upbringing clashes with the values of her elder relatives, who follow the Chinese mindset that Billi’s sick grandmother need not be informed of her health condition in order to spare her from added suffering. She’s an immigrant, but also American, but also an outsider in a country that was once her homeland. The positioning between American culture and Chinese culture—and studios’ hardline distinction between the two—repeatedly posed issues for Wang as she tried to sell the film. American producers saw it as a subtitled Mandarin-language feature, while Chinese producers found Billi’s perspective “too westernized.” Initially, both sides wanted to change things to make the film better fit either a Chinese or an American audience. To those responses, Wang is adamant that The Farewell is American; instead of changing the film’s language or location to fit a dominant narrative of white, English-focused Americanness, however, Wang is pushing Hollywood and viewers to broaden their conception of what it means to be American. “To me, it’s a very American story because I’m American,” she told Vanity Fair in July. “...It is an AMERICAN film, challenging what it means to be American and who gets to claim Americanness. That’s why I’m writing to you now, asking you to go see the film in theaters, because we need American movies like this to keep getting made,” she wrote in an A24 blog post in August. “No, I will not change the ethnicity of the cast. No, I will not have them speak English. No, I will not have these characters talk or behave in any way that doesn’t feel authentic to the people I know.” Throughout their long history in the United States, Chinese immigrants have built the country as we know it, and

Chinese culture continues to be endlessly borrowed, enjoyed, and riffed on, and despite the long reach of 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese immigrants now make up the third-largest foreign-born group in the United States today. To imply that the Chinese American culture of The Farewell is any less American than the Italian American mobsters of The Irishman by virtue of its spoken language is a disservice to the breadth of cultures across the United States, the immigrants, and the people who make up the in-between. For the Golden Globes to consider The Farewell a foreign language film over a drama relies on an idea of a narrow and specific audience, one that feels increasingly stuck in a previous era. The United States is becoming more varied and multicultural, and it’s time for Hollywood to do the same.

Zhao Shuzhen and Awkwafina star in Lulu Wangâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s film.Illustration by Jun Cen

Jackie Chan: The Fists, the Fury, the Oscar 40

On Saturday, Jackie Chan, a legend in martial arts cinema, finally received an Oscar. Those movie buffs familiar only with Mr. Chan’s appearances in blockbusters like the “Rush Hour” trilogy and “Shanghai Noon” may not realize just how long a career the Hong Kong native has had as an actor, director and producer. Mr. Chan, 62, who began acting when he was very young, has wowed audiences the world over not only with the balletic, high-kicking “Drunken Master” techniques in his early kung fu movies, but also with the complex action sequences and comedic timing that gave his career a long arc.And he has broken many bones doing it, he said, since he has done his own stunts. According to IMDB, the online film website, he has appeared in 134 films as an actor. But if you count his directing, producing and writing, as well, his film credits may number well over 200, as he noted when accepting the Honorary Oscar. “After 56 years in the film industry, making more than 200 films — I break so many bones — finally, this is mine,” he said, shaking the golden statue. In his acceptance speech, a beaming Mr. Chan told a story about a time his father asked when he was going to win an Academy Award. “Dad, I only make comedy-action movies,” Mr. Chan recalled saying. He told how he had become obsessed with the award after seeing one at the home of Sylvester Stallone, and recounted his disbelief upon hearing that he had finally received it. Mr. Chan was among a roster of artists to receive the Honorary Academy Award, whose recipients were announced in September. It’s given to celebrate “extraordinary achievement” and “exceptional contributions” over the course of a filmmaker’s career, and it was roundly celebrated on social media. A comment from Lucius Hale, a 19-year-old from Kristiansand, Norway, was typical. “I’m really glad that Jackie Chan got an Oscar,” he said. “That man has been part of my life so long, and his movies are so goood.” Others celebrated Mr. Chan’s status as a trailblazing Asian actor in American films. It was difficult to find anyone on Twitter questioning whether Mr. Chan had earned the award.

Jackie Chan, receiving his honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards in Los Angeles on Saturday. Photograph by Monica Almeida and The New York Times

Amy Tan 42

I was very afraid. I was afraid that I would create something that would be an embarrassment or a misrepresentation of Chinese people, of Asian people. I was still a little nervous because film, to me, is different. I had written the book. Now it’s being adapted and I did feel I had a responsibility to the audience. I think this medium, this form of storytelling has a very different impact. It’s wider, it has different expectations, so I had hesitations. People continue to read The Joy Luck Club or watch the movie, and that’s fantastic. For so many years, I kept saying, “It’s over. It’s going to die. That’s the way it is.” I think it’s not going to happen and then it continues to happen. People continue to be moved by the stories. My main hope is that people will start giving Asian American actors more roles and there will be more Asian American executives, Asian American producers. I’ve talked to a number of Asian American producers and creative executives, so I know they’re out there now. That’s how it’s going to be different, how it’s going to change. That’s why you’ll have movies coming out that never would have been considered before. I’m confident there’s going to be more, because the gatekeepers finally include Asians. We need that.

Tan’s mother, Daisy Tan, translates a letter for her daughter in 1989. Courtesy of Amy Tan

Movie List 1937

1961

1. Daughter of Shanghai was unusual in that Asian American actors played the lead roles. In 2006, Daughter of Shanghai was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures to be added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

2. Flower Drug Song is a 1961 American musical film directed by Henry Koster, adapted from the 1958 Broadway musical Flower Drum Song, written by the composer Richard Rodgers and the lyricist/librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, in turn based on the 1957 novel of the same name by the Chinese American author Chin Yang Lee.

Flower Drum Song became the first major Hollywood feature film to have a majority Asian cast in a contemporary Asian-American story. It became the first major Hollywood feature film to have a majority Asian cast in a contemporary Asian-American story.

45 1982

1992

3. The Last Emperor is a 1987 epic biographical drama film, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The film stars John Lone as Puyi, with Joan Chen, Peter Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Toole, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maggie Han, Ric Young, Vivian Wu, and Chen Kaige. At the 60th Academy Awards, the film won all nine Oscars for which it was nominated.

1992

4. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is a 1992 psychological horror film directed by David Lynch and written by Lynch and Robert Engels. Joan Chen is a Chinese-American actress who played Josie Packard in Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces.

5. Strangers is a 1992 American erotic drama anthology television miniseries directed by Daniel Vigne, Joan Tewkesbury and Wayne Wang and starring Linda Fiorentino, Joan Chen and Timothy Hutton.

Movie List 1993

1995

6. The Joy Luck Club film reveals the hidden pasts of the older women and their daughters and how their lives are shaped by the clash of Chinese and American cultures as they strive to understand their family bonds and one another. It was the first film to feature a majority Asian cast telling a contemporary Asian-American story

Amy Tan and Academy Award winner Ronald Bass wrote the film adaptation. Wayne Wang, who made prior films about Chinese Americans, such as his first film Chan Is Missing, was the director.

7. The Hunted is a 1995 American martial-arts thriller film written and directed by J. F. Lawton in his mainstream directorial debut, and starring Christopher Lambert, John Lone, Joan Chen, Yoshio Harada and Yoko Shimada.

47 1997

1997

8. Tomorrow Never Dies is a 1997 spy film and the eighteenth in the James Bond series to be produced by Eon Productions, and the second to star Pierce Brosnan as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. Michelle Yeoh plays a role as Colonel Wai Lin, a skilled Chinese spy and Bondâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ally.

2004

9. Chinese Box is a 1997 movie directed by Wayne Wang and starring Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Michael Hui.

10. Saving Face is a 2004 American romantic comedy drama film directed by Alice Wu, her feature-length debut. The film focuses on Wilhelmina, a young Chinese-American surgeon; her unwed, pregnant mother; and her dancer girlfriend. It was the first Hollywood movie that centered on Chinese-Americans since The Joy Luck Club (1993).

Movie List 2016

2018

11. Paint It Black is a 2016 American film directed by Amber Tamblyn and co-written with Ed Dougherty based on Janet Fitchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 2006 novel of the same name. Nancy Kwan plays a role as Margaret.

12. Crazy Rich Asians is a 2018 American romantic comedy film directed by Jon M. Chu, from a screenplay by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim, based on the 2013 novel of the same title by Kevin Kwan. It follows a Chinese-American professor who travels to meet her boyfriendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family and is surprised to discover they are among the richest in Singapore.

Crazy Rich Asians film is the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. Despite praise for that, the film did receive some criticism for casting biracial actors over fully ethnically Chinese ones in certain roles.

49 2018

2019

13. Ocean’s 8 is a 2018 American heist comedy film directed by Gary Ross and written by Ross and Olivia Milch. Awkwafina plays a role as street hustler and pickpocket Constance.

2019

14. The Farewell film received acclaim from critics, with particular praise for Wang’s screenplay and the performances of Awkwafina and Zhao Shuzhen. The film was nominated for two awards including Best Foreign Language Film, with Awkwafina winning for Best Actress – Musical or Comedy.

15. Always Be My Maybe is a American romantic comedy film, written by Ali Wong, Randall Park and Michael Golamco and directed by Nahnatchka Khan. Always Be My Maybe was nominated at the 2019 People’s Choice Awards for “The Comedy Movie Star of 2019 - Ali Wong”.

There is work being done to celebrate Chinese Hollywood â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it is unseen, ugly, 50 messy, costly, yet beautiful; may we see it through to the end.