I’m half-Chinese. My pale complexion and oval eyes don’t give me away at first, but give me a Playstation controller and I’ll dominate it, make me laugh and my eyes will get all slanty while my cheeks bunch up like Buddha’s. It’s why I don’t play videogames or laugh very much. Sometimes, my Chinese friends and I get together and commiserate about how I’m the only one who gets to pass for white in public, when Fei is more driven and Jianguo has some really good ideas about solar power. Them’s the breaks, I tell them. Your mom should’ve been a race traitor too. And then I bounce off and do white people things, like eating at Chipotle and arguing about what white people things really are, man, and how that type of thinking is racist in itself. Ha ha. How little they/we/I (????) know!
Ergo you can probably tell I don’t “really” care about my racial issues, even if I did get a good college essay out of it (Chinese family = immigrant and happy, Jewish family = educated and sad!). But the one thing I will notice is every Asian man that’s on TV or on film, and how he’s portrayed. There aren’t a lot of them—the dude on Lost (who speaks perfect English and nevertheless had to adapt that stunted accent for like five fucking seasons) and the guy from Inception, who is also the dude from Batman Begins and The Last Samurai. The more popular portrayal in the last few years has been an effeminate Asian caricature that would’ve felt at home in a ’40s war comic about the Jap threat. The T-Mobile guy, the Six Flags guy, Ken Jeong in Community and The Hangover. Every Jackie Chan movie made after 1995, let’s be honest.
It’s slim pickings. I tell Matthew, “Racism obviously affects black people more. Only an asshole would argue against that. But at least you look cool. At least you have Odd Future and Denzel Washington and everyone on The Wire. We have two options: goofy sexless buffoons or ‘street’ Asians wearing baggy clothes and sneers. Extras in The Fast and The Furious, basically. Even Ken Watanabe can’t look cool in a movie. He spent half of Inception lying down, and got punked in Batman Begins by a guy with throat cancer.” I’m usually pretty wary of the idea that pop culture portrayals have any reflection on real life, but it seems like we’ve pigeonholed ourselves into the model minority ideal when it’s more likely that an Asian politician would become vice-president (not president, never) than an Asian actor would find himself in Julia Roberts’ uterus on the big screen. Not that Julia Roberts’ uterus is what we should aspire for—I’d take an acting Oscar or the Wolverine movie set in Japan or even a yellow Spike Lee. Some recognition that we can exist in non-stereotype form. But it doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon. Ask Tony Leung. He knows how much international acclaim is worth when it comes to being taken as a serious actor in the States.
This ad, though. This ad. I watched it and started laughing so hard because I couldn’t believe someone had pitched it or written it or even aired it. Then I put it on my Facebook and tagged all of my Asian friends with “THE CONSPIRACY IS REAL.” Brittany, who is not Asian and a theater major, said “This is what I’m going to change!” Wesley, who is Asian and doesn’t pay attention to pop culture, said “God dammit.” Fine, it would be easier to not care a little bit. But god dammit.
I can’t fault Dat Phan too much, this vaguely offensive yellowfacing aside. He knows how hard it is to get a break.
