Why Does Cinema Love Making Asians Become American?

For all of its small miracles—big laughs and bigger gasps, brilliant performances by Joan Chen and Izaac Wang, sharp dialogue that evokes almost too well the brash posturing of ’00s suburban adolescence—Sean Wang’s 2024 coming-of-age comedy-drama Dìdi left me with the feeling that I had seen this one before. The strong-willed child, the disapproving mother, the half-comic-half-tyrannical grandmother, the tense family dinners, the heated arguments conducted between English and Chinese. It gives one, I thought as I walked out of the theater, the unmistakable impression of being an Asian American Film.

In the last decade or so, and especially since the huge box office success of 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, films and television shows by Asian American directors and with majority-Asian American casts have debuted at what seems an ever-accelerating pace. Part of a general enthusiasm for “diverse” popular media, the mushrooming production of Asian American media by major entertainment companies has given us a dizzying list of titles, from prestige dramas like The Farewell to YA dramedies like Never Have I Ever, blockbusters like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to indie darlings like Everything Everywhere All At Once. If we take the marketing, box office figures, and effusive reviewers at their word, there has never been a better (or more entertaining) time to be Asian American.

Yet I wince a little to identify myself as such. I am a third-generation Japanese American, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area amidst perhaps the most vibrant and diverse Asian diasporic community in the U.S., but if I am an Asian American, I am a somewhat reluctant one. Films like Dìdi are regularly praised for being “good representation,” and though the upward turn in both quantity and quality of depictions of Asian Americans in media is undeniable, I can’t help but feel that this representation has failed to deliver on its lofty promises of empowering Asian Americans and fostering racial harmony. It is not precisely that I, personally, don’t feel “represented,” or that I think these representations are inaccurate or inauthentic. It is rather that I am disillusioned with the project of representation itself, at least as it has been articulated in the popular discourse of Asian American media.

Where more and better representation would seem to invite an expansion of Asian American creative and political possibility, the Asian America that has emerged onscreen feels like the opposite. It is not a broadening but a narrowing of Asian American experience, a congealing of infinite variation into a single narrative core which then appears as the “authentic” essence of Asian America. 

This Asian America, the backdrop and the product of what I call the Asian American Film, is an example of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the “hyperreal”: a sign that has come unmoored from its referent, a mere image which has acquired the gravity of the real. In its repetition and consistency, the hyperreal is something like the “cliche,” but the power of the hyperreal lies in its ability to appear not cliche. Cliches bother us because they remind us of the contrivance, the artificiality of the representation; the hyperreal makes us believe that we are not dealing with representations at all.

The logic of representation and authenticity insists that what marginalized minorities need is to see more people like us on the TV. But in doing so it assumes that there is a clear and self-evident object to be represented in the first place (“people like us”) and obfuscates the active, creative nature of representation itself. Representation never simply mirrors an already-existing reality. It pares and polishes experience in order to create a finite object which resembles a world. In naive calls for better representation, the idea seems to be that any representation, so long as it is produced by a member of the ingroup, expresses some kind of essential, unified, and politically potent “truth” about a group’s lived experience. But, as recent years of Asian American filmmaking have demonstrated, this line of thinking lends itself easily to the production of hyperrealities, which obscure, rather than reveal, real people’s lives.

What exactly does this hyperreal Asian America look like? You probably already have some idea, but let me sketch, briefly, the characteristics of the Asian American Film. In the first place, it takes little more than a glance at the posters for the above-named films to see that mainstream Asian American media is dominated by East Asian—primarily Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean American—stories, with the occasional Indian entry, while the Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, and countless other diasporic Asian American filmic imaginaries remain virtually nonexistent. The Asian American Film clings to a tenuous ethno-racial metonymy: the leap that we make when we refer to this mostly East Asian American body of film, or any individual film, as “Asian American.” 

Within this restricted ethnic scope there is, too, a certain curious homogeneity. From New York to LA, sci-fi to sentimental drama, there are some things you can almost always expect to see in the Asian American Film: nagging mothers, enforced extracurriculars, gaggles of judgmental aunties, cluttered homes hung with calligraphic scrolls, problematic non-Asian partners, parents convening to compare their children’s extracurricular accomplishments. These tropes appeal to an overdetermined idea of the Asian American life which we are supposed to recognize as our own, and end up producing the very world that they claim merely to represent. 

The calling card of the Asian American Film—what accounts for much of its chronic sense of déjà vu—is not a single scene or character type but a formal tendency: a narrative structure premised on the tension between Asian immigrant parent and their American child, a fundamental opposition which generates the narrative energy of the film and constitutes its emotional core. The parent is old-fashioned, conservative, and demanding, possessed of an “Oriental” backwardness and incapable of comprehending the child’s wild American ways. A relatively straightforward—and especially common—version of this narrative is the trope of the Asian immigrant parent who struggles to accept their gay American child. In Dìdi, it is teenage protagonist Chris’ passion for skateboarding videos and other early Internet-era amusements that signifies his endearingly free American spirit, while his mother Chungsing’s kitschy oil paintings indicate her old-fashioned, culturally conservative outlook; their clashes, less a matter of personal disagreement than mutual unintelligibility, form the film’s affective backbone.

The feeling of narrative satisfaction is achieved when the child has either overcome the parent’s authoritarian power, brought them around to a more progressive way of thinking, or a combination of both. It is through this narrative crucible that our hero(ine) emerges as a proper Asian American; “Asian” being only a modifier, though a significant one. For it is not only the immigrant parent that must be rejected or overcome in the Asian American Film, but Asia itself which hangs over this hyperreal Asian America like a threat, Asia which must be pushed aside, excised like a tumor or put to rest like an angry ghost. “You’re so Asian,” Chris hisses at his mother in a moment of exasperation. When he makes friends with a group of non-Asian, slightly older teenage skaters, he lies and tells them that he is only half. 

Plenty of white kids fight with their parents, too, but for onscreen Asian Americans, teenage rebellion is never only generational. It comes superimposed with a layer of cultural meaning, the (more or less) tacit assumption that what is at issue is not mere familial discord but an East-West culture clash. Even when the child comes to accept the well-meaning of their parents, there is always a figure just behind them (usually, as in Dìdi, a grandparent) in which the backwardness and despotism of Asia persists. Behind each of these figures, too, we could imagine an endless line of scowling parents, but the source of the discontent is always, ultimately, the dark, distant phantasm of Asia itself. It is no wonder then that the coming-of-age is such a popular genre in Asian American fiction: in addition to the child becoming an adult, the coming-of-age narrative stages the process of the Asian becoming an American.

It will probably be objected that the aforementioned films cannot have been performing the covert ideological work I have suggested, because they are reflections of reality and therefore innocent of such schemes—in fact, many of the works I have referenced are semi-autobiographical, a privileged form in Asian American storytelling at least since Maxine Hong Kingston’s landmark memoir The Woman Warrior. I am not suggesting, following Frank Chin’s notorious attacks on such writers as Kingston and Amy Tan, that these films are fraudulent, their directors race traitors and fake Asian Americans; unlike Chin, I have little faith in the existence of “real” Asian Americans. 

The Asian America I know, comprising experiences as vast and varied as can be expected from a population of over 20 million people, has hardly appeared onscreen in its fullness. This Asian America includes, of course, a great number of repressive immigrant parents and rebellious American children. But it also includes families like mine, who have been in the United States for over a century; mothers like mine, born in Long Island and speaking only English. It includes parents, immigrant or not, who don’t care if their child is gay or wants to go to art school; it includes parents who themselves are gay and went to art school. It includes Asian Americans who never knew their parents, who never start their own families, who give up on America and go back to Asia or someplace else altogether.

It is a cruel irony that this real heterogeneity disappears under the guise of representation and authenticity. It is not only excluded from but distorted to fit a predetermined image of what constitutes “authentic” Asian Americanness. My problem with the Asian American Film, which recounts again and again the same story of immigration and adjustment, is not so much its lack of verisimilitude as its myopia, its privileged status as the only Asian American story we seem to be able to tell. 

It is not only Asian America’s contemporary expanse that disappears under the uniform gloss of the Asian American Film, but its rich history. Almost twenty five years on from the release of his book The Deathly Embrace, Asian diaspora scholar Sheng-Mei Ma’s observation that “[the fact that] Asian America is more than 150 years old but rebels like a misguided fifteen-year-old attests to its stunted growth” still rings true. My great-great-grandparents came to this country more than a century ago to build the railroad that united these states, and since those first waves of mass immigration, Asian Americans have have been excluded, incarcerated, and segregated, have worked the land and built cities within cities, have organized and resisted, assimilated and transformed. And yet all of this heavy and wonderful history is virtually inconceivable in the eternal present of the Asian American Film, where history is something that happens elsewhere, in a vague Old World of war and deprivation. 

The narrowness of the Asian American Film corresponds to the disappointment of Asian America as a political project, a feeling captured well by Steven Duong’s short story “Dorchester.” A disillusioned Asian American writer is invited to read a poem at a protest against the killing of an elderly Asian woman. “They had painted their signs with slogans like Stop Asian Hate and Protect Our Elders,” Duong writes, “things we all believed in, because what else could we believe?” Though it does not refer explicitly to film, “Dorchester” dramatizes the awful gravity that the hyperreal Asian America exerts on those who cannot but call themselves Asian Americans. The narrator runs away from the reading with a sick feeling in his stomach, recalling the deceptions of his mother, who had lied about being a beleaguered refugee when in fact she arrived in America on a plane, “nine years after the fall of Saigon, nine years after [she] had supposedly boarded the fishing boat at dawn.” In Duong’s story the mythology of Asian America has the coercive power to compel certain types of narrative production and exclude others. The sprawl of our lives shrivels into an “authenticity” where Asians can only ever arrive in America in their huddled masses, seeking a better life for their ungrateful offspring.

I am aware, of course, of the irony of my referring to “Asian America” and “Asian Americans” throughout this essay despite my professed skepticism about the coherence and usefulness of these categories. Like the protagonist of “Dorchester,” I feel an obligation to these terms in spite of their limitations, or maybe just a kind of Stockholm Syndrome – what else can we believe?

Asian American Studies scholar Susan Koshy suggests that “‘Asian American’ offers us a rubric that we cannot not use.” But in using it we must acknowledge its perpetual partialness, its failure to bear the burden it takes upon itself. 

In pointing out the failure of the Asian American Film to represent the wholeness of Asian American experience, I am not suggesting that we redouble our attempts to represent, that there exists somewhere a more perfect authenticity if only we can find it. Imagine, for a moment, that we were to represent Asian America in its infinite variety: every ethnic group, every region, every family configuration, every possible relation of the Asian to the American and the immigrant to the native-born. What then would we have achieved but Jorge Luis Borges’ proverbial map the size of the empire itself, coterminous with the land it attempts to reproduce and thereby useless? 

Asian America is, in its totality, unrepresentable. Perhaps there is some comfort in imagining otherwise, in being handed a ready-made narrative and aesthetic package and being told: this is your world, this is your story. Undoubtedly there is comfort in the production and re-production of Asian America as the triumphant result of individualized struggle between Eastern repression and Western social freedoms. But there is greater courage and honesty in shedding the straightjacket of realism and sentimentality, breaking out of the home and into the streets, building something bigger and stranger and more ambitious. 

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed Dìdi. But I’m sick of the autobiographies, sick of the family dramas, sick of Asians becoming American. If there is to be an Asian American filmography — which seems inevitable and is not necessarily undesirable — I want one always new and never authentic, collective but not self-contained. I am not entirely pessimistic about the possibility of an Asian American cultural and political identity of the type imagined by the Asian American dreamers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but any such project must move past the shortsighted aim of producing authentic representations and towards a collective imaginary that embraces, rather than elides, multiplicity. One that does the difficult work of building shared goals through difference, not just within Asian America but between, across, and throughout Asia and America. 

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