“Please, God, let me like this movie,” I said as I walked into a screening of a film I’d been awaiting more eagerly than any other in years. “Crazy Rich Asians,” directed by Jon M. Chu, is the first movie from a major Hollywood studio to feature an entirely Asian cast in a contemporary story since Hollywood Pictures released “The Joy Luck Club,” twenty-five years ago. That movie, based on the novel by Amy Tan, came out a year after I had arrived in the United States from China, as a child, and it became the reference point for anyone who learned of my growing literary ambitions. “Maybe one day you can write a book like ‘The Joy Luck Club,’ ” I was told by well-meaning adults, both Chinese and American, who often added that they hadn’t read the book but had enjoyed the movie immensely. Movies, more than the written word, were how you reached a mass audience, and in the history of American cinema there have been woefully few faces like mine on the big screen.
I forgot about my little entreaty to God about three minutes after the opening credits of “Crazy Rich Asians” and became engrossed in following the film’s riotous, surreal, impious world, which felt something like a cross between a roller-coaster ride and a safari. The movie’s aim (a largely successful one) is to take its viewers through narrative loops, arcs, and spirals rising to formidable heights in order to reveal a particular species of the überwealthy, roaming with spectacular abandon in its native habitat, far from the prying eyes of lesser mortals. That species may be rare, but over the past decade its numbers have grown robustly, its members flitting freely among the world’s most cosmopolitan cities—from Singapore to Shanghai to New York—and living with the irreverent glee that comes from the recognition that, in a global society increasingly covetous of material wealth, they are evolutionary winners.
Amid this astonishing opulence, the movie, based on a 2013 novel of the same name by the Singaporean-American author Kevin Kwan, is built along the lines of a conventional rom-com, with added hints of both “Cinderella” and “Pride and Prejudice.” At the center of the story is a wedding—in this case, a forty-million-dollar extravaganza in Singapore, at which the beloved scion of one of Singapore’s wealthiest families, Nick Young (Henry Golding), is to be his best friend’s best man. Like most upper-class Asians, Nick was educated in the West; unlike many of his class, he prefers to keep a low profile. Since grad school, he has lived frugally as a history professor at New York University. A little implausibly in the age of the Google, his wealth has been a secret to his girlfriend of a year, Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), a middle-class, American-born Chinese woman who teaches economics at N.Y.U., whom Nick invites to go with him to Singapore. She has never been to Asia, and the trip presents an opportunity for Nick to introduce her to his highly status-conscious, old-money family. But word of his pending arrival, plus one, throws not only his family but all of Singaporean society into a disoriented, self-interested tizzy. Trouble, intrigue, and hilarity ensue.
Kwan’s novel, which is loosely based on his own childhood in Singapore, had already printed a million copies when Warner Bros. acquired it for production. I read it a couple of years ago, when I wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the phenomenon of wealthy young Chinese living in Vancouver. (I followed a group that appeared in a reality-TV show called “Ultra Rich Asian Girls.”) Chu, the film’s director, was born in California, and his depiction of the Asian-American experience resonates the way that messages scribbled on bathroom stalls occasionally do, articulating uncomfortable truths that are generally too politically incorrect to discuss in the open. At the beginning of the novel, before Rachel starts dating Nick, her friend teasingly accuses her of being a “self-loathing Asian,” since she doesn’t go out with Asian men. “The real reason you treat Asian men the way you do is because they represent the type of man your family wishes you would bring home,” the friend says. “Either that, or growing up as a racial minority in America, you feel that the ultimate act of assimilation is to marry into the dominant race. Which is why you only ever date WASPs.”
In the novel, Rachel vigorously denies the accusation. But, as a fellow Chinese-American woman about Rachel’s age living in New York City, I wondered about the extent to which my own impulse to fit in, and that of other Asian-Americans I knew, was a function of what we saw in popular culture. When I was growing up, in the nineteen-nineties and the early aughts, the lack of Asian appearances on television and in the movies seemed like the surest sign, despite what liberal-minded friends and teachers told me, that Asians were too different to ever be representatively American.
To see Asians onscreen, you mostly had to turn to DVDs of dramas produced in Asia, and those tended toward a distinct cultural aesthetic that felt increasingly alien to me as years passed. In my teens and twenties, whenever I watched the few available movies about Asian-Americans—mostly indie productions—I felt refreshed but suddenly and awkwardly exposed, as you do when, after a shower in a hotel bathroom, you catch a glimpse of your bare body in a mirror that you had forgotten was there. Watching mainstream TV and movies, I rooted for the Asian actor if there was one, but at the moment, in spite of myself, I couldn’t help feeling aspirationally white. How could I not when the characters given the most complexity, screen time, and humanity were the Caucasian leads?
That’s why, for me, the true star of “Crazy Rich Asians” is its inversion of racial expectation. The movie opens on a rain-drenched Asian family, laden with suitcases, attempting to check into a posh London hotel only to be dismissed by a pasty-faced manager who suggests that the family try Chinatown for accommodations. By the end of the scene, it becomes apparent that the family—Nick’s family—are the hotel’s new owners. In another scene, at an unspeakably over-the-top bachelor party for Nick’s best friend, beauty queens from the Miss World competition (uniformly Caucasian, sporting bikinis and ceremonial sashes) are flown in. Their appearance is fleeting, as is that of all the white people in the movie—they are tokens in the way minorities have traditionally been in American movies. What’s more, “Crazy Rich Asians” has fun deliberately upending the trope of Asians as hardscrabble immigrants (which the “Joy Luck Club” protagonists were). In one scene, a Singaporean patriarch encourages his children to eat up all their dinner by saying, “Think of all the starving children in America!” Similarly, when Rachel arrives in Singapore’s famously luxe Changi airport, she whispers, “Changi has a butterfly garden. All J.F.K. has is salmonella and despair.” One gets the sense that the Western centers of cultural gravity—London, Los Angeles, and New York—have effectively finished their reign.
When I was a child, Asians, both those living in Asia and those tucked away in ethnic enclaves in the diaspora, turned to shows such as “Dynasty” and “Dallas” to spy on the inner world of American blue bloods. The reversal, in “Crazy Rich Asians,” in which the audience is made to feel like an interloper vying for a glimpse of Asia’s glittering class, is what makes the movie, as many critics have deemed it, a landmark. At the screening, I imagined what it would have been like to watch the film as a twelve-year-old or an eighteen-year-old, and wondered whether, in the novel, Rachel would have felt compelled to date only Wasps if she had had the opportunity to see movies like it.
In the days leading up to the film’s release, Chu told the Hollywood Reporter that “we can sugarcoat it all we want, but the moment you bring up an Asian-led movie, there’s one example to point to, and that’ll be us. To be on the biggest stage with the biggest stakes, that’s what we asked for.” For many Asian-Americans, both cinephiles and those, like me, who haven’t been inside a movie theatre in a couple years, the mere existence of “Crazy Rich Asians” has been cause for celebration. But some have also expressed anxiety. “Is this supposed to be our Black Panther moment for stereotype-shattering Asian-American representation in mainstream media?” a millennial from San Francisco asked on Medium. “What if no one watches it? Does it prove once and for all that Asian-Americans are not bankable stars?”
The question is not an idle one. Every stage of the process of attempting to make a “barrier-breaking movie” required a painstaking exploration of identity, of both Asian-Americans and of the ever-changing continent from which their parents or their grandparents emigrated. Chu, to insure that he was doing justice to the biggest stage with the biggest stakes, supplemented casting calls in New York and L.A. with a five-continent search and an online open call. “We just didn’t want to miss anybody,” he told the Times. “I wanted this to be the ‘Avengers’ of Asian actors.”
But a two-hour movie, no matter how action-packed, can’t be all things to all people, or even to all Asians. As soon as the trailer came out, some lamented the absence of South and Southeast Asians. One Twitter user noted, “All the representation talk on the red carpet, yet brown people used as servants, drivers.” Others decried the movie’s failure to depict the life of the vast majority of Singaporeans and Malays, who live workaday lives, and complained of its eagerness to caricature and exoticize Asians to entertain mainstream American audiences.
I had a concern of my own: What does it mean that “Crazy Rich Asians” must accommodate simultaneous, conflicting demands—to tell a coherent narrative, to represent Asians of all stripes, to showcase Asian culture without alienating the dominant culture, to sell something palatable to the average American—when other movies, starring white leads, are asked only to tell a single story convincingly? Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group that is united, more than anything else, by a historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter of a century. In this sense, we can’t help but become emblematic of another stereotype: the overbearing Asian parent, demanding the best of our creation, endowing it with our greatest hopes and, like any good tiger mom, our fiercest criticisms.
After all, if we don’t ace every test and hit every mark, how will we ever prove our worth? If we don’t achieve the impossible, how will we realize our crazy dream of being truly American?
