Defying Stereotypes: A Growing Problem of On-Screen Representation
“Who are you?” Katy asks Shaun, or rather Shang-Chi, after he punches out a group of bad guys in the recently released Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Shaun and Katy are both Asian-Americans living in San Francisco. They are both smart, like karaoke, and are valets, not living up to their full potential despite being able to speak four languages or having graduated from U.C. Berkeley. For the first time in American mainstream entertainment, the niche “Asian-American experience” is attempting to be shown, contemplated, and discussed on screen.
This subject is mixed in with an array of other Asian entertainment and news that have recently exploded into American pop culture. To clarify what I mean by the “Asian-American experience,” I don’t mean the experience of being just Asian, having grown up in Asia, as shown in Parasite or Squid Game. I don’t mean The Farewell or Crazy Rich Asians, which both get around the topic by setting their Asian American protagonists in Asian countries for most of their respective stories. I don’t even mean the Oscar wins of Chloe Zhao, who has never made a feature about anything Asian-related at all (and it is in her full right that she chooses not to).
I don’t even fully mean Shang-Chi, except that several who worked on the movie have said they deliberately tried to resist as many racial stereotypes as they could, such as removing streaks of color for the character Xu Xialing, to avoid the “rebellious Asian girl” trope, or taking development steps to avoid stereotypes about Asian martial artists in the film. Hearing this should make me happy, make me feel empowered, make me hope that Asians in America can be seen as more dimensional. Instead, it makes me feel disappointed.
Philosopher G.W.F Hegel believed that you see yourself only when someone else sees you. Essentially, when you come face to face with another being, it is only then do you realize how you are perceived by others. Frantz Fanon expands on this in Black Skin, White Masks, describing the experience of realizing himself as a black man in white society, feeling like the people around him expected him to behave “like a black man,” with all the “legends, stories, histories” behind what it means to be a black person in a white society.
In the same way, Asian Americans have only known themselves as what it means to be an Asian in a predominantly white country. We’re quiet, weak, small, good at math, and make smelly food. Our men are effeminate, and our women hyperfeminine. To realize how you are seen by society makes you see yourself in the third person; it takes you out of your body; it is objectifying and humiliating. As individuals with different interests and personal dispositions, we condemn ourselves for helplessly reaffirming stereotypes or feel defected and isolated by inadvertently defying them. In moviemaking, to create characters that only defy stereotypes still means you are playing by the boundaries set by the people who have made the stereotypes. It adds nothing to a character nor truly anything of substance to the culture the character represents, even if intentions are good. As Fanon put it, “I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men,” or to put it even simpler, to be a human among other humans. And that is the solution.
Create characters that are human, that have depth and complexity, not because of what society sees them as, but because of their own nature and experiences. I think American movies today, especially, struggle with depicting characters in full, realized capacity, due to the current guilt-ridden cultural push for more representation in media. However, this pressure to portray more diverse characters on screen has been conflated with creating just one or two token characters per movie that are supposed to be able to represent a whole community, a whole race, a whole culture. No one character in a movie can ever be responsible for capturing the spirit of a whole community of people, and though this situation is often inevitable, there’s still more responsibility for the filmmakers to portray their character through the character’s own particular fictional history; otherwise, this character will just become symbolized; a personification rather than a person; an empty array of generic characteristics that satisfies no audience. Who cares whether stereotypes are followed or defied, so long as the characters are written for themselves’ and their story’s benefit? Even more so in the formulaic Hollywood movie-making process, where original and creative risks are rarely ever taken, this might be a hard task. However, through the individualization of diverse characters, complex perspectives of the characters’ cultures will show, be created, and understood on their own.
What does it mean to be white as an American? There is no one singular answer. There never has been, and we understand that there doesn’t need to be. On screen, they have been gangsters, priests, lovers, and murderers; they have been nerdy, loud, athletic, lazy, just to name a few traits. What does it mean to be Asian as an American? There is no one singular answer. In film, this needs to be explored through multifaceted characters created with care rather than the socially interpreted yet still elusive perceptions of Asians in America. I loved Shang-Chi, but I wish the movie’s filmmakers would have made their characters without being influenced by outsiders’ stereotypes of what it means to be Asian. Now, I don’t mean that a character’s culture should be disregarded or ignored at all. I just urge (or rather, beg) all those who want to create stories that represent the Asian American diaspora, or really, any misunderstood group or people, to treat their characters as complicated, imperfect individuals. These characters do not need to be defined by the very people who are not a part of their culture. Instead, the cultural representation will find itself while, at the same time, brighter, more creative stories will be told.
Cover Photo by IMDb. Edited by Katrina Kwok.
