Nowadays, there's more than one flavor on the pan-Asian menu. Since the nineties, there have been a buffet of lush art-house films and dizzying martial art flicks to choose from. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), a film that combined these two genres became an unqualified box-office hit as well as a critical success. Asian American films that play up the American, too, are coming into their own. At this year's Sundance Film Festival, Daughter from Denang, a documentary about an American-raised HAPA girl who left Vietnam as part of "Operation Babylift" at the end of the war, walked away with the highest prize for documentaries. With Jackie Chan, Margaret Cho, and Michelle Yeoh all out there projecting different Images, today's Asian American entertainment landscape is even a far cry from the eighties, when the most visible Asian American was Pat Morita's pidgin-speaking sensei from Karate Kid.
"If you compare the situation for Asian actors now and when they began working twenty years ago, then, yeah, it's better," Hwang says. He points to the relatively blind casting of secondary TV characters, where interns can be Asian without being foreign and speak without an oriental accent. What's more, these days there are actually "bankable" stars of Asian ancestry (that is, both Asian and Asian American). "It's interesting to me that, twenty years ago, if I went and pitched something with an Asian subject matter, producers would've assumed I couldn't cast it. Now I occasionally get a certain eagerness. 'We can put Chow-Yun Fat in this, Lucy Liu in this.' Given the way Hollywood works, that's what kind of pulls the cart," he says.
Hwang dates the surge of interest in Asian directors and actors to 1993, when a cluster of Asian and Asian American films found an audience among mainstream America. "When Joy Luck Club came out, it was the same year as Dragon, the Bruce Lee movie, and a few other Asian films. There was a respect that these films got in the industry, though they were not blockbusters," he says. Then five years later, Jackie Chan starred in Rush Hour, and suddenly everything changed. "The other movies made producers say, 'Okay,' but they weren't eager. Then Rush Hour racked up the grosses and the Hong Kong action style found its way into everything."
Now, there are Asian American heroes and Asia American anti-heroes. The talk of this yearıs Sundance Film Festival was the feature film Better Luck Tomorrow, a tale of valedictorians-gone-awry that spurred heated debate about when it is acceptable to portray "bad" ethnic characters. Yang, the director of the San Francisco film festival, likens Better Luck Tomorrow to Flower Drum Song. "Many characters are multi-faceted. They might not be upstanding citizens. They might not be people you necessarily want to be your friend or son. But now, people are ready for that." But Hwang does not think that the fight is finished. The most of the important roles for Asians--anything considered a star role--still involve stereotypical contexts, he points out. Asian appear when the story involves martial arts or an interracial love plot involving an Asian woman and white man. The only Asian American-themed TV show ever made, comedian Margaret Cho's All-American Girl, never made it past nineteen episodes.
Some of the hardest battles have only very recently been won. In the early 1990s, Hwang and other Asian American activists were involved in a highly public fight regarding Miss Saigon. They protested the casting of a white man, Jonathan Pryce, as the main Asian character in the Broadway production. Although Pryce eventually performed, Hwang says, "I think we lost the battle and won the war because we were so loud."
Another good thing about Miss Saigon, he adds, is that the show ended up creating Asian actors who had experience on Broadway. So when Hwang set about reviving Flower Drum Song, he found a large pool of talent stage actors. "Not the least of which is Lea Salonga," he adds. Salonga, who played the lead in Miss Saigon, plays the lead in Flower Drum Song.
But Hwang acknowledges that there was the controversy in Miss Saigon that never got an airing: the content. Though he notes he is reluctant to criticize a play that did create a large number of Asian roles, Hwang says he was disappointed by the show's reinforcement of old sexual stereotypes. "I'm best known for having written the play taking apart the Madama Butterfly myth and Miss Saigon comes along and reinvents it with no irony," he says. "It's hard for me to like Miss Saigon."
But audiences still have an appetite for these stereotypes. Miss Saigon only closed on Broadway in 2000 and continues to play in cities in Eastern Europe and England. To date, the official Web site says that the show has played in front of some 28 million people.
Stepping to the beat of a different drummer
'We can put Chow Yun-Fat in that'