For Asian-American actors, playing a hot mess is liberating

NEW YORK – Actress Ashley Park did not tell her mother much about the drugs, sex or other debauchery in Joy Ride, the over-the-top comedy in which she is co-starring.

So, perhaps it was understandable when, at the South by Southwest film festival in March, just before the film was set to premiere, Park’s mother approached Teresa Hsiao, one of the screenwriters, with a question: If swear words were removed, would the movie still have to be rated R21?

Park recalled in an interview: “Teresa was like, ‘Oh, I don’t even know how to explain it.’”

Moviegoers will be able to decide for themselves. Compared with films such as The Joy Luck Club (1993) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018), in which the most egregious transgressions involved earning poor grades or simply being middle class, the shenanigans of Joy Ride are eye-popping.

Arriving in the months after Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) made Oscar history with its Best Picture win, Joy Ride – which is showing in Singapore cinemas – is one of several film and television projects to present Asian-American characters who are both deeply flawed and fully fleshed out.

The people making and watching the work agree: It is about time.

In April, Netflix released Beef, a series about two rage-filled Asian Americans – played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun – surreptitiously seeking to destroy each other.

In June, the comedy Shortcomings played at the Tribeca Festival and introduced viewers to Ben, a self-hating, mopey, movie theatre manager played by Justin H. Min. And then, there is Joy Ride, in which Park and her friends go to China on a business trip that goes off the rails.

Taken together, these productions represent an important moment in the relatively short history of Asian-American lives on-screen.

For decades after The Joy Luck Club proved a landmark hit, the handful of movies with Asian-American casts mostly offered family-centric stories filled with generational hardship, sacrifice and culture clash.

But now, in part thanks to blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians, audiences are finally getting to see all dimensions of the Asian-American experience – even the weird, bad and raunchy parts.

“Being Asian American is a part of who I am, but it’s not all of who I am,” said Randall Park, who makes his directorial debut with comedy-drama Shortcomings.

“What I’m conscious of are these other things that make up my human experience – those imperfect things, those everyday things,” he added. “And I feel like to be able to share those stories, that’s what we’re aiming for.”

American comedienne Margaret Cho was among the first Asian-American women to go onstage and talk openly about race, sexuality and other topics that some had deemed taboo.

Ticking off a list of things she did not excel at – “I don’t have martial arts skills. I was not a professional skater. I was not a good student” – Cho said in an interview that she was “very much not fitting in with what was Asian American at the time”.

Still, even though she also was not, as she put it, “a Joy Luck Club girl”, the success of that film led to a big break both for her and for Asian Americans writ large – a starring role in a television sitcom centred on a Korean-American family.

All-American Girl debuted on ABC in 1994, though it lasted only 19 episodes.

Jeff Yang, a co-author with Phil Yu and Philip Wang on Rise: A Pop History Of Asian America From The Nineties To Now, said “we wanted to tell stories that were somehow meaningful to everybody, and the perception then was that the only way to do that was to water those stories down to make them as generic as possible”.

There would not be another Asian-American sitcom for 20 years, when Yang’s son, Hudson, starred with Park on Fresh Off The Boat (2015 to 2020).

The intervening years were a period of “narrative scarcity”, Yu said.

There were so few Asian-American stories emerging – save occasional indie breakouts such as Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) – that the “initial stabs” had to “be kind of like our best foot forward: putting on our best face, showing them what we can do”.

One could say that Asian Americans were still nervously dabbing their brows in 2018, when romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians debuted. It delivered the box-office triumph (US$238 million or S$320.5 million worldwide) that many had longed for, proving definitively that a movie with a nearly all-Asian cast could bring in huge audiences and big money.

In interviews with more than a dozen Asian-American actors, film-makers, executives and scholars, many cited the comedy as a milestone that made it easier for more such stories – including Everything Everywhere All at Once – to get the go-ahead.

As the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the United States, Asian Americans reiterate that they are not a monolith.

Still, they acknowledge that much of the mainstream conversation remains heavily focused on East Asian stories, even as South Asian film and television projects are becoming more prevalent and many marginalised groups remain hungry for exposure.

One promising development, say creators, is that the narratives being greenlit seem to increasingly showcase different slices of the Asian-American diaspora that have seldom been seen on-screen.

Mindy Kaling’s series Never Have I Ever (2020 to 2023) took viewers to California’s San Fernando Valley to spend time with a modern-day Indian American teenage girl. The film Yellow Rose (2019) centred on a small-town Texan Filipino American with country music aspirations.

Even Minari (2020), which chronicled the toils of a Korean immigrant family, offered a rare look at Asian-American life in rural Arkansas.

Now Beef, Shortcomings and Joy Ride have helped further emphasise the not-a-monolith refrain, in part with even greater specificity. If it feels like Asian-American stories are suddenly everywhere, all at once, it may be because they are.

“In the next few years, we’re going to see a lot more diversity in terms of what we mean by AAPI”, or Asian American and Pacific Islander, said Jeremiah Abraham, a co-producer of Yellow Rose who runs a marketing and communications agency specialising in Asian-American projects. “There is more talent out there than we are giving access and opportunities to.”

To the extent that Crazy Rich Asians made a resounding business case, Everything Everywhere All at Once showed that Asian-American stories could also win the highest form of critical acclaim.

Now, new projects are providing a kind of thematic “boldness and outspokenness” that comedienne-actress Sherry Cola finds refreshing.

“As a community, especially Asian women, we’re expected to be submissive and not rock the boat,” said Cola, who co-stars in Joy Ride and is also in Shortcomings.

“I make it a point to be the loudest person in the room because I don’t want anyone to think that I’m timid.”

Joy Ride opens with a scene showing Ashley Park’s character Audrey and Cola’s character Lolo meeting as young girls. A white boy tells them the playground is off-limits, using a racial slur. A young Lolo curses back and punches him in the face.

The rest of the film follows the now-adult friends on their travels and racy adventures.

For Park, who is also starring in Beef, the excitement about the new stories is not so much about retiring tired tropes about Asian Americans. “I’m not trying to break a stereotype,” she said. “I’m trying to show the truth of what my reality is.”

Cho has a similar goal in mind when she describes herself as a “bad Asian”. She said: “I’m allowing all of my humanity to be viewed. Better to be ‘bad’, because then, we are allowing people to see us in the totality of our being. We’re human. So, to be ‘bad’ is to be there.” NYTIMES

Joy Ride is showing in cinemas.