Almost White: Aestheticizing Asian Americans
Almost white. The history of Asian Americans in the Western perspective is a confusing one, full of contradictions and U-turns. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the mirror to the Western perspective, Hollywood, where despite a history riddled with yellowface and cultural appropriation, recent Asian-led movies have achieved massive critical and financial success. Both Crazy Rich Asians, a romantic comedy directed by Jon M. Chu, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, have broken multiple box office and awards season records with their recent releases in 2018 and 2022. Despite the success of Crazy Rich Asians and the unprecedented representation it’s all Asian cast provides, controversy remains. As its name suggests, Crazy Rich Asians tells a story centered around an aestheticized Asian identity detached from reality. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to say that the exposure generated by the movie will ultimately improve the place of Asian Americans in the Western perspective. It then follows that although aestheticization of Asian identity may have its drawbacks, it is a necessary evil for assimilation. While this may have been true at points in the history of Asian American assimilation, the recent financial and social success of Everything Everywhere All at Once proves that this evil is no longer necessary today. The movie tells a quality story with an almost all Asian cast but does so in a manner independent of this fact, providing a pertinent example of Asian Americans achieving success without aestheticization. Accordingly, aestheticization of Asian identity, seen in multiple layers of the Western perspective, is an unnecessary evil in today’s time that enables the marginalization of Asian Americans.
While both Everything Everywhere All at Once and Crazy Rich Asians emerged from the predominantly white historical background of Hollywood with majority Asian casts and Asian creative leads, Crazy Rich Asians centers its success around the aestheticization of Asian identity while Everything Everywhere All at Once finds success independent of this. Crazy Rich Asians centers itself around the flamboyant wealth of a group of Asians. When Rachel Chu, a Chinese American professor, travels to Singapore, the wealth of her boyfriend’s family is revealed as a surprise to both Rachel and the audience. The basic premise of the plot is the first sign that the creatives behind the movie operate out of a Western framework, as this revelation implicitly feeds into the stereotypes regarding Asian frugality. This is only reiterated with the appearance of various plot devices meant to emphasize the wealth of the Singaporean family, most of which operate out of Western cultural notions of monetary wealth. The bachelor party is on a yacht with poker, strippers, and rocket launchers. The bachelorette party, on a private island, shows Asian women gleefully indulging in an all-expenses paid shopping spree for American and Western designer brands. In this manner, Crazy Rich Asians ultimately makes the implicit claim that being accepted into the Western world necessitates the aesthetics of wealth — and Western wealth, at that.
Though the plot of Everything Everywhere All at Once does involve components of Asian identity and culture, it is not enveloped by them and finds success through a story about the multiverse, familial relationships, nihilism, absurdism, hot dog fingers, and supervillains. The movie tells the story of how Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese American, discovers the existence of a multiverse, which she must save from her estranged daughter (played by Stephanie Hsu) while simultaneously saving their relationship. As Hsu, an Asian American icon, said at a recent interview at the University of Southern California, the movie is an example of how cultural stories can be told without having Asian identity aestheticized as an emphasizing factor. Hsu says, “Everything Everywhere had a balance — it didn’t deny the truth of the culture or where the characters came from, but walking out of the movie you didn’t think that this was about race… it was about so much more.” Applying Hsu’s insight in the context of recent Asian-led movies, we see that whereas Crazy Rich Asians sought success through Asian identity aestheticization, Everything Everywhere All at Once found success while being Asian.
In order to prove the economic soundness of Asian-led films, the director of Crazy Rich Asians made the assumption that the movie must be commercially successful, resulting in the movie’s framework in which Asians must possess an aesthetic factor to be on par with Westerners. Proponents of Crazy Rich Asians argue that the aestheticization of Asian identity through wealth is a necessary evil as the Western world is not yet at the point where Asian identity can be appreciated, unadulterated, in pop culture. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the director himself takes this stance. Chu revealed that he took less money for a theatrical release over a Netflix release for not only big-screen representation, but also to show Hollywood that Asian-led films could be successful, as Netflix does not give public proof of film performance. This admirable risk shows that Chu and company believed that the entire Asian community’s body of work depended on their success, in this way framing the need for Western aestheticization of Asian identity as a necessary evil for future Asian American success. This aestheticization for economic purposes mirrors the aestheticization in the context of the film, which is accomplished through wealth. Accordingly, the aestheticization of Asian identity in the movie is derived from Chu’s belief that Asian-led films cannot be successful on their own.
In adopting the perspective that economic success is required for acceptance of Asian identity in modern America, Crazy Rich Asians’ creatives work from an outdated framework in which Asian Americans are inherently othered. As a result, the movie’s aestheticization of Asian identity enables the psychological phenomena of othering of Asian Americans with the veil of an unnecessary evil as justification. According to researcher, professor, and psychotherapist Poul Rohleder, othering is a modern twist of social identity theory and seeks to explain the implicit process by which individuals categorize people based on race, gender, and other features, into favored ingroups and alienated and hated out-groups. Working with this definition allows us to see how Chu’s framework posits that in Hollywood, capitalistic power must overpower the psychological power of othering for a movie to be accepted and find success. According to this, Chu’s aestheticization for economic purposes is justified as a necessary evil for both Asian American protection and future success. The recent critical and financial success of Everything Everywhere All at Once contradicts this. When a panel of expert critics at Vox discussed the movie’s success, they touched only briefly on Asian identity, focusing instead on word-of-mouth, the movie’s comedy, and its themes on depression, weirdness, and nihilism. A panelist even alluded to the movie’s differences with Crazy Rich Asians, saying “this film, and multiple others that have garnered acclaim in recent years… without relying on dated tropes or the qualifier of being “crazy rich” is pretty moving and feels significant.” Continuing to work under Rohleder’s definition, we see that Chu’s assumption is invalidated by the rapidly subsequent financial and critical success of the unaestheticized Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Western world is at a point where Asian Americans can be seen as the ‘ingroup’ and accordingly othering no longer needs to be a barrier to success. Asian identity aestheticization in Crazy Rich Asians is therefore an unnecessary evil in today’s world.
While aestheticization of Asian identity is an unnecessary evil on the macro scale of the Western perspective, the smaller scale of reality often differs, as it did for the middle-school me who believed it to be a necessary evil. The aestheticization of Asian identity translates from the screen to reality in how youth either embrace their cultural identity or are driven to aestheticize it to fit in. Going into freshman year of high school, my source of this aestheticization was the recently released Crazy Rich Asians, which due to the unprecedented all-Asian cast, quickly became my favorite movie. 15-year-old Catcher could not recognize the nuanced perspective implicitly being imprinted onto me. All I saw was a screen full of more people who looked like me than in my entire high school. In comparison to the middle school years of hiding my Filipino food and laughing along to painfully unoriginal joke after joke about how my skin was a different color or my intelligence was because of my race, Crazy Rich Asians’ aestheticization was like a breath of fresh air. As a result, while the othering did not stop in high school, my approach to it did, and my situation seemed to get better. Instead of laughing along when Johnny cracked the classic ol’ “yer only smart cause yer Asian!”, I shrugged and nodded proudly. Instead of hiding my eggrolls, I jokingly waved them in friends’ faces. I thought that I was working towards a better acceptance of my Asian identity with the help of this aestheticization. I thought I had found my pride. Yes, aestheticization is an unnecessary evil on a larger scale in that it creates a framework that enables othering. But for individuals dealing with the results of this othering, aestheticization ironically and paradoxically seems to be the only way to combat the results.
The drive for Asian American individuals to fit in by aestheticizing their identities, as younger me did, is encapsulated in the model minority label. However, in today’s context, the harm of this label outweighs its potential benefits. As in Crazy Rich Asians, the model minority label aestheticizes Asian identity, but instead of doing so through wealth, style, and popularity, it does so through American ideals. The label originated during the Cold War Era, meant to counter communist arguments and paint America as a land of opportunity for all; the success and hard work of certain Asian American immigrant populations was upheld as evidence for this. In this way, the label aestheticizes Asian identity by attempting to make it congruent with the American identity and Western perspective. During the COVID-19 pandemic, in the shadow of a presidential run, Andrew Yang wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, urging Asian Americans to combat the pandemic-related racism by showing our “American-ness in ways we never have before” and telling us to take after the Japanese Americans that enlisted during World War II. Yang, a former presidential candidate and accordingly a symbol of the newfound place of Asian Americans in the Western perspective, ironically takes the side of this outdated argument: that for assimilation to continue in the context of the anti-Asian hate due to COVID-19, American aestheticization of the Asian identity is necessary. One might argue for this as a necessary evil in prior decades, when Asian Americans were still finding their place in the country, as evidenced by the unmentioned context of Yang’s example — Japanese Americans being placed in internment camps. However, in current times, as is shown by the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once (and ironically, Andrew Yang), Asian Americans are so ingrained in the American culture and population that to call an individual ‘Asian American’ instead of American is a waste of breath, and accordingly to aestheticize the Asian identity to make it congruent to that of the American identity is an exercise in futility.
Since watching Crazy Rich Asians, I have gone through the COVID-19 pandemic, moved to an area with more than a handful of individuals who look like me, and watched Everything Everywhere All at Once. Most importantly, I have come to a full realization of my Asian identity and how aestheticization of it, in any form, dilutes it. While my Crazy Rich Asians-esque aestheticization in high school may certainly have helped combat othering, it held me back from truly being myself. It formed a layer between my experience and the reality of my identity just as the different forms of aestheticization seen in Crazy Rich Asians and the model minority myth form a layer between the Western perspective and the reality of Asian identity in America, a layer that drives the psychological phenomena of othering.
One might argue that this layer is analogous to that of an organism’s fat layer: it weighs us down and prevents the Western perspective from seeing the true nature of Asian identity but insulates us and protects us from the effects of a lack of assimilation. This ‘necessary evil’ argument may have held validity decades ago, but in recent times it has become clear that this evil is only necessary because of a self-perpetuating framework. The aestheticization of Asian identity is realized through Hollywood and culture, as seen in Crazy Rich Asians and the model minority stereotype. When internalized by a Western audience, it creates a societal belief that renders continued Asian aestheticization necessary for Asian acceptance in society. In the process, this self-perpetuating framework enables the othering of Asian Americans in the perspective of the masses. My belief in the necessity of this evil was due to this perspective that was implicitly imprinted onto me, and the othering that I explicitly experienced due to the perspectives imparted onto my peers. Having come to this newfound understanding, I see the risk that breaking this framework presents to Asian Americans. It leads to the converse ideology: when Asian Americans fail and are not completely congruent with the American identity or when Asian Americans are seen as a nuisance instead of wealthy and cool, othering is justified. The belief arises that Asian identity does not belong in America, and violence and hate to push Asians out ensues. The effects of this aesthetic framework are real and present, as we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Asian American hate. Today, the resolution of this framework does not revolve around when assimilation will occur. It revolves around when we will fight to remove this aesthetic so that Western masses will see that assimilation has already occurred, and that the Asian American label is synonymous with that of the label automatically granted to an individual with white skin: American.
References
Ford, R. S. and R. (2023, April 17). The stakes are high for ‘crazy rich asians’ — and that’s the point. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved April 21, 2023, from https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/crazy-rich-asians-how-asian-rom-happened-netflix-1130965/
Hsu, Stephanie. “Q&A.” Asian Pacific American Student Assembly, University of Southern California. Los Angeles, California, April 5, 2023.
Rohleder, P. (2014). Othering. Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 1306–1308. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_414
Wilkinson, A., Romano, A., Abad-Santos, A., & Zhou, L. (2023, February 4). Why we loved everything everywhere all at once — and why we hope it wins the Oscar. Vox. Retrieved April 21, 2023, from https://www.vox.com/culture/23584649/everything-everywhere-oscars-2023-michelle-yeoh-ke-huy-quan
Yang, A. (2021, March 11). Opinion | Andrew Yang: We Asian Americans are not the virus, but we can be part of the cure. The Washington Post. Retrieved April 21, 2023, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/andrew-yang-coronavirus-discrimination/
