Nov 26

Nov 26 S03E01 - Crazy Rich Problematic Faves (and why we still love them)

Transcript

Jay Ooi

Crazy Rich Asians. This 2018 blockbuster is, in the words of director Jon M Chu, “not a movie. It’s a movement.” Based on the 2013 novel by Kevin Kwan, it was almost a different film, with earlier producers asking to white wash the main character Rachel. Thankfully, she wasn’t, and after an Asian screenwriter was brought onboard to add more cultural elements and develop Michelle Yeo’s character Eleanor, we got the film we have today. But why was this film so important?

Fiona S. P.

Every single time you have the people of color being the fish out of water, this turned an American into the fish out of water in an Asian context.

Jay Ooi

What are some of the critiques?

Jane Park

I think if you say, “This is so diverse,” maybe one thing is to say, “Well diverse for whom?” Who is being represented?

Jay Ooi

And why does racial representation in the media matter?

Ben Nguyen

I think that if you belong to a minority culture, then you've become very used to projecting yourself onto others. But then the real question is, has the majority culture also done that?

Jay Ooi

Hello and welcome to Shoes Off, stories about Asian Australian culture.

If you’re anything like me, you remember the time when Crazy Rich Asians came out. Even just the trailer, with all the glitz, and the Henry Golding open shirt shot, there was so much excitement. Finally, I was seeing Asian people in a big Hollywood movie that was going to be showing at the local cinema. You could feel the energy in the air.

Jay Ooi

Do you remember when you first heard that this was happening, and what was your reaction when you did hear about it?

Wenlei Ma

It was a few months before release, and I remember thinking that it was really, really cool.

Wenlei Ma

By that time, Constance Wu was already quite well known because of Fresh Off the Boat, and we had watched Fresh Off the Boat from the beginning when it first started appearing.

Wenlei Ma

My name is Wenlei Ma and I am the TV and film critic at news.com.au, so I watch a lot of movies and TV for work. It's pretty much a dream job.

Wenlei Ma

So, it felt like it was just snowballing all of a sudden into this huge Hollywood blockbuster, and then it became this really anxious experience of, "Oh my God, what if this loses money," in the same way that a few months earlier it seemed like the hopes of every female superhero movie from now on hinged on Wonder Woman.

Wenlei Ma

It was a double-edged sword. It was a bit like, "Yes, this is great this is happening, but it's so unfair that everything hinges on this."

Jay Ooi

So if you were like me, you were feeling the excitement, but if you were in the industry like Wenlei, there was also a sense of nervousness. Why was so much hanging on this film’s success?

Wenlei Ma

Unfortunately, it is commerce. Entertainment is an industry like anything else, and everything is about money. People don't really do things because it's the right thing to do, they do it because there's profit in it for them, or at the very least to break even and then they can be seen to be doing a good thing. So, if it loses millions and millions of dollars, like we saw with Elektra and in Catwoman, it grinds to a halt. Nothing gets made after that.

Jay Ooi

Yeah. It's really interesting you mention Elektra and Catwoman, because I remember watching these films. They were terrible films.

Wenlei Ma

Terrible movies. Terrible movies.

Jay Ooi

But then I guess studio heads, they just see, "Oh, female lead movie did not do well." They don't really take into account that the films were actually just shockingly bad.

Wenlei Ma

Absolutely, because I think it's harder to quantify that the script was terrible, and because that creative endeavor is subjective, whereas bums on seats is objective.

Wenlei Ma

But it does mean if a studio puts up $40 million and it ends up only making $8 million, for example, the next studio boss who has to green light the next project goes, "Well, Warner Brothers took a $32 million bath on that plus promotional costs. Why would I make that same mistake and annoy all these shareholders and then lose my job?"

Jay Ooi

Luckily, the film was a major success, making $239 million at the box office on a budget of $30 million. And a big part of that was us - we really supported this film, because it starred people that looked like us. I can’t say a rom com is the sort of film I would usually go see, but knowing the importance of it, it almost felt like a duty to me to go see this film. And others did too - there was a whole #GoldOpen movement to try and ensure the film had a good opening weekend. Businesses, celebrities and some everyday folk bought out entire screenings for the film’s release - that’s how much was at stake, and that’s how important it was to so many Asians that it was a success. And we’ve seen the trend continue, with Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M Chu buying out a theatre for the opening of The Farewell, and himself and star Henry Golding doing the same again for the opening of John Cho’s film Searching. Plus, they engaged with a lot of Asian Americans so now, all of a sudden so many people feel ownership over the film.

So, why was the film so successful? Well apart from the dutiful support of many of us Asians, there are a few other things happening here.

Wenlei Ma

something like Fresh Off the Boat helped because it had been on air for a few years. It was pretty popular on a very, I guess, white bread American TV network. It's ABC, so it's our version of Channel 7 or Channel 9. That was on air for many years. It was beaming into American households 22 times a year, and it's that kind of really feel-good, family, nonthreatening pop culture that lays the groundwork a bit.

Wenlei Ma

But I also think it helped a lot that Kevin Kwan's book, Crazy Rich Asians, was hugely popular. This is a source material that has already made money, so that helps, so they know there's a built-in fan base, and that tends to be the case with a lot of Hollywood movies anyway, is whether or not it comes with either fans from the comic books, from books, maybe it's a spinoff, a remake, or if it's Tom Cruise fans. So, there needs to be a factor of, yeah, this particular segment is going to turn out.

Jane Park

And the thing is it doesn't cater to the White gaze at all.

Jay Ooi

That’s Dr Jane Park from the university of Sydney, who teaches about race and gender through the lens of pop culture.

Jane Park

Like the implicit audience for that movie, I think that's what was so empowering and fun and awesome for a lot of Asian-Americans and Asian-Australians and Asian-Canadians, is that you could see really beautiful rich cool Asian diasporics and “westernized Asians”. But it was a story that didn't have any White people in it. I mean, maybe there was one. Oh yeah, in the very beginning there's the White racist guy in the hotel, but then he's just kicked out in the-

Jay Ooi

Yeah, yeah. That's right, yeah.

Jane Park

Right. And they're like, “No White people.” It's like so refreshing. Right? It's in English and it's also a fish out of water story. You've got Constance Wu going in there as a naive Asian-American Cinderella, and then she has to go through the whole Singaporean rich thing. It shifts the gaze from the ethnographic White Hollywood gaze of, “Oh my goodness. How are these Asian immigrants doing?” Like that sort of thing, right? Or like, “These poor Asians, another war or whatever.” Or even like, “Oh here's the interracial romance.” To like, “No White people. It's just us having fun.”

Jane Park

I think that was really refreshing for a lot of people. I also think that maybe one of the reasons, along with the fact that the romcom is such a tried and true trope. It had good production values. It was funny. Awkwafina's in it and you have Constance Wu coming in from Fresh Off The Boat. I think that in that way it was good box office. I think it showed that diversity can make money, which is important because we live in this horrible capitalist society.

Jay Ooi

Yes the film had a mix of humour, sentiment and lavish production values all tied up in a love story that already had a big following from the book it’s adapted from by Kevin Kwan. And like Dr Park mentioned, it wasn’t made for the white gaze - it was really made for us diasporic Asians, with pretty much no white people in it. And I genuinely felt this, like the film was made for me.

Jane Park

I have to tell you, I watched it with like, I think three of my very good Asian female friends. A lot of this is about … Watching media is also about who you're watching it with. I was like, "Yay." It was so great and then we had like, I think we had dumplings afterwards or something. But anyway like culturally, I can't identify, although I have. I love Singapore and I love Malaysia. I've been to both countries many times and I have lots of Singaporean and Malaysian friends. I didn't grow up there. It's not like I didn't have the same effect or whatever that you probably had. But just seeing people who are phenotypically Asian who have certain, I mean I don't want to … This is so hard because you don't want to generalize.

Jane Park

But there were certain things that I could relate to as a Korean-American person and as somebody who actually has some crazy rich friends. I'm not crazy rich, but you know. Yeah, I think it's a big question. I think it depends on who you're talking to. But do you think that there's something to be said for the aesthetics, the visual. It's like in real life as well, to see it on screen and to, in real life. You know that as an Asian person, you feel differently when you're in a space that has mostly Asians or people of color than in a mostly White space where you're the only Asian person. It's a very different feeling. I mean there is a parallel.

Jane Park

You watch a Hollywood movie and it's Sandra Oh as the one non-White person who is like the crazy girlfriend to some White guy or the best friend to some White woman. That happens in real life too. It's the different spaces that we occupy and I think it's really empowering just to see a space that's just full of normal, sometimes super flawed Asian people because we don't get that speaking English.

Jay Ooi

Yes the film was jarringly refreshing seeing only Asian people not being stereotyped or not being relegated to the weird side character. So many moments and scenes, like folding dumplings as a family and eating all the amazing street food play into our sense of belonging and identity. I didn’t think seeing parts of your culture and upbringing being displayed in a Hollywood film could have such a big effect on me, but it did. And there was one other scene that meant something more to many Asians.

Wenlei Ma

I think the Mahjong scene as well in particular really struck me. I don't know how to play Mahjong, I've never learnt how to play Mahjong, but the sound of those tiles, I think anyone growing up in any sort of Asian, Southeast, North Asian cultures would kind of be familiar with the sound of the Mahjong tiles, and I think I did hear a ripple of people sort of going, "Ah." There's just that pang of familiarity. It's like nostalgia, but different.

Fiona S. P.

But one thing I did like, which is something that almost no one has mentioned, is that it actually demonstrated the difference between culture and race, because you had someone who went to a country where people looked like her and discovered how American she is on the inside. I liked that.

Jay Ooi

That’s Fiona Swee-Lin Price, a Cultural Diversity Specialist.

Fiona

The other thing is, I loved the inversion of the immigrant family of color goes to the US, and comically recounts their brave struggles to settle into American society. Every single time you have the people of color being the fish out of water, this turned an American into the fish out of water in an Asian context. But an American who looked Asian.

Fiona S. P.

And I think one thing that there's has been very little discussion of is the fact that it actually challenges the notion that race is more definitive than culture. It actually flags that Asians who have grown up in Asia are actually quite different in mindset from Asians who've grown up in the US. And that's a message which I actually like, and I think was worth more discussion that it got

Jay Ooi

Because our main character is Asian American, the film really brings to light how people of the same race can be culturally quite different, which is not always a common understanding in Australia. And this meant a lot to Fiona especially because she’s mixed race and doesn’t appear Asian to a lot of people.

Fiona S. P.

And I identified very strongly with Crazy Rich Asians because that's the culture of my mother, and my mother's friends and my mother's relatives. I have relatives who behave like that. And yet I'm excluded on the basis of what I look like, which is basically a bit of a genetic lottery. And I think to myself, "I want to reserve the right to wear a cheongsam, to identify with a movie that's about Asians, whether or not people think I look Asian. By blood and by cultural upbringing, I am quite Asian.

Jay Ooi

Now this is still a Hollywood film after all, so it is mainly made for a Western audience, and that does mean that the “western” way of viewing the world wins out in the end, and the Chinese Singaporean world is seens as traditional and a little behind the times. And that’s not the only critique of the film.

Jane Park

One of the critiques is, there's several, but one is that you don't really see the diversity of Singaporean society at all. For all the stuff about how this is so diverse, it's not. You just see the upper echelon and also there's one scene if you've seen the movie where there's a Sikh guard and the way that he's portrayed is so similar to the ways that African-American characters are portrayed in Hollywood.

Jay Ooi

Right, right.

Jane Park

Right? Just totally dehumanized, doesn't talk, is just a menacing character. Singapore is a very diverse multicultural country and yet we never see anything but Han Chinese. There's that critique.

Wenlei Ma

A lot of Singaporean critics actually felt like the movie did the city a disservice, because it was so focused on this particular group of people with the Chinese descent, that it didn't really look at the very strong Peranakan cultures or Malaysian cultures or the South Asian cultures.

Jay Ooi

So yes, the film doesn’t represent all of Asia, obviously, in fact it doesn’t represent all of Singapore, or even all of the Han Chinese.

Wenlei Ma

I mean, it is a really specific story. It's not just cultural representation, it is also economic representation. It's completely ridiculous the lives these people lead, and it is not representative of billions of people around the world.

Jay Ooi

So we might think it’s diverse, but is it?

Jane Park

I think if you say, “This is so diverse,” maybe one thing is to say, “Well diverse for whom?” Who is being represented? The people who felt they were being represented were Asian-Americans, who we have to remember are a very privileged group of people.

Jay Ooi

So by our western standards of diversity, yeah we would consider it diverse. But it definitely wouldn’t be by other standards. And we saw this reflected in its box office performance in China and South Korea, where the film essentially flopped, not even making the top 5 on its opening weekend. So we applauded its diversity, but to a lot of Asians living in Asia, it was a really shallow representation of Asians.

Jane Park

I think often Americans of all ethnicities, forget how you US-centric we can be. It was interesting as an Asian-American whose been living in Australia, I was like, “Oh yeah, I can see both of these sides now.” Which is cool.

Jane Park

Also, another critique was that, and this comes up often, any time you have a lot of non-White people is the fact that all the main characters in that family, they're all mixed race. They're all Eurasian, so a kind of whitening that gets related to sort of class.

Fiona S. P.

I mean, the woman who was the bride was very plainly Japanese. I thought to myself, "All right, some Japanese and Chinese people look fairly same, but this woman looks very Japanese. There's no way that she looks Chinese. That's a very Japanese look.

Fiona S. P.

But that's okay, because she's from the right box. So they had a half Iban, half white guy playing a Singaporean Chinese.

Fiona S. P.

And I thought this idea that it's okay for the Japanese and the Chinese to go in the same racial box because they're all Asian, I find that a bit insulting, honestly. I really find that actually the white gaze simplifying the social landscape to make it easier for themselves in a way which is quite dismissive and reductionist.

Jay Ooi

Yes there was some controversy over casting, including Ken Jeong’s American accent because his character studied in America for a bit, which doesn’t quite make sense to me, and Awkwafina?

Wenlei Ma

Absolutely, Awkwafina's accent does not make sense. It's a Queens accent because that's where Nora Lum, I think that there's her real name, grew up.

Jay Ooi

So you had all of these Asians and mixed race people from all these different countries, and a lot of them western countries, playing these Han Chinese Singaporean characters, and yeah, it’s not casting that on the surface makes the most sense. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t enough to hold us back from enjoying the ride, like I was so there the whole time and ate it all up.

Wenlei Ma

It's like a gateway drug, right? If you can get into this and then maybe in a years time, if you like that, you can watch Alan Yang's movie, Tigertail, which is very specific to that part of Taiwan that his father is from, and maybe then you'll watch something else that really... maybe follow Adam Liaw's journey around the many TV shows that he's done around specific parts of Asia, about the places outside of Beijing where his mother lives. It's a springboard. It can't be everything to everyone, and it certainly shouldn't be, because the great hope is that it's not the only thing that we're ever going to get. I think if it's the only thing that our cultures, our communities are ever going to get, then, yeah, then it becomes a bit like, "Well, they didn't get that right, they didn't get that right. That's a bit weird."

Jay Ooi

Yeah, gotcha. It functions more as something more palatable for a more white audience to then be like, "Oh, there's this whole other side I don't know about. Let me go explore some other form of media."

Wenlei Ma

Yeah. It doesn't even have to be this conscious thing that they then go out to find. Not expecting all these Caucasian audiences who saw it to then dig up Joy Luck Club to learn about the history of China, or read some really boring books. It's just next time a movie comes along, there isn't this automatic bias that kicks in and goes, "Oh, I don't want to see that. That's about Asians. That's got nothing to do with me." They might subconsciously go, "Actually, I had a really fun time at that other one with all the fancy cars and the glittering costumes and the really fun story, so, yeah, maybe this next movie is for me as well."

Jay Ooi

Yes, Crazy Rich Asians is a gateway into seeing and relating to non-white people on our screens. And this film, being the first film starring an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club 25 years prior, was such an important moment for us Asians, because we never really see ourselves reflected on screens like this. So why is racial representation important?

Ben Nguyen

I think that representation is important because I guess it's broadly you can't be what you can't see.

Jay Ooi

That’s Ben Nguyen, Vietnamese Australian Channel Manager at SBS TV.

Ben Nguyen

I think that if you belong to a minority culture, then you've become very used to projecting yourself onto others. But then the real question is, has the majority culture also done that? I think that we like to at SBS make shows about walking in other people's shoes. And I think when we consume content, we do walk in someone else's shoes, and so that identification with the characters on the screen are a really important way of how we position ourselves within the world.

Jay Ooi

Ben grew up watching a lot of TV and dreamt of being a film director, until he actually worked in some bigger TV productions.

Ben Nguyen

I was crushed when I didn't make it into film school as a postgrad. So then I went off backpacking in Canada, and I fell into a bit of production work there. So I worked on shows like The L Word, and Smallville, and a couple of others, and decided that production work wasn't for me, I was a bit disillusioned that none of has read the script and we had no creative input. We were just kind of stopping people walking into a shot and things like that.

Ben Nguyen

I think I had a real sense of the romance of being on a set, and that bubble was burst. But there's definitely something exciting about not really knowing what the day is going to hold. And that was certainly true of my time in production, and I think that ... I can imagine that a lot of people just really enjoy that feeling, that I guess ... I think I even remember people talking about they'd much rather be doing that than sitting behind a desk and looking at the same view every day. I just felt the opposite.

Jay Ooi

Having worked in TV production myself, I can definitely say it is not a glamorous job. But okay, so when we think about representation in the media, where are we at in Australia? A Screen Australia report showed that only 7% of TV drama characters are of non-European descent despite people of Chinese and Indian ancestry alone making up over 8% of our population. The figures get weirder, with non-Europeans almost never being portrayed in sporting or military roles but more often being cast in legal or professional based roles, or manual, retail and small business roles.

Ben Nguyen

I think it's a mixed bag I think, representation. I feel very conscious as an Asian man about how often do I see myself reflected on Australian TV. I think that it's sort of it really is quite astonishing looking at the current season of Masterchef that's going out on 10, and seeing the amount of Eastern, Southeast Asian representation in that series. And I think that reality TV has been really influential in terms of having more diversity on screen.

Wenlei Ma

We're a small market. We're only a country of 25 million people. We only have three commercial networks, one pay TV network. So, I think money's, again, the big thing. The way that the TV programming has been moving the last 10, 15 years anyway, has been away from scripted. So, they're investing heavily, and by investing heavily, I mean cheaply, in reality TV the programming.

Jay Ooi

Yepp, Wenlei has also seen this shift in reality programming, which by the hour of content that makes it to air, is much cheaper to produce than drama. And she’s also noticed the racial representation in Masterchef for 2020.

Wenlei Ma

I mean, I think Masterchef this year is absolutely amazing. You've got something like eight or nine Asian contestants, plus Melissa Leong as the host.

Wenlei Ma

It's such a great thing, but it is that thing where Australian commercial television has never really been super comfortable having people of Asian descent on their screens in things other than really cooking shows, because when it comes to Asian cultures, Australians are very comfortable with our food. I mean, they've grown up with it for decades, whether or not it's an authentic experience or whether or not it's honey lemon chicken.

Wenlei Ma

But food is this big deal in Asian cultures, but it's also a really non-threatening, low risk way to experience another culture. So, I think for Australians, food is something that they can absolutely associate easily with people from Asian heritages.

Jay Ooi

Now I don’t want to do a disservice to Masterchef. It has done a lot to further representation on screen. There have been so many moments in the show that have felt almost triumphant as an Asian in Australia, telling the stories of immigrant families and showing the cultures of Asian Australians, so don’t get me wrong; this is a good thing. But Masterchef is the exception and not the norm. The reason it’s been celebrated so much for its representation is because this doesn’t happen in the rest of Aussie TV.

So when people point to Masterchef and go, “look! We have so much representation on our screens - look at all the people on Masterchef!” it’s kind of missing the bigger picture. And I think as Wenlei stated, food is one area where Aussies are super comfortable seeing Asian people represented, because we’re so used to eating Asian food. But Asians in the lead of a drama, or a comedy on one of the commercial channels, heck even an asian male as a romantic lead? That’s where we’re not represented.

Wenley Ma

It would be really great to see Asian faces on Australian screens that aren't just on ABC and SBS, because they're not so bound by commercial pressures either. The commercial networks, I think Channel 10 is better at this than Seven and Nine, but seems like 7 and 9, there probably are some risk averse, maybe conservative forces within their programming divisions that still don't seem willing to take that risk.

Wenlei Ma

Poh Ling Yeow and Adam Liaw, they do their shows on the public broadcasters, whereas people like Justine, she got a show on channel 10. I'm not saying there's anything malicious behind it, but I do wonder if even in those circumstances, programmers and people who commission content fall back into old established, comfortable patterns.

Jay Ooi

These old, established, comfortable patterns. What are they? And who is making these decisions?

Wenlei Ma

There is this accepted idea, which I don't think is necessarily true, around the fact that we only seem to relate to people who look like ourselves or who we think are just like us. That means men promote other men to corporate positions in banks, in law, in anything. It means that programmers who are predominantly male, Caucasian, and straight, also commission stuff and commission content that looks just like them. Of course, it's not a 100% the case. It's not a full whitewash behind the scenes. You've got people like Tony Ayers, who is very influential and who's very well regarded as a producer. He made Home Song Stories a few years ago, a film, and he's kind of involved in it.

Ben Nguyen

I think that in terms of Australian lagging behind the U.S., I think that that's the real missing link at the moment is I don't feel like ... There's notable exceptions as there are people like Tony Ayres has been very influential at Matchbox Pictures. And you have people like Benjamin Law who created The Family Law for SBS. And Ronny Chieng who did International Student for ABC. But I don’t think that amongst producers in Australia, there is the diversity that we’d lie there to be.

Wenlei Ma

I think there's a lot of people behind the scenes who are trying to push diversity a bit more, but it's just a matter of who controls the money and who makes what decisions at what time, and whether it is conscious or subconscious. It's certainly true for entertainment in general, is that people go with known quantities.

Jay Ooi

It’s that mentality that Josh Thomas now infamously spouted, that you’re looking for talent for your show, but the people who have experience are not people of colour, and so you choose to give roles to existing talent who are white. It’s a vicious cycle.

Ben Nguyen

I think it's a little bit of a chicken and egg, because there's probably not the Asian talent that has the runs on the board, and has the experience that they can just be handed a show and be a trusted old hand. But if those opportunities don't exist to gain that experience, then that will remain a barrier into the industry.

Jay Ooi

And like what almost happened with Crazy Rich Asians main character Rachel, we see people in power making decisions where Asian characters are whitewashed. A 2014 Australian film called William Kelly’s War saw a mixed race Chinese Australian Billy Sing, who was Australia’s top World War 1 sniper, played by a white actor, and the director even defended his choice.

And it’s even happening in our public broadcaster. Despite having people like Ben working at SBS, there was a bit of uproar earlier this year when people started speaking out about how most of the leadership is white. And a look at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s board also shows they’re all white. In fact, they had their own diversity goals that they did not hit.

So a quick note to TV and film producers and executives: can we please stop with this whitewashing? And can we start what is happening in small numbers in the US, where they’re setting diversity riders, where you get to set a number or a percentage of your cast and crew that has to be, say, people of colour. If you’re entire crew is white, you can set the bar low, but we’ve gotta start somewhere.

Ben Nguyen

And I'd say in terms of bringing through new talent, we all kind of, I think there's sort of the running joke about Home and Away being this sort of beta for Hollywood. But it does have that track record. And I think it is quite notable that I feel like Neighbors has tended to have a lot more diversity on screen than Home and Away has. And that's not to say Home and Away hasn't done it, but I think that soaps are really important, because they can be a way to normalize people from diverse backgrounds just as a part of a community. And I think Neighbors has done that, and then also is a way of ... An entry level position for a writer to get experience. And I can't speak to how diverse those writers rooms are, but I would hope that they are. Because that really is a way to allow writers from diverse backgrounds to gain experience, and then that can lead them on to the bigger shows.

Jay Ooi

I was also thinking about Home and Away and Neighbours, how they have launched so many careers, international-

Wenlei Ma

So many careers.

Jay Ooi

Yeah. So, with the lack of representation there, it's so much harder for an Asian actor to make it, because they haven't got this launching point, essentially, of-

Wenlei Ma

Absolutely.

Wenlei Ma

Yeah, and there are people in the Australian film and television industry who absolutely see the value of shows like Home and Away and Neighbours and children's programming productions as almost like a waystation on the way to the next step. It's a really good training ground for actors, it's also a really good training ground for crew and for writers, and everyone from the grip boy to just everyone who works on those productions, because they work at a really fast pace. You have to be so disciplined at learning lines, for example. So, if they don't write those parts in those shows that do launch careers, like Margot Robbie, then it is just yet another obstacle as to how you can sort of make it in Australia. Maybe some people go to LA and they go to New York and then people look at you and go, "Hey, you're Australian, but you haven't been on Neighbours?"

Jay Ooi

I know Home & Away and Neighbours aren’t pinnacles of quality television, but both shows perform really well, particularly in the UK, and have launched so many careers - Chris Hemsworth, Kylie Minogue, Russel Crowe, Isabel Lucas, Brenton Thwaites. So when Aussie Asians aren’t really well represented on these shows, it really stunts the ability to launch the careers of Asian Australians. And it’s led to a lot of them moving to Hollywood because of the lack of opportunity back home.

Wenlei Ma

There's just a dearth of opportunities here.I mean, that's probably the case for everyone, but for every 20 Caucasian roles, there might be one role for someone of a diverse background. Then you've got all these people competing for that one role. It's like that Master of None episode where Aziz Ansari goes on an audition, and it's like, "Well, we can only ever have one Indian guy in a scene."

Jay Ooi

Yeah.

Wenlei Ma

I think that's probably true.

Ben Nguyen

I think there probably exist a bit of a perception that hasn't completely gone away that we need the lead character, if the lead character is universal, that universal means white. And you know, that's a problem.

Ben Nguyen

I think that SBS has much more limited budgets than the ABC or the commercial networks to produce drama. And the strategy so far at SBS has been, you might broadly frame them as problem dramas. They're definitely about specific cultures, migrant cultures within Australia.

Ben Nguyen

But they tend to be framed with, here is a problem that this community faces. And I think that where we all would like to get to is just to have diversity much more normalized in just every day context. So I mean, I was thinking of the last couple seasons of Offspring Lawrence Leung joined the cast as a doctor in the hospital. But it's sort of astonishing that it took that long to have an Asian doctor in the hospital.

Ben Nguyen

I think that it's a little bit what I'm saying is that about these problem dramas, that if your lead character is someone from a specific migrant background, then they're playing a migrant from that community. They're not playing a universal character. And so there's still this perception that if you want to have universal character who a white audience can identify with, that they should have white skin. And that's clearly not the case. I mean, you mentioned Crazy Rich Asians, and I think a lot of white audiences experience watching that film was realizing that they could very happily vicariously identify with Asian actors on screen in the same way that Asian audiences have been made to vicariously identify with white actors on screen for a very long time.

Jay Ooi

I’m sure you can relate to having to relate to white characters, and being so pleasantly surprised when a cool Asian shows up. And whilst SBS does serve an important role in Australia in showing programs specifically with cultural and linguistic diversity, when it’s stacked against the bigger players, y its reach and viewership is far lower. So when we don’t see ourselves reflected on screens by the bigger players, what is being communicated to us?

Wenlei Ma

I mean, for people who are of Asian backgrounds, it is a visibility issue. As much as we like to think that these external factors don't affect us, but not seeing yourself represented in these sort of exalted spaces all of a sudden means it's almost like your place within these communities, within these environments are not validated because you're not there. You're never, ever there.

Wenlei Ma

I mean, when I was growing up, there was Lee Lin Chin and there was Dr. Cindy Pan. That's all I can remember. So, like any nine-year-old, I was like, "I would love to be an actor, I could be famous." Then at some point you go, "Well, that's never going to work because they don't cast people that look like me." So, who knows? Maybe I could have been a great actor, probably not though. So, that is part of it, and it is one factor in a whole lot of things about how we internalize our own existence and the way we navigate these environments that we grow up in.

Ben Nguyen

I mean, I think I've always been very conscious growing up. And I guess sort of not seeing Asian men represented as being attractive in our culture. And I mean, on the flip side, Asian women often exotisized in terms of their attractiveness, and so that has plenty of issues too. But I think that sort of on a very personal level, it led to me having a real lack of confidence, and real questions about my own attractiveness. And I think that that is a byproduct of the messages that we send through media. So I think it's still, if you look at Hollywood, it's still very, very rare that you would have a leading man who's Asian, particularly if they don't have marshal arts skills like a Jackie Chan.

Ben Nguyen

And I think that there's a lot of historic reasons for that that are really problematic. And so I think in order to overcome a lot of the legacy of that, it just underlines how important it is to have these characters on screen that everyone, no matter what race you are can be drawn to and attracted to.

Jay Ooi

It’s unfortunate, but media has the power to make certain people feel seen and validated, and also the power to make us feel like we don’t quite belong, and we can’t quite make it in the film and TV industry, and even the power to make us feel like we’re not attractive because we almost never see attractive portrayals of people who look like us. And I think this was one of the reasons why Crazy Rich Asians was such a movement. It wasn’t about fetishising Asian females or emasculating Asian males, in fact it was the other way around this time - it was a female gaze ogling hot Asian men, of which there were plenty. More on that in an article in the show notes.

But back to media representation in Australia. It’s clear we’re not doing great when it comes to the commercial networks and most of the programs on our screens. But there are a couple of areas where we see things changing just a bit.

Ben Nguyen

Something that I've really observed is that the change in the advertising industry. Because I feel like when I was growing up, and even more recently that advertising was the last bastion of this really traditional depictions of a nuclear family, and it was always a white family. And I think that that has in the last couple of years really, really shifted.

Ben Nguyen

But I feel like sometimes I'm watching a show, and it's almost an all white cast, and then we go to an ad break, and I'm seeing a lot more diversity within that ad break.

Wenlei Ma

I can't remember if it's Telstra or if it's a banking giant, but you see a lot more representation in ad breaks now than you do during programming. I mean, there are mixed race families who are just being boring like white families, getting around an iPad and stuff.

Jay Ooi

Full disclosure, I do work for Vodafone in marketing, and we are very conscious of diversity when it comes to our advertising, so Ben and Wenlei have both hit the nail on the head.

Wenlei

So, I think it's small steps, it's incremental steps, and hopefully that will have a bigger impact than just what a 30 second ad which is designed to sell a phone plan is going to have, that it will start to normalize things. But I think you also see it in the communities in the fact that we are a multicultural nation, and that ratio is probably shifting a little bit more to people from different backgrounds.

Wenlei Ma

I mean, Australia is an immigrant nation completely. Other than the First Australians, everyone is here from somewhere else. Perhaps there can be a better conversation, a civil conversation, where families who are from those Anglo backgrounds and maybe have been here either for 20 years or 200 years, start to really connect with that idea, is that they've just been here a little bit longer, but in the history of settlement in this country, they really haven't been here for that long either.

Jay Ooi

So advertising is one space where we’re seeing more diversity on screens. And another? Here’s Dr Jane Park from the University of Sydney again.

Jane Park

I think tons of stuff coming up now particularly on Netflix. If you've noticed Netflix has become so superficially culturally and racially diverse. I mean, it's almost kind of funny.

Jane Park

I just saw what looks to be a horrible Netflix film just the other day that was advertised called secret Obsession, which the trailer just gives it all away. It's about some White guy who I think kills this guy whose wife is Asian. Then he pretends to be the Asian woman's husband because she has amnesia.

Jay Ooi

Oh, yeah.

Jane Park

It just looks ridiculous. Then I looked up the IMDB ratings and it's like a three or something.

Jane Park

The more recent one is Always Be My Maybe with Randall Park and Ali Wong. Ali Wong's been huge with her standup performances and so on and blowing up certain stereotypes of Asian women. The fact that she can sort of speak to those stereotypes, in really sometimes quite crude, but effective ways, I think that just got a lot of people talking. Certainly within the Asian diaspora communities, but like outside that as well.

Wenlei Ma

But I think something like Always Be My Maybe, which is a rom com with Ali Wong and Randall Park, is that it's almost not really remarked upon. It's just a movie that exists, it's just a story that exists. Besides Casey Wilson as the interior designer, and I think she had a name, every character in that movie was from a diverse background. Every white character in that movie was the maitre d', or the rando in the background that normally gets assigned to people from diverse backgrounds.I thought it was so great. There are small things. I think there were some small kids that ran through a scene and took their shoes off, just like this podcast.

Jay Ooi

That's right.

Wenlei Ma

And carried their shoes and then ran through the house and put their shoes back on, which is what we all did. So, they're small things, but it doesn't make a big deal about it. The more that happens, the more it becomes normalized, or even like the movie Searching, which is John Cho is the lead, He's a Korean-American father searching for his daughter. Their cultural backgrounds does not become this flash point in the film. It's just all there is now the confidence that an actor like John Cho gets lead a movie.

Jay Ooi

Yes, so Asians in leading film roles are becoming a little bit more normalised where they don’t necessarily have to play a minority or “problem” character, and Crazy Rich Asians has shown us that there is a hunger for people of colour to be in these leading roles. And these online streaming services have been much quicker to react and adapt to this. If you have, say, Netflix, you probably would have noticed the crazy amount of diverse content on there, from Korean dramas, to animes, to shows featuring diasporic Asians like Never Have I Ever and Master of None. So why is it suddenly so much easier for these companies to make more diverse content?

Jay Ooi

I understand that they are commissioning a lot of stuff that is telling diverse stories, but why wasn't that possible before these new structures?

Wenlei Ma

The way that commercial television in particular has always worked is that they needed to maximize audience every single minute of the day, because that's how they were selling ad space, and that's how they made their money. So, if they take the most popular show in Australia so far in 2016, which I think was maybe Lego Masters, if you could somehow put Lego Masters on the air 24/7 and you could maximize that 24/7, they would. They would do it. So, it's not really about trying to find a whole bunch of different things, but it's about trying to find the thing that is going to get the most eyeballs at any given moment.

Wenlei Ma

Streaming services work completely differently. It's the way that HBO used to work, or still works, and why we managed to get so many good shows out of the late nineties and early noughties, is that they just need you to feel so passionate enough about one or two things that you keep subscribing. They don't need you to like everything. I mean, Netflix really actually does want you to watch 16 hours a day, but for the most part they need you to be so into one or two things at any given moment out of hundreds and hundreds of things that you just keep paying them.

Wenlei Ma

So, they don't need to cater to the broadest market. They can cater to really specific markets. They have these taste tribes, so if, for example, Jay, you are really into maybe animated cartoons for adults, which it sounds like you might be, if they keep getting the rights to Rick and Morty and that hooks you for the next six months and you'll just keep paying your subscriber fees, they don't care if you don't like Marco Polo or 13 Reasons Why. So, I think that's one of the reasons why they can make a lot more choices and take more risks, because they just operate differently. They don't need you to like everything, they just need you to really like some things.

Jay Ooi

This was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. Whilst I might not be interested in watching Gossip Girl, sorry Gossip Girl fans, as long as there are new episodes of something I do want to watch, say, the live action remakes of Cowboy Bebop and Avatar the Last Airbender, or Brooklyn 99 or Sabrina, then yeah, I’m going to keep paying my subscription. The problem, though, is that they aren’t commissioning a lot of stuff locally here in Australia. Whilst it is great we’re seeing ourselves on screens more because of this new model of programming, it still means local talent like Chris Pang and Remy Hii from Crazy Rich Asians, needs to go overseas to find success. So where to from here?

Jay Ooi

What needs to happen for TV networks to start changing?

Wenlei Ma

There either needs to be some more... I don't want to use the word brave or bold, because I feel like it is just common sense decisions that need to be made, or there just needs to be a new generation programmers and people who do the commissioning. I mean, like in any industry, there is an old guard that's going to hang on there as long as they can, but younger people are pushing up through the ranks, and perhaps they're going to make some different choices because they grew up in a different environment and because their friends maybe don't look like their parents' friends, and where they hang out on the weekends don't resemble a golf club. So, hopefully, like with anything, the decisions that get made represent the people who make them, and hopefully we'll just get different people making the decisions.

Ben Nguyen

I mean, one thing that I find really astonishing in the Australian media is how few south Asians we see in scripted content. And I really can't understand what that is. Because I suppose as well as having more diversity as a draw card to audiences, it's about finding talent. And I feel like there's untapped talent that is being bypassed, just because casting agents or directors expect a lead to look a certain way.

Jay Ooi

What about us viewers? Are there things that we can do to support a more diverse on-screen and even behind-the-scenes talent crew, that sort of thing?

Wenlei Ma

I guess it's just making an active choice. Just maybe seek out some of that content, whether or not it is on ABC or SBS or on a public broadcast, because they still come up in the ratings. So, maybe if Channels 7, 9 and 10 see that everyone is watching The Family Law on SBS and it's hitting some really good demo numbers, then that gives them more confidence to commission something similar.

Ben Nguyen

Well I think the number one thing is to watch the shows where there are creators and leads from diverse backgrounds. And then I think just be really honest about them. I think I'm not one that goes in for you have to say a show is good just because it represents the viewpoint that you believe in. If the show is bad, you're allowed to say that and you're allowed to think that. Because I think that what we don't want is, I don't know, like this idea that shows for people from minorities are a bit of a charity. I think we want to be making shows which can compete with and be better than the shows that we're watching now. So, I think engage in the content and the culture around it, and have an opinion and discuss it.

Wenlei Ma

So, don't just fall into old viewing habits of, "This is the kind of thing that I've liked before, so this is the kind of thing I'm just going to keep watching." Watch some new filmmakers. Don't just be like, "I'm only going to watch Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan movies for the rest of my life." Go out and find out what Alan Yang is doing this year, what Tony Ayres is making, and women as well. Why not go see every movie Greta Gerwig has done, instead of just every movie that David Fincher has done?

Wenlei Ma

So, I think it's about being conscious about the choices that we're also making and finding time for, and it's not just seeing every single Marvel movie, but go out and see some independent movies. Go out and see what Lulu Wang is going to do next, because The Farewell was so awesome, and everyone should see that movie, And that made me cry like an absolute baby.

Jay Ooi

Yeah, yeah.

Wenlei Ma

Have these emotional experiences outside of Avengers.

Jay Ooi

Okay we’ve covered a LOT in today’s episode, and also haven’t covered a lot, like the production crew behind the scenes which is also severely under represented, or the whole news and current affairs side which is just another can of worms for another time, but let me try and wrap this up.

Crazy Rich Asians was so big and meant so much to us diasporic Asians because it had been so long since we had seen ourselves reflected on the big screen in this capacity. And yeah, the film doesn’t represent all Asians, and is a kind of mish mash of Asian actors from around the world, but it was so important to us because of how deprived we’ve been of this sort of representation. And we’ve seen this shift, with movies like The Farewell and shows like Kim’s Convenience, and ones coming up like Marvel’s Shang Chi and the live action remakes of Cowboy Bebop and Avatar The Last Airbender which I’m personally super excited about, but especially here in Australia, Asians are still highly underrepresented. It’s partly because we don’t make a lot of scripted content, and partly because the decision makers in Australia are in general playing it safe and not casting Asians in leading roles, because in Australia, we don’t see Asians as universal characters. We feel the need to explain why they’re Asian, instead of just letting them be Asian in the show. And this has real effects on us, from us not pursuing a career in film and TV or moving overseas to do so because we don’t think there are jobs here for us, to us not seeing ourselves as attractive because we’re never portrayed as attractive on screens. And an even bigger impact? We don’t really see ourselves as fully Australian because we’re constantly told that white people are the norm here.

But things are changing. We’ve seen the shift in advertising locally, with more diverse families and talent used to sell us things, despite commercial TV programming not yet realising that diversity sells. And we’re seeing the rise of streaming services, giving us so much diverse content, and allowing for more “niche” programs to be commissioned. And us? Well, we can show commercial networks that we want to see more diversity by seeking out diverse content. You don’t have to watch everything with an Asian in it, but I can almost guarantee you there will be a show with leading people of colour that you will enjoy - I’ll leave a list of some recommendations in the show notes.

I know Crazy Rich Asians isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I know it’s not a masterpiece in film making. But it’s undeniable how important this film has been. Its success shows media executives that diversity on screen can sell. And it’s made us feel like our experiences are valid, and that we might, one day, be on the big screen like Constance Wu and Henry Golding. Because representation really does matter. And Crazy Rich Asians is definitely not where this story ends.

This episode of Shoes Off was written, produced and edited by me, Jay Ooi.

Special thanks to all the guests in today’s episode: Wenlei Ma, Dr Jane Park, Fiona Price, and Ben Nguyen for all of your thoughts and work, as well as Erin Chew who I couldn’t fit in and Isabel Lo from Media Diversity Australia who isn’t in today’s episode but you’ll be hearing her in another episode for sure.

In the show notes for this episode at shoesoff.net there are lots of things: all of the references, a list of films and TV shows with diverse lead characters to check out, the article I mentioned talking about the female gaze of Crazy Rich Asians, where you can read Wenlei Ma’s work and where you can listen to Ben Nguyen’s own SBS podcast, The Playlist.

You may have noticed the music in today’s episode is a bit different from normal. In the vein of Crazy Rich Asians, I wanted to feature a bunch of diasporic Asian artists, so all the music in today’s episode is by Asians, and a big thanks to them for letting me use their music in this episode. You’ve heard tracks from Avik Chari who also composed the new intro music, Morning Shift, Peach Luffe, Jacky X, Black Jade, Josh Im, Vidy, Planet Drvv, Junan, STACE and Emily Soon, who you’re listening to right now. You wonderful people are amazing, and I’ll be linking to them and their music in the show notes - please check them out. And the episode artwork is by Alli Chang.

How visible do you feel in Australia when you look at our media? Let me know @shoesoffau on facebook and instagram.

If you liked Shoes Off please subscribe, we’re on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to it right now, or head to shoesoff.net

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Thanks, and catch you next episode.

Jay Ooi

I remember the wedding scene, watching... even the second time, I knew that was coming in Crazy Rich Asians. As soon as the water came into the church, I was like, "It's so beautiful."

Wenlei Ma

It's amazing. It's completely ridiculous. If you were actually at that wedding, you would be laughing about it on Monday at work with your colleagues and just go, "Oh my God. This completely over-the-top wedding that I went to on Saturday, you won't believe it." But on screen, it's so much fun and it just makes people feel happy. I don't think we can really overestimate the value of feel good experiences and the associations that come with them.

Wenlei Ma

Yeah, because it actually felt like in that moment for that month, it was a movement, and that we got to be part of it, and it was very emboldening.

Jay Ooi

Yeah. It was. It really was. I felt like, yeah, it just made it feel a bit more normal and okay being Asian in Australia, for a little bit.

Wenlei Ma

For a little bit. I mean, before the virus, and the government, before Pauline Hanson saying she had been vindicated.