Since its release, Crazy Rich Asians has captivated the hearts of many by transporting its viewers to the glitz and glamour on the island of Singapore. The film follows the story of Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), as she travels to Singapore with her boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding), to attend his cousin’s wedding and meet his family. Upon landing in Singapore, Rachel learns that Nick hails from a vastly wealthy family, and finds herself knee-deep in the flashy excess of Singapore’s richest of the rich. All eyes are on Rachel as she finds herself in the center of gossip and attempts to navigate jealous ex-girlfriends, snobby relatives, and worst of all– Nick’s disapproving mother.
A much-anticipated movie, Crazy Rich Asians celebrates a cultural milestone as the first Hollywood film with an all-Asian cast in twenty-five years, following The Joy Luck Club in 1993. Upon its release, Crazy Rich Asians became the number one film in America for three weeks, raking in $120 million since it opened on August 15th. While the film follows familiar romantic-comedy tropes, Crazy Rich Asians was a breath of fresh air for Hollywood as it presents “an all-Asian cast in complex roles” and proceeds to “challenge racial expectations and bring underrepresented voices before a huge audience.” The film explores love, class, family, and heritage through a cultural lens that Hollywood has neglected for so long. There were several cultural nuances in the movie that appealed to its Asian-American audiences, such as the bustling street food hubs, the presence messaging apps that caters to the Asian population like WeChat and Weibo, and even Rachel bringing a Tupperware of leftovers to the plane that her mom had packed for her (Asian moms, am I right?).
Part of Crazy Rich Asians’ success is solely due to its dedication to cultural nuances that made the film accessible to the Asian-American population. Shortly after the novel’s release in 2013, Kevin Kwan was offered a movie deal “if he was willing to change Rachel to a white girl,” which he promptly rejected. Despite his fear that “traditional Hollywood would find [the film] to be not a viable project,” Kwan knew that the film needed the all-Asian cast it deserved, which resulted in years of waiting before the book’s film adaptation to be released. Though casting Rachel as a white woman may seem like a simple compromise, doing so would have resulted in the erasure of the presence of Chinese-American heritage that would undoubtedly alter the tone of the film. Rachel’s identity as an American-Born Chinese woman was a crucial aspect of the story. Eleanor Young, Nick’s mother, disapproved of Rachel as a suitable wife for her son since Eleanor believed that Rachel, in her best friend’s Peik Lin’s words, was “some unrefined banana. Yellow on the outside and white on the inside.” Despite being born to Chinese parents and identifying as a Chinese-American, Rachel was still a “foreigner” in Eleanor’s eyes due to the cultural disparity of being raised in the United States as opposed to being raised in China. This cultural disconnect is a universal feeling not only for the Asian-American audience, but for anyone who has experienced an internal conflict between two cultures. Casting a white woman to play Rachel would erase this aspect of the story, thus making it less accessible to a more significant part of the film’s audience.
Despite its success, Crazy Rich Asians have exceedingly high expectations that’s impossible to surpass. Although the film features an all-Asian cast, the plot heavily revolves around “super-rich, ultra-glamorous and extremely Westernized” East Asians, who already dominate the Asian-American narrative in the United States. A multiracial country, Singapore has a significant Malay and Indian populations, and yet were not featured heavily in the film, except as domestic workers and security guards. However, this is not the film’s fault. Director Jon M. Chu addresses this issue, saying, “We decided very early on that this is not the movie to solve all representation issues. This is a very specific movie; we have a very specific world, very specific characters. This is not going to solve everything.” The problem at hand stems from the lack of Asian visibility in Hollywood. Asian-Americans account for 5.6% of the American population, with a total of more than 17 million people across the country. Fitting each narrative into a single movie is an impossible task. Hollywood needs to make room for Asian visibility, instead of taking Asian roles and stories and casting them with white actors.
Though Crazy Rich Asians may not have been the movie to solve the lack of representation in Hollywood, most of us still found comfort having a refreshing, all-Asian cast on the screen. “There’s something miraculous about how so many parts of such a disparate community could find a way to relate to the film,” says Frank Shyong in an article on LA Times. “It speaks to how badly all of us want to see ourselves on-screen, how starved we are for representation.”
Source(s):
“‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Didn’t Tell all of our Stories, but Asian-Americans Found a Way to Relate”
“‘Crazy Rich Asians is a Dazzling, Sumptuous Success”
“‘It’s Taken on a Whole Other Life,’ Says ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Author Kevin Kwan”
“Where are the Brown People? Crazy Rich Asians Draws Tepid Response in Singapore”