I watched Crazy Rich Asians

Thanks to Sam and Emily, to Safiyya, for sitting through my incoherence.

Another episode where I take silly things too seriously. The lines between genuine media criticism and deranged ranting is blurred.

Cover image: Screenshot of Opulence, video essay by ContraPoints. I hope this counts as fair use.

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I finally saw Crazy Rich Asians, the 2018 film about crazy rich Asians directed by Jon M. Chu, which has had a lot of praise for featuring a majority Asian cast and production team, and for supposedly featuring main characters who are non-stereotypical people of colour.

Let’s get this straight: the fact that the Asian representation in Crazy Rich Asians has been so widely lauded says a lot about the diversity of Hollywood (namely the lack thereof) and our expectations for the representation of people of colour in mainstream media (which is dire), but it cannot elevate a mediocre film that doesn’t even do Asian representation very well.

I know some representation is better than no representation, progress comes in small steps, reforming Hollywood is like having a tiger change its stripes etc, but as an Asian person watching Crazy Rich Asians I was frankly very disappointed. It feels like the Asian-ness is only aesthetics, the window dressing to what is at heart a deeply American and pretty conventional romantic comedy.

The plot, in its essence:

Rachel, a Chinese-American woman, is dragged to Singapore to meet her boyfriend Nick’s family, not knowing that they are the richest family in Singapore. Nick’s family and friends accuse Rachel of gold-digging, and bully her for being born to a single immigrant mother working menial jobs. Nick proposes to Rachel because True Love, but his mother Eleanor tells Rachel that she will never be good enough for Nick and tells her to leave. Rachel rightly concludes that she is too good for the whole lot of them, and tells Eleanor that she will leave Nick, so if Nick finds a happy life marrying someone else, it will be because of her, and if Nick is heartbroken over Rachel, everyone will know it’s Eleanor’s fault. Her strength of character moves Eleanor, who relents and lets the couple marry.

The astute among you will have noticed that there’s nothing inherently Asian about this story. Girl dates posh boy, posh boy’s mother says no, girl says girlboss things, mother relents. The main ‘Asian’ obstacle, Eleanor’s scorn for Rachel because of her birth, is so easily removed – over a matter of minutes, off-screen – that it feels more like a convenient plot device than the central issue of the film.

There are many salient issues around modern Asian culture and identity that are in desperate need of exploration, like immigrant identities (most of the characters are members of the Chinese diaspora), the growing socioeconomic disparity in Asian countries and abroad, the lifestyle of opulence, filial relationships and generational divides, the clash of different value systems, racism and colourism in Asia, the legacy of British colonialism, … …

The film outright ignores most of these, such as by having no characters of note who are of Malay or Indian descent, even though there are significant Malay and Indian populations in Singapore (the only dark-skinned character I remember is employed to guard Nick’s mansion, take that how you will); or by having no representation of local English accents (all the main characters have English or American accents).

The closest it comes to dealing with genuine (not to mention interesting) issues is with Eleanor and Nick’s relationship, where Eleanor embodies a traditional Chinese interpretation of motherhood where the mother expresses her love by indulging the son’s every trivial want and potential need, but micromanages every aspect of his life that actually matters ‘for his own good’ and with no regard to what he wants for himself (i.e. education, job, marriage, raising children). The sons typically grow up spoilt, ineffectual, and existentially discontented – which Nick obliges by being a wet wipe throughout the film. I’m not sure how ‘traditional Chinese’ this is in the grand scheme of things à la Confucianism etc, but it’s certainly associated with rich Chinese people and is a useful contrast for American individualism. Michelle Yeoh’s Eleanor expertly shows this duality of maternal sacrifice and expectations, but the film brilliantly swerves from exploring any of its actual consequences.

The Astute among you may also have realised that I’m looking for depth in a rom com, a genre not famed for its depth of engagement with social issues. To this I will say, True. But depth and rom-comitude are not mutually exclusive. For a film that is a landmark in using Asian cast and crew, they’ve missed the opportunity to do something actually special.

Instead we ended up with a nuance-free escapist fantasy about bottomless wealth that only pays lip service to its Asian influence. By making it crazy rich Asians, there’s no further need to justify why Nick’s family are so rich and so horrible. The physical, emotional, and cultural distance between Rachel (aka audience stand-in) and Nick’s family removes the need to negotiate the issues with wealth: Why are they rich? Why do they live in such opulence? Shouldn’t it be a moral obligation for the extremely wealthy to put their wealth towards philanthropic or environmental causes? The same film set in a modern Anglo-American context would not be able to completely evade these discussions, but by setting the film in an Asian social bubble, the characters’ wealth is consequence-free and all moral panic kept at bay. Nick’s family is problematic because it’s full of catty and arrogant individuals, not because they are part of the capitalist elite that’s exploiting sweatshop workers and pushing our planet towards climate catastrophe.

The music helps a lot with setting the mood: this is opulence, the nice, luxurious, consequence-free kind that you secretly (or not at all secretly) want. The soundtrack uses a lot of nostalgic ‘70s pop music like Teresa Teng, Asia’s soundtrack of glittery bourgeoise indulgence after the decades of upheaval in the mid-20th century. There’s also a lot of jazz, which evokes the Golden Age of the 1920s to the same effect. This is the sound of wealth, of luxury that is both aspirational and nostalgic, and it serves as a short cut for you to like the rich people on screen. When we do have cause to dislike Nick’s family, it’s because they are horrible individuals; the aspirational and benevolent nature of opulence is never in doubt.

The Astute Among You might also say, But this is just some escapism why are you deeping it so much not everything has to be about capitalism all the time Kitty. Which is also fair. Although while the desire to enjoy consequence-free escapism about being filthy rich isn’t inherently a bad thing, it is bad when the escapism is made possible by exploiting the cultural distance between Hollywood’s typical audience and supposed traditional Chinese values.

The cast and crew are all Asian, but that doesn’t guarantee good Asian representation. Asian stereotypes are used in utterly unsophisticated ways to affirm the values and trajectories in your basic American rom com, starting with the Asian-American poster child for immigrant assimilation and the American Dream, and the boy who wants to break free from his family’s traditional cultural values. Not to mention there’s no representation for normal people in Asia (much as Singapore is very affluent), people who aren’t existential-dread-evokingly rich, people who lead comprehensible lives. If cultural distance is used to facilitate a specific depiction of wealth, the characters’ wealth is also used to enforce a cultural distance: Asian people are filthy rich, weird as hell, and hate your Western values of equality.

In the end the Crazy Rich Asians is still made by Warner Brothers in Hollywood, and it’s produced by three White people. It feels like when White directors claim it’s okay to have the one woman of colour on their main cast make all the racist jokes: the jokes aren’t any less racist because she says them, and it’s the White people that are making her say them. This is the same thing on another level: a bad portrayal of Asian people is in no way redeemed by having Asian people do it, least of all when they’re working under White producers in a White-majority industry, whose main concern is producing profitable and inoffensive content that happens to align with White values.

It feels like an Asian film for White people.