Computer Guys and Kung-Fu Masters
Several years ago, my little brother and I settled in to watch The Maze Runner on a flight from Hanoi to Toronto. Tired from the travel, I barely paid attention to the intricacies of the plot, but one face stood out to me from the start: Minho, a strong athletic boy and one of the original maze-runners – the riskiest job in their society. At the film’s climax, when all of the characters attempt to make it through the maze, he was a leader in the group. I found myself rooting for him, hoping he wouldn’t die as just another sidekick. When I voiced that thought to my brother, and he exclaimed that he had felt the same connection to the boy throughout the movie.
“So few Asian characters get to do the exciting stuff, like running and fighting and exploring,” he said. “They’re usually just computer guys or kung-fu masters.”
My brother was eleven at the time of that comment. Since then, we have talked continuously about the representation of East Asian characters in film and television: how few exist and how limiting their roles often are. He – as a swimmer and hockey player, lover of sports, hater of piano and schoolwork – never gets to see himself onscreen. I, as a girl, only knew one admirable character that looked like me growing up: Mulan, who wasn’t even of my culture.
For a long time, I didn’t notice the lack of roles or think that it mattered; I had other women to look up to. Only in rare moments when I did encounter a non-stereotypical East Asian character did I begin to see how much representation meant. When I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, it felt so exciting to have a whole selection of women – strong, three-dimensional women that I actually wanted to emulate – who I could dress up as for Halloween and genuinely resemble. When I watched The Legend of Korra, it meant so much to share a name (albeit spelled differently) with Toph’s daughter, Lin Beifong. I felt an inexplicable attachment to her immediately. Being able to see a version of myself onscreen makes me feel like I have a voice and a possibility to achieve what those characters can.
Of course, when Avatar the animated show became a feature film – arguably the worst adaptation in the history of cinema – the main characters suddenly turned white, as is often the case. Looking at Ghost in the Shell or Dr. Strange, we can clearly see that isn’t an out-dated issue either. Even the Oscars this year, though less white than usual, featured zero East Asian leads or stories. And let’s not get started on Matt Damon in The Great Wall, released only a couple months back.
The other day, I was scrolling through hairstyles on Pinterest and saving picture after picture to my boards when I noticed that every hairstyle I’d saved was blonde. I thought back to the time one of my friends, blonde herself, had tried to do my hair for a formal. She was great with braids, but she couldn’t get my hair to do anything she wanted. It was too slippery, not a texture she was used to working with, and we had to give up. Feeling that my hair would likely not work with any of the styles I’d saved, I searched up “Asian hairstyles” and found less than a quarter of the variety.
When we replace “hairstyles” with sports, strength, courage, creativity, and so on, we can understand why representation is crucial – and as others have discussed, this issue remains pertinent to all minority groups. It’s lonely and disheartening to always see yourself, if at all, as second best, as a caricature and a single story. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” As Vietnamese, this issue has affected my brother and I in lowering our confidence, making us the butt of nerd jokes, and limiting our view of possibilities. For other minority groups, as we recently saw with Trump’s Muslim Ban, this problem of representation becomes downright dangerous when the caricatures are all people will see.
If Hollywood wants to take a stand, as so many Academy members have expressed, representation is the most basic first step. And we’ve got a long road ahead.
Originally published on Project Boundless.