are you planning on watching crazy rich asians?
It’s good representation for pale, upper-class, heterosexual East Asians. So no, I won’t. I’d love to support Asian representation that isn’t about celebrating gross wealth in the hands of an ethnic majority (and I’d have the same feeling if this movie was about upper-caste, pale North Indians or a movie about pale, rich, Sunni Arabs, don’t get me wrong!). There are antiblack tropes in the movie + I’ve heard that these light-skinned rich East Asians have employees (aka domestic help) that are all dark-skinned South or Southeast Asians which. Lmfao. As a South Asian woman, no thanks.
I also hate that East Asians keep touting this as “Asian representation!1111″ when it’s really only for East Asians at best, and it’s just part of this annoying trend of American East Asians still framing Asian identity around themselves (which is why you then get white people claiming that only East Asians can be Asian). It’s not “Asian representation” or “great for Asian-Americans”, it’s only good for East Asians, and that too a very small sector of them (pale, upper-class, cishet Chinese ones).
I wholeheartedly support other groups of Asians getting representation, if it’s good and authentic and doesn’t universalize the “Asian experience” into a monolith. So for example, I empathize heavily with Magnus Bane. Though he’s Southeast Asian, and not South Asian like me, I still consider him to be representation for me, because he’s brown, mentally ill, and bisexual like me. And his Asian identity isn’t displayed as the be-all end-all of the Asian experience or Asian representation, unlike this book and movie.
Also people keep saying cringeworthy things like “CRA is Asian people’s Black Panther” and again 1) it’s only representation for EAST Asians, not Asians as a whole and 2) it’s incredibly antiblack and unnecessary to compare every single thing to the achievements of Black people. Not to mention that Black Panther was actually incredibly diverse - it featured Black people of various nationalities and ethnic groups, whereas this movie mostly features Asians of a specific nationality and ethnic group. And the premises for the movies aren’t the same at all. One is based on a superhero comic book and is meant to showcase the progress of an African nation that was untouched by colonialism or the slave trade, and the other is a random romantic comedy about an American East Asian woman falling in love with a bourgeoise East Asian man. It’s irritating and antblack that Asian-Americans (this goes for all of us, not just East Asians) can’t advocate for themselves or even spread awareness about their needs without framing their desires around Black people or asking Black people to do our work for us or wanting Black people to feel guilty for their hypervisibility or comparing our hurdles with that of Black people’s.
So I’m sure it’s enjoyable for those who liked the book and for East Asians who think this is the pinnacle of representation but I guarantee you that most South, Southeast, Central, and West Asians don’t think anything of it.
vaporwave
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