crazy rich asians is not a win for representation unless the ones you care about representing are the hyper-rich chinese people in a country (singapore) where they are already the dominant race & hold financial, racial, cultural, political, & a host of other privileges on the backs of minorities, including the indigenous population (Malay people) who till today have to bear racist stereotypes of the âlazy nativeâ that has been absorbed into todayâs society despite it initially being a colonial stereotype meant to degrade the population to justify their oppression. malay people still have to see politicians & read state papers condescendingly telling them that they are lagging behind & have high rates of diabetes & basically having issues racialised instead of talking about structures of inequality (one of which includes institutionalised racism privileging chinese people).
& now we have this movie that perpetuates the idea that singapore, a country that has been part of the malay world for thousands of years with a rich history of trade, & poetry, & beauty, be bastardised as simply once being a backwater. & that itâs supposedly some edenic blank slate, a paradise. what is this colonial language? why erase the history of our land like this? who gave this chinese male writer the right to re-write & bastardise the history of a land he is not indigenous to?
this movie has been the bane of my damn existence the past couple of weeks because all over social media i have to see people openly defend a movie that isnât even good! i have to see chinese people dismiss the concerns & pain of minorities when they express how, yet again, they feel unrepresented & dismissed in narratives about singapore.Â
what kind of praxis for racial justice & concern do you even have if you canât see that itâs terrible that brown bodies are only displayed on screen when they are in subservient positions? when sikh men are portrayed as if they are savage on-screen without even saying any words? imagine seeing that scene in the cinema & hearing chinese people laugh around you. (btw! when i watched black panther i also had to hear the chinese audience laugh during certain scenes that i presume they find funny because itâs âtribalisticâ). that laughter pisses me off! that laughter says everything. itâs the laughter i heard from a chinese guy when i said that my friend has an âindianâ side to his family. whatâs so funny? why are darker bodies seen as a joke to them?
the racism in singapore is all the more insiduous because it hides under an air of state-sponsored âmulticulturalismâ that SAYS it cares for diversity but in fact doesnât ever want to properly talk about race at all. youâre talking about a country that has such a poor state of racial discourse that you can hear people defend the use of the ânâ word, the exclusion of hijabi women in certain vocations, & the exclusion of malays in certain military positions because they are seen as not loyal to the country â a country that they are indigenous to!!Â
iâm so tired!! i canât wait for the discourse of CRA to be over!! we literally have to hear people telling us that we donât have to represented on screen!! because it doesnât add value to the story!! we donât add value to this country!! asian-americans i get that you want representation but please remember asians in asia kind of have a different experience & context!! & we are kind of already saturated with your culture as it is & now we have to deal with ^&@$^*$%%
