Transcriber: Linda Z. Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
As a girl who held a book in her hand 24/7,
it was no surprise that I wanted to become an author,
creating characters and stories for all of you out there to read.
That was my dream. And like the little girl I was,
I told everyone everywhere about this brilliant plan of mine until one day,
my friend’s dad replied: nope, you can’t do that.
And I didn’t understand what he was talking about at first.
Maybe he thought I wasn't good at writing or maybe I wasn't reading enough books.
But when I asked why, he simply said: there aren’t any authors with
a name like yours. That was in the second grade, when I still believe that anything
and everything that adults said was the truth,
like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and authors not having Asian names.
From that point on, I became more aware of the characters in books and movies,
and I noticed that my friend’s dad was right.
Not only did I ever recognize an author with an Asian name,
I began to recognize a repeated cycle of misrepresented Asian characters:
the great obsessive tiger mom, the kung fu master, the rebellious,
angsty Asian with purple streaks in their hair.
And how can we forget the awkward, nerdy Asian?
The problem is that all of us grow up with these characters.
And for Asians, this makes us feel like these stereotypes are all that we are.
And for everyone else, you might begin to think that maybe Asians really are
only what they show on screen.
And you really can’t blame the audience when the only representation of
the Asian community is limited and skewed without any positive reference.
The audience’s response is predictable.
The University of Southern California reports that Asians represent only 5.1%
of speaking or named roles across film,
television, and digital series since 2014.
5.1%
I don’t know if you’ve noticed,
but that is a very small number.
Each year, hundreds of movies and TV series are produced and
the numbers are unstoppable, doubling year after year.
So it would seem reasonable for
the number of Asian characters to escalate along with the number of films.
But the world doesn’t seem to work that way.
1944, Katharine Hepburn portrayed Jayton in the film Dragon Seed.
1982, actress Linda Hunt won an award
for her role of Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously.
2007, Rob Schneider use facial prosthetics for his role as an Asian minister
in I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry.
2017, Motoko Kusanagi of the film adaptation of Japanese manga Ghost in
the Shell was played by Scarlett Johansson.
All of these movies I've just listed come from different time periods with
different actors portraying different characters.
But there's one thing that all of these movies have in common.
All of these movies portray whitewashing.
Whitewashing is the act of casting Caucasian actors for
the roles of another race.
For this specific case, Asian.
Caucasian and Asian are two different races,
and one will never be able to correctly portray the other.
There is a simple solution to this problem: casting Asian actors
for Asian roles. But if that were the case,
I wouldn't be presenting that speech right now.
So instead, many directors turn toward yellowface,
a process in which an actor would fake a heavy Asian accent
and use prosthetics to naturally pull back their eyes to appear more Asian.
I grew up believing I will never be lucky enough to be bitten by
a radioactive spider. I felt pressured to answer that
Mulan was my favorite Disney princess when really
I remember being Snow White for Halloween three years in a row.
I gave up waiting for my Hogwarts letter,
telling myself they probably didn't want another Asian student after
the three out of two hundred eighty they already had.
I grew up hating my Asian identity,
reminding myself of the things I couldn’t be better than the things I could.
Unfortunately, we cannot change the past,
but what we can change is the future.
2018, Crazy Rich Asians,
the first major Hollywood movie in 25 years to have
an all Asian cast premiered.
2020, South Korean film Parasite stepped on the stage of
the Academy Awards for Best Picture, the first time a non English movie won
the award in its 92 year history.
2021, Minari,
a film highlighting the stories of Asian immigrants,
was nominated for Six Academy Awards.
We cannot change our race, but directors and writers can change the way
they look at us. Media is more than just tickets to a theater.
Media is more than just award shows.
Media is the way society chooses to represent us.
Asians are more than just a character.
We are a community demanding to be represented with equality and accuracy.
We are a community wanting our children to grow up
knowing they can be superheroes, princesses, wizards,
whatever they want to be. We need to be seen. Thank you.