Warning: spoilers ahead
Joy Ride starring Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, and Sherry Cola, is the latest Hollywood film to hit theaters with a star-studded cast of Asian Americans. This laugh-out-loud buddy film explores themes of friendship and identity through cultural nuances throughout the group’s adventure.
While Joy Ride is an easy and, at times, emotional watch for casual moviegoers, Audrey’s (played by Ashley Park) close friends constantly challenge her identity throughout the film. The film’s story centers around Audrey being an Asian adoptee, disconnected from her birth origins. To trigger the story’s wild adventure to find Audrey’s birth mother, Lolo (played by Sherry Cola) tells a lie to help Audrey finalize a business deal which results in the friends taking off across Beijing, rural China, and South Korea.
Joy Ride offers viewers an opportunity to reflect upon how different communities in the Asian diaspora can exist—inclusively—together. This film shows us how Asian representation can exist while undermining marginalized groups within our diaspora. Joy Ride is not inherently wrong for doing so, but it is an opportunity to continue to improve how we tell our stories to each other.
The adoptee reality isn’t that simple or funny
At the beginning of the film, when Lolo comes across the photo with baby Audrey and her birth mother, Audrey quickly dismisses the picture and tries to suppress her internal conflicts. Despite Lolo’s good intention to help Audrey finalize her work deal and find her birth mother, the story inadvertently forced Audrey into a birth search with very little time to process her self-identity internally.
For Asian adoptees in North America, grappling with being adopted by families that do not look like them or being transplanted to a place where preconceived racial notions often judge them is not as simple to unpack as a…
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