It took a while for stories of Asian love to make it to American screens, but once they crashed the party, movies like Crazy Rich Asians and Always Be My Maybe showed that Asians are quite capable of delivering the swoon. In this Q&A, actor Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and filmmaker Alice Wu (Saving Face, The Half of It) talk about the racial politics of romance, the aching need we sometimes have to touch and be touched, and the ways in which love is a many-splendored—and gendered—thing.
*
We’ll get right into it. Why do you think it took so long for Asian American romances to appear on-screen?
Simu Liu: Well, historically, cinema has been framed from a predominantly white male perspective. That means Asian male characters would rarely be three dimensional or aspirational, much less romantically appealing. And meanwhile, Asian women were often fetishized as docile, submissive sex objects. You can see how that combination might serve as an obstacle to depicting Asians through a romantic lens. I can’t say that I even remember seeing two Asian people kissing in a Hollywood film until I reached adulthood.
We’re telling these stories as a kind of proxy for that abundance.
Alice Wu: But most Asian American indie films haven’t focused on romance either. And I think there are reasons for that: Ours is still a majority immigrant community, and if you’re the new kid on the block, that first generation basically has to just figure out how to survive. Romance is not practical. In a lot of ways, it’s the opposite of practical. So maybe it takes two or three generations to get to a point where you’re ready to make romance a focus, something you can tell stories about. And I think American romantic cinema is a late bloomer—but as a result, our romantic movies contain all the beauty and the pain of being a late bloomer.
I can see that. A lot of us—not all!—were definitely slower to experience romance than our non-Asian…
Read the full article here