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I plan to use this because it talks about how the movie made in on the big screen. The directors thought it was very important for the movie to make it in theaters rather than just having it on t.v. With this, there would be more representation of Asians in movies.

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The new film's creators turned down a "gigantic payday" at Netflix to ensure the first Asian-American-focused studio movie in 25 years would be seen in theaters and, if all goes well, reshape the Hollywood landscape: "The biggest stage with the biggest stakes - that's what we asked for."

Kevin Kwan's heart was pounding. It was a Friday evening in October 2016, and the author of the breakout 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians was in his Manhattan home, on a conference call with the producers of the planned film adaptation - Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and John Penotti - and its director, Jon M. Chu, along with their respective legal teams, about 22 people in all. They had a massive decision to make.

Behind one door: Warner Bros., which had outbid other traditional studios with a distribution offer for Crazy Rich Asians a week earlier. Behind the other: Netflix, the great disrupter, which had come in hot the following Monday, dangling complete artistic freedom, a greenlighted trilogy and huge, seven-figure-minimum paydays for each stakeholder, upfront. Now Warners had come back with not so much a counteroffer as an ultimatum, giving the filmmakers just 15 minutes to pick an option. Jacobson spoke up: "We're going to go with whatever Kevin and Jon want to do."

Kwan's lawyer, Peter Nichols, was pulled over on the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway texting his client furiously. Kwan and Chu had already tried to rationalize the cash grab: "Maybe we donate a percentage of our extra income to great causes," Chu recalls the two having discussed the night before. "But where does that money go? Right back to trying to get to this position of getting us [Asians] on the big screen."

No wonder Kwan, 44, was nervous. "I could sense every lawyer on the call shaking their heads: 'Ugh, these stupid idealists.' Here, we have a chance for this gigantic payday instantaneously," he says. "But Jon and I both felt this sense of purpose. We needed this to be an old-fashioned cinematic experience, not for fans to sit in front of a TV and just press a button." Adds Chu: "We were gifted this position to make a decision no one else can make, which is turning down the big payday for rolling the dice [on the box office] - but being invited to the big party, which is people paying money to go see us."

And so the director and the novelist passed on the crazy rich offer - "I could have moved to an island and never worked another day," says Kwan - and said no to Netflix. After more than a dozen advisers hung up in disappointment, Kwan called Chu. Both were in tears as Kwan asked, "What just happened?"

This is what happened: A major studio was throwing its weight behind an all-Westernized Asian cast and creator in a theatrical film release for the first time since 1993, when Disney made The Joy Luck Club, until now the only Hollywood studio movie to feature an entirely Asian-American ensemble. That multigenerational drama - a film its executive producer Janet Yang says isn't "commercial" enough to be made today - earned $33 million ($57 million adjusted for inflation). Unlike 2000 foreign-language Oscar winner Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and 2005 novel adaptation Memoirs of a Geisha (both released by Sony), Crazy Rich Asians centers on contemporary characters. The Meet the Parents-type tale - a Chinese-American professor accompanies her boyfriend to Singapore, not realizing that he's heir to a richer-than-God fortune - is a romantic comedy, another first in the tiny canon of Asian-American studio films, and a format that has struggled to find its way at the box office in recent years.

So even with the runaway success of Kwan's novel, which became an international best-seller (more than a million copies sold in more than 20 languages), Warner Bros. - whose chairman and CEO, Kevin Tsujihara, happens to be the first and only studio chief of Asian descent - is rolling the dice too. Early tracking has the film's five-day opening weekend at around $20 million, a solid number that's ahead of most recent rom-coms - and the industry is watching closely. "I don't think any movie wants to have to carry the weight on its shoulders in terms of, 'If this movie doesn't work, is this a big stumbling block for this kind [of film]?'" says box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian, of comScore. "But I think studios are learning that the biggest risks can reap the biggest rewards. To have that biggest punch, you want that wide theatrical release where everyone is talking about it."

For all of Netflix's reach and riches, it won't give films an exclusive theatrical window, which means major cinema chains won't play its movies - and the streamer doesn't offer proof, at least publicly, of a film's performance. "You can look at Get Out, you can look at Black Panther - it changes the whole economics of the business when movies like that succeed," says Jacobson. "It meant something to us to become a 'comp' for somebody else."

Crazy Rich Asians was almost made by Wendi Deng Murdoch, Rupert's China-born ex, after Graydon Carter gave her an advance copy of the novel. "She was the first person that came calling and, of course, she knows this world," says Kwan, whose book is a satirical take on his own Singaporean upbringing. "She had a vision for the movie that completely jelled with what I saw."

The deal didn't pan out, partly because of timing (Murdoch was in the midst of her high-profile divorce from Rupert), but UTA, representing the adaptation rights, was fielding plenty of interest. "I met with, I think, six producers in one day," says Kwan. "It was like a beauty contest." Many had renminbi signs in their eyes. "They were interested in getting into the Chinese market, and I was like, 'This is a movie with worldwide and domestic potential - that just happens to star Asians.'"

Color Force's Jacobson and Simpson, known for the Hunger Games franchise, saw it the same way. "It feels so mainstream and accessible - anybody can relate to being rejected by in-laws," says Jacobson. She and Simpson vowed to secure financing from a company with Asian ties, and UTA steered them to Ivanhoe Pictures, Penotti's then-brand-new company with offices in Singapore and Hong Kong. While Kwan had lucrative offers, he optioned his book to Color Force and Ivanhoe for just $1 (with triggers in place for him to earn more as the project got made) in exchange for the right to remain involved with development decisions - a rare opportunity for a first-timer. "To say, 'I'm going to do this for a dollar,'" says Simpson, "the only other person I know who does that is Stephen King."

The team decided to package the project with a script and a director before going out to studios. "You don't want to just be another piece of development. With a movie like this, people are never going to have to make it, and it could get lost," says Simpson, who adds that in 2013, two years ahead of #OscarsSoWhite, Hollywood was "sort of pre-this moment of, 'Let's have more representation.'" (Before going with Color Force, Kwan fielded pitches that included turning his heroine into a white woman; "It's a pity you don't have a white character," he was told by one producer.)

By 2016, the team had a working screenplay by The Proposal's Peter Chiarelli and was ready to bring a director on board. Jacobson and Simpson approached a few contenders, all of Asian descent. Chu, then 36, had just completed production on Now You See Me 2 and was looking for his next project. He'd had success with action sequels (2013's G.I. Joe: Retaliation scored $376 million worldwide), dance and music films (Justin Bieber documentaries) and movies that are both (the Step Up franchise), but none of the eight films in his 10-year career had explored his own Chinese-American identity. "Something in me shifted during those Twitter-sphere protests of Whitewashed Out and Starring John Cho," he says, referencing two hashtags decrying Asian underrepresentation in Hollywood that were trending at the time. "I was like, 'I have this power to do something, but what is the story?'"

He took a few meetings in China, but nothing connected with his experience. Then his sister called, nagging him about a book she'd urged him to read a year earlier. He phoned his agent, UTA's Rob Carlson, to ask about Crazy Rich Asians. "How did you know?" Carlson replied - he'd been sent the script from Jacobson and Simpson that very day.

Chu's presentation to the producers began with old photographs of his parents, immigrant restaurateurs who bought him filmmaking books in high school, and his four older siblings, who personally catered his first short-film screening at USC. The pitch then segued to a multimedia vision board for "a way we haven't ever seen Asians before," Chu explains. "Contemporary, stylish, at the top of art and fashion, emotional, funny, sarcastic and unapologetic. Confident." He also offered up a dream casting sheet, "the Avengers of fucking [Asian] actors," which included Fresh Off the Boat star Constance Wu, The Daily Show correspondent Ronny Chieng, Silicon Valley breakout Jimmy O. Yang, martial arts cinema legend Michelle Yeoh and Brit beauty Gemma Chan. Wu met with Chu about playing Rachel, but her ABC sitcom conflicted with his shooting schedule, so she was out. Then a month or so later, Wu was on a flight and "I guess I was feeling dramatic or something," says the 36- year-old star. She wrote Chu an email: "Dates are dates, and if those are unmovable, I understand. But I would put all of my heart, hope, humor and courage into the role. What all this could do means so much to me. It's why I advocate so much for young Asian-American girls, so they might not spend their life feeling small or being commanded to be grateful to even be at the table."

The letter convinced Chu, who pushed production about five months to accommodate Wu; soon after, Yeoh, 55, joined as Nick's fearsome mother, Eleanor. The Chinese-Malaysian Crouching Tiger star, who had looked into acquiring Crazy Rich Asians' option herself, made it clear she was not interested in playing a tiger mom stereotype. "Eleanor was very representative of some of the most beautiful women I've met in Asia who take a second seat, because that's how you manage your husband's position in the society," she says. "And I don't think it's just Chinese women - I think it's very universal to be self-sacrificing, first to your husband, and then to your children."

Nailing that nuance in Eleanor's character was required before Yeoh would commit, so Chu brought in Malaysian-born TV writer Adele Lim, who worked with Chu to incorporate not just more cultural specificity into Chiarelli's script, but also emotional authenticity. Resolving the face-off between Rachel and Eleanor without villainizing the latter required a deft touch and a new third act, original to the movie. "This hold that parents have on their children is a specifically Asian thing," says Lim. "It presents itself in really aggressive ways sometimes, but it comes from a place of deep devotion."

Finding the film's male lead was, unsurprisingly, the toughest challenge. The character of Nick Young was "the type of human being that walks between the raindrops," says Terri Taylor, who scoured the globe with fellow casting director PoPing AuYeung. "The list [of contenders] always remained fairly short. It was probably a vast difference in volume compared with if we were trying to cast Ryan Gosling's [role] in The Notebook."

The talent agencies scoured their rosters, and some drama schools in the U.S. and U.K. told the casting directors that they hadn't seen anyone who fit Nick's type - as in, an Asian leading man - in a long while. Just days before the team had to deliver a candidate to Warners, Wu was set to read with four finalists in L.A. and four in China. But none felt quite right to Chu.

Then the director received a tip from an accountant in the production's Malaysian office who remembered watching a travel video years earlier that was hosted by a handsome young Asian man with a British accent. Intrigued, Chu and Taylor began cyber-stalking the social media accounts of Henry Golding, a Singapore-based presenter for travel programs on the BBC and Discovery Channel Asia.

"Jon started following me on Instagram, and I was like [ gasps], 'What does this mean?'" says Golding. Shortly thereafter, Chu reached out via a mutual friend and Golding, 31, sent a self-tape for what he figured would be a bit part. That led to a 17-hour trip to L.A. for a chemistry read with Wu, then, days later, a screen test with the studio that required the newly married Golding to cut short his Cape Town honeymoon.

"He's like John F. Kennedy Jr. in New York, cooler than any of these [other] guys we were reading, and he's not even trying," Chu says, adding that Warner Bros.' film chair, Toby Emmerich, was likewise charmed. "We showed Toby and he was like, 'Is there even a choice to be made here? Obviously that dude.'"

The surprise casting was a coup for Chu, but after it was announced, there was a bit of backlash in some corners of the internet (the Malaysian-English actor is biracial, while Nick is Chinese-Singaporean)."What is the level of Asian-ness you need to be to be profiled as Asian?" says Golding, who has since booked two more films, including Paul Feig's September mystery A Simple Favor, opposite Blake Lively. "Spending my childhood in England, I was always labeled as Asian. I'm Asian. I was born in Asia, I've grown up most of my life in Asia. Jon would not have chosen me if he didn't think I was right for the role."

With the casting team still hustling to fill 76 speaking parts, nearly all of them Asian, the eight-week shoot commenced in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in April 2017. (The $30 million production would move to the more-costly Singapore for its final three weeks.) For its cast - hailing from the United States, England, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia - the experience was somewhat surreal. "We've all been 'that Asian' on set at one point. That dynamic didn't exist here," says Chinese-Korean-American rapper-actress Awkwafina, 29, who plays Rachel's best friend. Adds Korean-American actor Ken Jeong, who plays her father (earning the 49-year-old the affectionate off-camera nickname "Papafina"): "We've gotten to a point where it's accepted to have Asian-American supporting roles in major movies, and I've been a beneficiary of that. But when all the participants are Asian, it's even more joyous to support the story and each other."

Everyone was on the lookout for potential blind spots and cultural cliches. Wu convinced Chu to remove dialogue from the book wherein Rachel boasts about never dating Asian men. Yeoh, touring Eleanor's kitchen set, pointed the finger at a packet of MSG. "You can't have that on the table!" she exclaimed, but Chu reassured her that no one would notice. (She was later vindicated when the director sent a snapshot of the pair on set to his father - owner of the deceptively old-school Silicon Valley power spot Chef Chu's - who ignored the film icon next to his son and instead complained about the MSG in the background.)

The cast forged out together nearly every night for street food and karaoke, led by the ensemble's local natives, who included Golding and Chieng, who was raised in Malaysia and Singapore. ("When I read about the movie, I called my agent and said, 'If you can get me an audition, I swear I can book this one,'" says Chieng, 32, who plays one of Nick's snobby cousins. "In fact, this is the only one I can book, because there's no other movie that's going to ask for this kind of accent.'") Although many of the actors had never met prior to production, "everybody was on the same page," says Silicon Valley's Hong Kong-born Yang, 31, who plays an obnoxious playboy in the Singaporean high-society scene. "We all kind of grew up the same way, so there was no convincing, like, 'Oh, hey, we're going to Chinatown for Asian food, but don't worry, it's not that adventurous.' Like Gemma and Sonoya [Mizuno], they're basically models, but we're always on the same page about eating. Nobody's vegetarian."

The actors stay connected via a massive WhatsApp group text, and several made it to Chu and graphic designer Kristin Hodge's July 27 wedding in Napa (Golding was a groomsman). "I'm so used to being the token that I forgot how much it meant to have your people around you," says Nico Santos, the Filipino-American star of NBC's Superstore who plays another of Nick's cousins. "I didn't have an Asian crew I rolled with until I found Crazy Rich Asians."

Ahead of the film's Aug. 15 opening, Warner Bros. has embarked on a unique marketing campaign befitting its unprecedented film. In April, an unheard-of four months before release, the studio hosted a tastemakers screening at downtown L.A.'s Theatre at Ace Hotel for 1,200 people, most of them Asian-American. Audible sniffles were heard throughout the darkened theater as the romantic comedy played out onscreen.

"When they do screenings, a lot of Asian-American people have this overwhelming urge to cry. And they don't know exactly why," says Awkwafina. The Ocean's 8 breakout can perhaps relate, having teared up one evening during the shoot when Chu showed her some of her dailies. "I've never seen myself as a character in a movie," she told him.

More advance screenings have been held in major cities including San Francisco and Washington, D.C. On July 26, designer Prabal Gurung and several of fashion's Asian stars hosted one in New York. Warners also is working with Asian-American community organizations to arrange theater buyouts and develop outreach strategies to a demographic that, according to the MPAA, registered the U.S. and Canada's second-highest per-capita theater attendance (behind Hispanic/Latinos) last year. Still, Asians represent just 6 percent of the American population, so for Crazy Rich Asians to be a success, it will have to play broadly - as, in fact, its sole studio predecessor did in 1993.

"There was no point in thinking about whether Joy Luck Club could succeed on an Asian audience alone," recalls producer Yang. Like Crazy Rich Asians, Amy Tan's novel "was not just an Asian thing," she adds. "Nobody even thought about Asians as a distinct demographic group back then." But that film's resonance with generations of Asian-Americans has obscured its wider reach, which Warners is betting on for Chu's film. "I really believe it will work on a broad basis," says production president Courtenay Valenti. "It's a story with rich themes about identity and culture and where do you belong, which are so universal, especially in terms of the conversation that's resonant today worldwide." The film will have a staggered international rollout in dozens of markets, from Australia to Italy, although a make-or-break China release is not yet confirmed. "We're all praying to the China gods right now," says Ivanhoe's Penotti. "From my colleagues in Beijing, it looks like we're in strong consideration."

It has taken a rapid succession of undeniable hits - Hidden Figures, Get Out, Girls Trip, Black Panther - for Hollywood to warm to the concept that culturally specific stories can lure wide audiences by offering novel takes on well-worn genres. "When people get to see either themselves on screen or fresh faces who aren't the same old lineup, reshuffled, we're seeing breakout success," says Jacobson. Still, the creatives behind Crazy Rich Asians know that the marketability and near-future prospects of an entire community's body of work likely hinge on their perceived success or failure. "We can sugarcoat it all we want, but the moment you bring up an Asian-led movie, there's one example to point to, and that'll be us," says Chu. "To be on the biggest stage with the biggest stakes, that's what we asked for."
A version of this story first appeared in the Aug. 1 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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The Stakes Are High for 'Crazy Rich Asians' - And That's the Point

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The new film's creators turned down a "gigantic payday" at Netflix to ensure the first Asian-American-focused studio movie in 25 years would be seen in theaters and, if all goes well, reshape the Hollywood landscape: "The biggest stage with the biggest stakes - that's what we asked for."

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I plan to use this because it talks about the struggles Asians go through to even be in film. They are constantly criticized for their looks and accents. People overlook their hard work.

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There's a scene in Crazy Rich Asians in which Rachel Chu, the lead character played by Constance Wu, is in a game of poker. Her hand is much weaker than her opponent's-he's got two pairs-but she fearlessly bluffs and puts in all her chips. He folds, only to be crushed when she reveals her cards. As Rachel, a professor of economics and game theory at New York University, tells her students, "The key is playing to win, instead of trying not to lose."

To many in Hollywood, Crazy Rich Asians might look like a risky bet. It's the first modern story with an all-Asian cast and an Asian-American lead in 25 years; the last, The Joy Luck Club, was in 1993. It's an earnest romantic comedy in a sea of action and superhero films. It features two leads who are new to movies: Wu, an actor most recognizable for her role on the ABC series Fresh Off the Boat, and Henry Golding, a virtual unknown who last worked as a travel host for the BBC. And it makes use of a multilingual script that flips seamlessly from English to Cantonese to Mandarin and back again.

But if you understand the cultural forces that are at play-an underserved audience, the rapidly expanding influence of Asian culture and the power of the global box office, this $30 million movie doesn't seem like much of a gamble at all. In fact, it seems destined to be a hit. Crazy Rich Asians is pure escapist fantasy, a Cinderella story about an Asian-American woman meeting her boyfriend's colorful and, yes, crazy-rich family in Singapore. It also boasts a relatable rom-com heroine, opulent set pieces and witty dialogue. It has already won over critics: the film has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

That doesn't mean getting this movie made was easy. An early prospective producer suggested casting a white woman as the lead. Later, the filmmakers turned down a lucrative deal with Netflix to make the film with Warner Bros., which guaranteed it a higher-profile release. This mattered, both for fans of Kevin Kwan's best-selling book series, which inspired the film, and for Asian audiences the world over who have waited decades to see themselves represented onscreen in all their diversity. Hollywood has grown increasingly dependent on Asian financiers and global audiences to turn a profit. Crazy Rich Asians has the potential to revive the romantic comedy-a genre that has foundered at the box office recently-for a massive general audience. By representing Asian people so vividly, the film could set a precedent for many more stories like this one to be told. It's coming at the right moment. After years of work in the game of Hollywood, Crazy Rich Asians is poised to win.

For Wu, the film's success is about so much more than just its ability to establish her as a marquee star. Wu first broke out on a sitcom, and she has killer comedic timing-but she's also deadly serious, and fiercely outspoken, about issues of representation and equality.

For decades, Asian Americans working in the film and television industry have carried the impossible burden of fixing a system that has tended to punish, stereotype and ignore them. "They think we'll say yes to anything and we'll just be grateful," Wu tells me as we walk around the Silver Lake Reservoir in Los Angeles a few weeks before the film's release.

Wu is, nonetheless, grateful. With her experience on Fresh Off the Boat, the first network comedy to feature Asian-American leads since Margaret Cho's show All-American Girl in 1994, the Taiwanese-American actor has now had the unique experience of being featured in two milestone projects about Asian Americans. This matters to her. Both she and the film's director, Jon M. Chu, she says, are Asian-American pioneers. "We are not supporting roles," Wu says. "We are stars on our own journeys."

Her casting in this film as Rachel signals that she's the most bankable Asian-American movie star in a generation. But Wu has spent years discussing the state of Asian representation, both in interviews and with fans, and a sense of pressure has made her terrified of what will happen when the film is finally out.

Behind the smiling Instagram posts and glossy photo shoots ahead of the movie's release, Wu tells me she has been having panic attacks and crying every night. She's not typically an anxious person, but she's sensitive, which is part of what makes her such a great, funny actor and outspoken advocate of women's issues and greater diversity in her field. It also means that she's vulnerable to criticism about everything from her hair to her pronunciation of Mandarin to her love life. "I'm really scared of being such a public figure and opening myself up to scrutiny," Wu says. "I'm very panicked that I'm not going to be able to handle it, and I'm just going to have hurt feelings for a really long time."

For so long, Asian-American women have been told to be grateful for whatever they get, and that being objectified is better than being ignored. But Wu's clear ideas about the type of work she wants to do, along with her race and gender, have made her a target on and off sets. "I couldn't do a shoot because I had a sick family member, and I was punished for it," she says. "Even saying I'm worthy of being a leading lady-people don't like it when a woman asserts her worth." But her experience on Crazy Rich Asians, being supported by people with the same commitment to representation that's guided her career, was more positive. "At the end of the day, the thing that drives people and moves people is truth and story and humanity," she says. "If you make sure all your work has depth, even if it's something fun and light like a rom-com, that's how you make good work."

In Kwan's book, Rachel is Chinese-American, raised by an immigrant single mom with decidedly American values. Her boyfriend Nick Young is the scion of a Singaporean family that is described as "richer than God." When Rachel goes to the Southeast Asian country to meet Nick's relatives for the first time, she's exposed to a world of privilege unlike anything she's ever seen. While the stories may seem outlandish, the details are from Kwan's own life. He drew on his upbringing as a member of one of Singapore's wealthy families, his experience as an immigrant kid in suburban Houston and his observations of his friends and relatives during visits to Asia as they became even richer.

At the time Kwan sold the rights to Crazy Rich Asians, he was already tasked with writing its sequel, China Rich Girlfriend. But as one of the film's executive producers from the start, he organized a research tour of Asia for other producers, answered questions from screenwriters Adele Lim and Peter Chiarelli, and helped pick the director.

Kwan and the other producers set a high bar. That included independently developing the screenplay for two years, sending casting directors to search for Asian actors in several countries outside of the U.S. and seeking an eye-watering amount of high fashion to rival that in The Devil Wears Prada.

The viewer encounters this glamorous world through Rachel's eyes, making the film function as much as lifestyle porn as it does as a romantic comedy. It was critical to get the details right. One scene features a 'Paul Newman' Rolex Daytona, which holds the record for the most expensive watch ever sold. Several pieces from Hong Kong-based bespoke jeweler Carnet also make an appearance. "These women wouldn't wear Cartier," Kwan says of the matriarchs in his story. "Cartier is too common for them."

Having directed, along with two S tep Up movies and the blockbuster G.I. Joe: Retaliation, a pair of documentaries about Justin Bieber, Chu knew a lot about expectations from fans and how even small details could be the subject of fierce scrutiny. "We had a mah-jongg specialist come in and design a game for us and teach us," Chu says, in order to nail a climactic tête-à-tête between Rachel and Nick's mother Eleanor, played by the venerable actor Michelle Yeoh. For day-to-day details, such as what food should be served and which language should be used, many of the cast and crew members, but especially Kwan, were treated as on-set experts. "It just opened a channel of communication on a set where it's usually, 'Just do what the director says,'" Chu says. "It's going to exist forever on film-you better do it right."

Evoking the sights and sounds of an outdoor market and the gleam of ultra-exclusive Mouawad jewelry was important, but even more crucial was the film's ability to represent the profound tensions within the Asian experience-especially the differences in identifying with mainland Asia vs. the diaspora. Rachel is part of a group that isn't the dominant culture; when she goes to Singapore, she's surrounded by people who look more like her, but the way she grew up makes her an outsider.

Moreover, despite the movie's title, Asian isn't a monolithic identity-something that's easier to understand from the vantage point of a cosmopolitan place like Singapore, which serves as a nexus for many Asian experiences. But Hollywood has tended to treat it as one category. "Obviously, Korean is different than Chinese, which is different from the Vietnamese culture, but the way the [American] culture has treated us is a point that we can probably find some common ground on," Wu says. She's frustrated by people who don't seem to understand the differences, especially in the limited number of period and independent films featuring Asian actors. "They think that having an Asian in their movie is the same thing as having an Asian American, and it's just not," she says.

While the film is charming you with its romantic-comedy affectations, it's slyly doing another kind of work as a commentary on class: Rachel's back-ground is working-class, while her college roommate Goh Peik Lin, a Singapore native, is hilariously rendered as nouveau riche-and then the Youngs are so old-money, they don't even talk about it. There are Asians from several countries, with different accents and different values-funny housewives, total jerks, devious socialites, air-headed actors and sassy friends. Oh, and hot guys with great abs too.

Few major studio productions explicitly aim to educate their audience, and non-Asian viewers going to this film may just want to see a glitzy rom-com. But many might walk out with a deeper understanding of the class gradations even just within Singaporean society, and the collectivist vs. individualist tensions found in many Asian families. And there's no obvious stereotyping. For decades, female Asian actors have been asked to portray stereotypes like the vindictive dragon lady, the submissive China doll, the nerdy overachiever or the inert sex worker. Crazy Rich Asians avoids all of these, instead showing the nuances of Asian women's experiences across generations.

Even Eleanor, who butts heads with Rachel, isn't a typical potential monster-in-law-she just comes from a different world and thinks only of what's best for her son and the families that depend on him. "In the old traditional sense, the elders came first. They were always put ahead of us," Yeoh explains. "That's how we showed filial piety and love." The film, Yeoh says, represents "a great opportunity to show our heritage and our traditions from the Asian side."

Given its ambitions, it's unsurprising that Crazy Rich Asians has been held to high standards. It was criticized before a single scene was shot-specifically for the casting of British-Malaysian actor Henry Golding as Nick and Japanese-British-Argentine actor Sonoya Mizuno as Araminta Lee. But the litigation of whether mixed-race actors are "Asian enough" has overshadowed the number of cast and crew members who are Straits Chinese, such as Lim, Yeoh, associate producer Janice Chua, actor Tan Kheng Hua and Ronny Chieng, who was born in Malaysia, grew up in Singapore and cinched the multi-national life of his character Edison Cheng by attending law school in Australia. "We strived very hard to match the perfect accent to every actor, and I think we did a pretty amazing job, but sometimes we had to make concessions," Kwan says. "Like, this actor was amazing, but he's not going to sound like he went to Hong Kong's top boarding school his whole life."

Everyone involved in this film says they hope it will pave the way for a Hollywood that allows many more stories about Asian Americans, with different perspectives, body types and ethnic backgrounds. And they're counting on that change to happen quickly. For Crazy Rich Asians, the pressure to succeed at the box office is high. But there are several factors already working in the film's favor.

Kwan's novels are hugely popular globally, with plenty of non-Asian readers, having sold more than 1 million copies in more than 20 languages. During readings for his first book tour, in 2013, Kwan says it was housewives in Texas and New York City socialites who made up his audience. It happened globally too: "There wasn't a single Asian person," he says, recalling a packed reading in Zurich with 300 people. "It was a sea of white faces that came out. To see that level of interest just speaks to the universality of the story. "

The film is being released in mid-August, traditionally a time when studios dump action films and mediocre comedies. But Crazy Rich Asians is different. Tracking estimates already peg the first-week sales at about $26 million. Warner Bros. screened the film for taste-makers months in advance to help build buzz. That strategy is working: Kwan's first book is on the New York Times best-seller list again.

The mood in which the movie opens also matters. Recently, Asian culture has exploded in popularity among Western audiences: K-pop supergroup BTS reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts in June, sales of Korean beauty products have tripled since 2015, and Japanese clothing company Uniqlo signed tennis star Roger Federer as its brand representative. Fresh Off the Boat has reached syndication status, meaning many more viewers will have the chance to see it.

After years of saying otherwise, Hollywood has finally realized that telling more inclusive stories is just good business. In the past three years, a number of films-including Straight Outta Compton ($202 million), Creed ($174 million), Get Out ($255 million), Girls Trip ($140 million), and especially Black Panther ($1.3 billion) -have shown that movie projects in a variety of genres with black and female leads as well as directors of color can be hits. Plus, Chu already has something in common with Nancy Meyers, the queen of romantic comedies: both directors have generated over $1 billion in ticket sales worldwide.

Still, there will be other definitions of success, beyond the numbers. Chu dreams of this movie being repeatedly played on a television channel like TBS, and he has heard directly from fans about how it has changed the way they see themselves-including men who tell him they're "proud to be an Asian dude" and those who never would've watched a romantic comedy before. "I didn't know we would get that kind of reaction," he says.

Wu hopes for a future with "narrative plenitude" through a wide variety of creative projects, so that one story doesn't have to represent all Asians, or all Asian Americans-a world in which the ability to tell stories that represent billions of people won't hinge on one movie's reception. "When you can be mediocre and still not feel like you have to prove something," she says. "That's when you know you've hit success."

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'Crazy Rich Asians' Is Going to Change Hollywood. It's About Time

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There's a scene in Crazy Rich Asians in which Rachel Chu, the lead character played by Constance Wu, is in a game of poker. Her hand is much weaker than her opponent's-he's got two pairs-but she fearlessly bluffs and puts in all her chips. He folds, only to be crushed when she reveals her cards.

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I plan to use this article because it talks about the movement for Asians to be more represented in films. If it weren't for this movie, Asians probably wouldn't have been represented as much. It's an advocate for more Asians in movies.

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If you didn't know the backstory of forthcoming film Crazy Rich Asians, you would think it was fiction. Based on Kevin Kwan's 2013 best-selling novel, the movie takes its inspiration from the writer's elite upbringing in Singapore: his grandfather helped invent Chinese cure-all Tiger Balm; his cousin is Nancy Kwan, one of Hollywood's first Asian stars; and as a kid he bred arowanas - exotic fish that now sell for up to $300,000 each. The "crazy" wealth is on an extreme scale: cruise ships with multiple pools, climate-controlled closets, and more private planes than cars. It also raises the stakes in Kwan's story about a romantic relationship between two New York University professors. After dating for two years, Nick Young (Henry Golding) flies Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) to his native Singapore to meet his family. Once there, Rachel learns that Nick is the highly sought-after heir to an enormous fortune, and any prospect of a future with Rachel in it sparks jealousy, sabotage and bullying that involves a bloody gutted fish.

But the film's exotic flowers and million-dollar gems have been eclipsed by a far weightier conversation. There is a dearth of major Hollywood roles available to Asian-American actors - they are given less than 5% of speaking parts, according to a University of Southern California study - meaning director Jon M Chu's film has already become a beacon for representation. For the film adaptation, he called for aspiring actors to submit audition tapes to get a chance to play a part. "We just really wanted to open up the process, because we know how hard it is to get in the door," Chu said in his announcement, "especially for Asian characters of different shapes, sizes and talents."

Asian actors have struggled to gain visibility in the United States, an issue cemented in 1930 when Hollywood enforced the Hays Code, a list of several dozen restrictions to keep films "wholesome" and "moral". Interracial marriage was still banned in 30 states, and the Hays Code forbade depictions of relationships between "the white and black races". As a result, MGM's 1937 adaptation of The Good Earth, Pearl S Buck's Pulitzer-winning novel set in Imperial China, starred a white couple. Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American star in Hollywood cinema, auditioned for female lead O-Lan, but because Jewish-American actor Paul Muni had already committed to play the male lead, MGM instead chose German actress Luise Rainer.

Hollywood may have stopped enforcing the Hays Code 50 years ago, but its repercussions are still felt. We have only very recently seen Asian-Americans reinterpret the romantic comedy, with Selfie, The Mindy Project, Master of None and The Big Sick, plus the forthcoming To All the Boys I've Loved Before, and Always Be My Maybe.

Meanwhile, the whitewashing of Hollywood cinema is a tradition that refuses to die: the many recent high-profile cases of Asian whitewashing include Cameron Crowe's Aloha (2015), which cast Emma Stone as the quarter-Chinese, quarter-native Hawaiian Allison Ng; 2016's Doctor Strange, where Tilda Swinton played a character who hails from the fictional Himalayan kingdom of Kamar-Taj; and 2017's Ghost in the Shell, with Scarlett Johansson as Major Mira Killian.

After it was announced that two Hollywood films would be made about the rescue of the 12 Thai boys from the Tham Luang cave, tweets joked that all the parts would be played by Johansson. Indeed, Kwan told the Hollywood Reporter that one of the first producers interested in Crazy Rich Asians asked whether some roles, including Constance Wu's Rachel Chu, could be rewritten as Caucasian.

It is significant, then, that Crazy Rich Asians has been cited as the first major Hollywood picture with an all-Asian principal cast since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. Because of this, its scenes feel like firsts: you get to see how a character like Wu, the Chinese-American Rachel Chu, feels when she meets her boyfriend's family in Singapore for the first time. The dynamic that Asian-Americans never feel wholly Asian or American, or like they belong with either group, is explored.

"Either because the roles haven't been written, or the roles are marginal, Asian-American actors never get the chance to become A-list actors," says Nancy Wang Yuen, Biola University professor and sociology chair. "They never get to flex their acting muscle because there is nothing there for them."

No wonder prospective viewers have pinned their hopes on diversity in Hollywood on a single film. There is a moral imperative among Asian-Americans to see Crazy Rich Asians. "It's not a movie, it's a movement," director Chu said at an advance screening. It feels as if viewers must demonstrate the demand for their stories on screen - otherwise, another movie boasting an all-Asian cast might not happen in Hollywood for yet another 25 years.

But because the conversation around diversity and representation has become so charged, does it mean that standards are impossibly high for what is essentially a romantic comedy that indulges in our fascination with extreme wealth?

People even critiqued the trailer's lack of browner faces, which could possibly signify Singapore's Malay and Indian populations. On Twitter, they nicknamed the film #CrazyRichEastAsians, #CrazyRichMongoloids and #CrazyRichEastLight-SkinnedAsians. They protested the trailer's absence of Singlish, the patois prominently featured in the book. As Nick, British-Malaysian travel host and first-time actor Golding strolls in complete with a British accent (a detail also in the book), and when audiences saw him, they zeroed in on his Eurasian background. The debate is reminiscent of one that occurred during the release of 2005's award-winning Memoirs of a Geisha - the film was criticised for casting Chinese rather than Japanese actors as leads (one of them being Michelle Yeoh, who plays Nick's mother Eleanor in Crazy Rich Asians).

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Keeping mum: Michelle Yeoh in Crazy Rich Asians. Photograph: Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros

As well as seeing a non-white cast in full regalia for once - Crazy Rich Asians centres on what is essentially a royal wedding - it could also mean further definitive proof of minorities' oft-ignored but growing digital influence and purchasing power. Because of this pressure, Crazy Rich Asians has inevitably been compared to another recent diverse blockbuster.

"Crazy Rich Asians could continue the movement of diverse hit movies like February's Black Panther," said Business Insider recently. However, comparing Crazy Rich Asians to Black Panther does not account for how complex and deeply personal representation can be. Black Panther was cathartic because of how it violently confronted America's political history, when enslaved Africans were commodified as free labour. Crazy Rich Asians, however, does not wage war; instead it feels revolutionary in the way in which Chu folds a culture clash into a date-night movie that actually features an Asian couple.

"Looking at grass-roots movements and business models we can do as a community is great," Yuen says. "But to say: 'We need our own Black Panther,' attaching it to someone else's success, takes away from what Black Panther means to that community."

Crazy Rich Asians is on track for a $18m-plus US opening, according to projections by its distributor Warner Bros, (the film's creators rejected what Kwan called a "gigantic payday" from Netflix to ensure it would be seen in cinemas). And hopefully its stars will continue to land big roles - Golding will next star in Hong Khaou's Monsoon, playing a man who returns to Saigon after fleeing during the Vietnam war. It's important, too, says Yuen, that in the future, representation "doesn't have to be this phenomenon that we have to wait for".

"I know [Crazy Rich Asians] won't represent every Asian American," Constance Wu tweeted on 31 July. "So for those who don't feel seen, I hope there is a story you find soon that does represent you. I am rooting for you. We're not all the same, but we all have a story."
Crazy Rich Asians is out in the UK on 2 November
* The headline of this article was amended on 11 September 2018. It misquoted director Jon Chu as saying "moment" instead of "movement".
Topics

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'It's not a movie, it's a movement': Crazy Rich Asians takes on Hollywood

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If you didn't know the backstory of forthcoming film Crazy Rich Asians, you would think it was fiction. Based on Kevin Kwan's 2013 best-selling novel, the movie takes its inspiration from the writer's elite upbringing in Singapore: his grandfather helped invent Chinese cure-all Tiger Balm; his cousin is Nancy Kwan, one of Hollywood's first Asian stars; and as a kid he bred arowanas - exotic fish that now sell for up to $300,000 each.

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I plan to use this article because it gives insight on the plot of the story. Kwan, the author of the novel, shares his story on how the characters came about. It also talks about his background in Singapore.

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As a child in Singapore, author Kevin Kwan remembers going to a family friend's house, where his father played tennis. Next to the tennis court was an airplane hangar with a private jet casually sitting in it.

At the house of another family friend, he saw at least 15 exotic cars - among them vintage sports cars and Rolls Royces in all colours of the rainbow - parked in perfect rows along the estate's portico.

"It was only looking back that I realised how unusual that is in Singapore," says Kwan, the best-selling author of comic novel Crazy Rich Asians and its sequels. His first book gave readers an insight into the world of insanely wealthy Singaporeans and is being adapted into a movie by Warner Bros.

"As a child, you're cloistered in this world," the 43-year-old says on the telephone from New York, where he lives. "You don't know how other people live until you leave that world and realise not everyone has an airplane in their garage."

He insists that he himself is not a "crazy rich Asian" like the outrageous figures he portrays in his books, although he is from a well-connected family.

Born in Singapore, he grew up in a multi-generational family home in Bukit Timah and went to Anglo Chinese School (Primary) until he was 11, when he emigrated to Texas with his engineer father, piano- teacher mother and two older brothers. He is now an American citizen.

Kevin Kwan's first two books

CRAZY RICH ASIANS (2013)

Doubleday Paperback/527 pages/$28.34/Books Kinokuniya

When Chinese-American economics professor Rachel Chu is invited by her Singaporean boyfriend, Nick, to attend his best friend's wedding back home, she imagines it will be a warm family affair.

Little does she know that Nick is a scion of one of Singapore's wealthiest families and that his rich, scheming family will do whatever it takes to get Rachel out of the way - none more so than his domineering mother, Eleanor, who is determined that no American girl from a humble background will steal her only son.

CHINA RICH GIRLFRIEND (2015)

Doubleday Paperback/479 pages/$28.36/Books Kinokuniya

Rachel and Nick are about to get married when Nick's mother, Eleanor, gatecrashes their simple Californian wedding by helicopter, having just dug up information that Rachel is in fact the illegitimate daughter of one of China's wealthiest men.

When Rachel travels to Shanghai to meet her birth father, she is thrust into a dangerous world where people are not just rich, but "China rich" - where spoilt heiresses have millions hanging off their every Instagram post, artworks are auctioned off for hundreds of millions of dollars and money alone is not enough to get into the highest echelons of mainland and Hong Kong society.

His grandfather was Singapore's first Western-trained ophthalmologist, Dr Arthur Kwan, who was for many years the commissioner of the St John Ambulance Brigade and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Dr Kwan shared a clinic with his brother-in-law, Dr Hu Tsai Kuen, father of Singapore's longest-serving finance minister, Dr Richard Hu.

Kwan's books, for all their riotous humour, have grief at their source.

His father died in 2010 after a long battle with cancer, during which Kwan took 18 months off his work as a creative consultant to care for him. During this period, they would chat about old times in Singapore.

"To be such a close witness to the intimacy of death is a profound, life-changing experience," says Kwan. "The books would never have existed had I not gone through that with my father."

He began writing what he thought would be dramatic stories based on his memories, as a way to cope with his father's death, but a funny thing happened along the way.

"Somehow, as it spilled onto the page, somewhere between my mind and my fingers meeting the keyboard, the story got transformed and became very satirical.

"For me, it was a very healing experience to be able to channel my grief and my memory in a way that brings laughter and joy."

The seed of loss planted in the books from their inception fully flowers in Rich People Problems, the trilogy's final instalment, which came out in Singapore last Tuesday.

It finds the Shang-Young clan's matriarch Shang Su Yi on her deathbed, as her multitudinous descendants jockey for last-minute favour in the hope of inheriting her 64-acre (26ha) estate, Tyersall Park.

Su Yi's one-time favourite grandson, Nick, whom she disowned when he married Chinese-American economics professor Rachel Chu, returns to Singapore to make amends - provided he can fend off his fortune-crazed relations first.

Such last rites are a fitting end to the series, which began with the wedding of the century in Crazy Rich Asians. "I thought a wedding and funeral would be perfect bookends for this sprawling saga," says Kwan, who is single.

The books are famous for their mind-boggling displays of wealth - in the first book's opening, the family responds to a British hotel concierge's racist treatment by buying the entire hotel - but Kwan insists that the truth tends to be more extravagant than fiction and, in fact, his editor often made him tone things down.

Many of his characters are inspired by individuals he knows, while others are amalgamations of different personalities. But he remains tight-lipped about whom they are based on, among them Astrid Leong, the incredibly beautiful and intensely private heiress dubbed "the Goddess" by her peers.

Kwan recalls that the film producers, while scouting locations in Singapore and Hong Kong, would be approached at parties by dozens of women, each claiming to be the inspiration for Astrid. "It's very flattering that people feel so strongly about my character that they would want to claim to be her," he laughs.

The character he feels he is most like is Alistair Cheng, Nick's "misunderstood, creative cousin" who produces films in Hong Kong, to the chagrin of his extended family.

"My relatives have always been wondering - what is Kevin actually doing in New York?" says Kwan, who studied media studies and creative writing at the University of Houston and also has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree specialising in photography and visual communications from Parsons School of Design.

"Most of them couldn't figure it out for the longest time and probably still can't."

He does not often return to Singapore, although when he does, he goes in search of a good wanton mee, which he says is impossible to find in New York.

His favourite hawker joint is Newton Food Centre. "That's probably blasphemous for a true foodie, but that's the one that was closest to where we lived and so I have the fondest memories of it."

Kwan, who, as a creative consultant, worked on projects such as a website for media organisation TED and a coffee-table book for talk-show star Oprah Winfrey, has given this career up to write full-time. He is now working on the script for a television drama for STXtv, the TV division of US company STX Entertainment, where he will serve as showrunner.

While he will not disclose what it is about, he says it will take place outside the Crazy Rich Asians world and he intends for it to carve out even more onscreen opportunities for Asian talent.

"It's always been my focus to bridge the gap between East and West," he says. "To create stories, films and TV that the reader or viewer can really lose themselves in, that transcend race and skin colour - that to me would be the ultimate triumph."
*Rich People Problem ($26.54 for paperback, $46.30 for hardcover) is available from Books Kinokuniya.
Crazy Rich Asians, the movie

Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan understands some of the frustrations surrounding the film's casting choices, such as the decision to cast Eurasians Henry Golding and Sonoya Mizuno as ethnic Chinese characters, but feels that the producers have achieved the best balance of talent possible.

"People are so eager and excited and sometimes disappointed by casting choices because, historically, there have been so few opportunities for Asian actors in mainstream Hollywood and Western- produced films," says Kwan, who is involved in all the film's aspects, from choosing screenwriters and casting to costuming and production design.

"We really tried as best as possible to be thoughtful and intentional with our casting. But at the end of the day, everything is such a balancing act," he says, adding that there are numerous factors to consider when casting, including actors' availability and chemistry.

"To be able to get 20 of the top Asian actors around the world to commit to a two-month window - it's been miraculous that we've been able to achieve it."

The film is being produced by Color Force and Ivanhoe Pictures.

Kwan says he and American director Jon M. Chu are taking it seriously that the actors, who hail from all over the world, get their Singlish right. "I can't tell you how much we agonise over every single casting decision and some of that was dependent on whether the actors could master the accent they are required to master. That said, some people might not be satisfied anyway."

Here are some of the cast of Crazy Rich Asians:
Constance Wu as Rachel Chu
American actress Wu, the star of ABC sitcom Fresh Off The Boat, plays Chinese-American economics professor Rachel Chu.
Michelle Yeoh as Eleanor Young
Malaysian actress Yeoh, best-known for her role in the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, plays Nick Young's domineering mother, Eleanor.
Henry Golding as Nick Young
The Singapore-based host-presenter makes his film debut as Nick, heir to the Young fortune and Singapore's most eligible bachelor. Golding's father is British and his mother is from the Iban tribe in Sarawak.
Gemma Chan as Astrid Leong
British actress Chan, from television show Humans, plays Astrid Leong, Nick's stunning yet down-to-earth cousin, whose picture-perfect life hides cracks.
Pierre Png, Fiona Xie and Tan Kheng Hua
So far the only Singaporean actors who have been cast in the film, albeit in undisclosed roles.

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'I'm no crazy rich Asian', says author Kevin Kwan

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As a child in Singapore, author Kevin Kwan remembers going to a family friend's house, where his father played tennis. Next to the tennis court was an airplane hangar with a private jet casually sitting in it.. Read more at straitstimes.com.

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I plan to use this article because it talks about how the movie reaches out to many people in Asian communities in America. It also has a woman as the protagonist, which appeals to many Asian women. It also talks about the lack of Asian representation in many films.

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‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Box Office Looks Bright: How an Unconventional Comedy Was Built to Succeed

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Box office signs are upbeat for the first studio wide-release of a contemporary movie with an all-Asian cast since Disney’s “The Joy Luck Club” 25 years ago. Here’s why it&#…

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I plan to use this article because it talks about the success of the actors post Crazy Rich Asians. It shows how big of an impact these characters had on many people, and how many of them are starring in many more movies with many other famous actors. It also gives hope to those in the Asian community who has had a dream to be in the film industry.

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Written By
Sarah El-Mahmoud

As 2019's summer season reaches an end, we may remember it as a moment when moviegoers couldn't get enough of live-action remakes and superhero genre epics. But when looking in restrospect to last summer's movie offerings, Crazy Rich Asians was the standout movie of the season that turned some tides for Hollywood with its massive box office and critical success. It brought about a new wave for the romantic comedy genre and proved there's an eager audience centered on Asian-American stories. Just look at how well the Crazy Rich Asians ' cast is doing, nabbing big-time roles after their breakout success!

Crazy Rich Asians had a stacked cast of Asian-American actors - the first major Hollywood film to do so since 1993's The Joy Luck Club. The comedy featured some well known talents such as Michelle Yeoh and Ken Jeong, but more notably introduced the world to quite a few newcomers who clearly have bright futures in the business looking at where they are just one year after Crazy Rich Asians, between their impressive co-stars and upcoming franchise roles. Check them out:

Constance Wu (Rachel Chu)

Fresh Off the Boat's Constance Wu lead 2018's Crazy Rich Asians as New York economics professor Rachel Chu, who journeys to Singapore with her boyfriend Nick Young for a wedding only to find out he belongs to an incredibly rich, celebrity-status family. Before starring in the summer success, Wu already had four seasons on the aforementioned ABC sitcom under her belt. The actress had been pursuing the business for over 10 years, and with Fresh Off the Boat being her only starring role at the time, Crazy Rich Asians allowed her to snag the spotlight in a movie.

One year after the August release of Crazy Rich Asians, Constance Wu is gearing up for a starring role in the upcoming crime dramedy Hustlers alongside Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart, Cardi B and Lizzo. The September release tells the true story of a crew of former strippers who decide to take advantage of their Wall Street clients. Wu holds the top-billing for Hustlers as a single mother named Destiny who creates the master plan with her fellow dancers.

The actress did have a very public outburst a few months ago when she took to social media to express her anguish over losing out on another opportunity following the renewal of Fresh Off the Boat. Slate has called the incident a unique win for representation Hollywood. Finally, an Asian-American "Diva" to call their own! ABC has assured fans there is no beef with the actress. She's also scored roles in Sony Animation's Wish Dragon and Low Budget Ethnic Movie.

Henry Golding (Nick Young)

When Henry Golding was cast in Crazy Rich Asians, he didn't have a single acting credit. He'd been hosting BBC World News' The Travel Show, which was just the source that got him invited to audition for the rom-com. When he debuted as Nick Young in the August flick, he became a Hollywood heartthrob overnight and has since gained massive fame ( a transition he admits he's wrestled with). In his breakout role, he plays Rachel's boyfriend with a family part of the Singapore elite.

After also starring in A Simple Favor alongside Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick for his second movie, Golding has an impressive line-up to continue his acting career. This holiday season he'll play leading man to Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke in another rom-com, titled Last Christmas. At the top of 2020, the Crazy Rich Asians actor will also be in Guy Ritchie's The Gentleman. The action film also stars Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Colin Farrell and Hugh Grant and will follow a British drug lord selling off his empire to Oklahoma billionaires.

Henry Golding is also making moves into blockbuster franchises with his recent casting as the lead in G.I. Joe spinoff, Snake Eyes. He'll play the fan-favorite ninja warrior in the Robert Schwentke (director of Red)-helmed flick. The actor has also recently been in public conversation about taking on the role of Namor in the MCU (maybe as the villain in Black Panther 2?) Who knows if it will happen, but the fact that Golding has made it as far as being fan-casted in a Marvel role within a year of his success is crazy!

Gemma Chan (Astrid Young Teo)

Of the Crazy Rich Asians' breakout cast, 37-year-old Gemma Chan had the most lengthy career before joining in on the summer hit. Fans of AMC's Humans series were familiar with her and she'd found supporting roles in Fantastic Beasts and Transformers. The Jon M. Chu-directed book adaptation was her largest movie role to date and has propelled her into Hollywood star status. Chan played Nick's sister Astrid, who is dealing with her husband's affair throughout the movie.

Since then, she played the blue-skinned Minn-Erva in March's Captain Marvel. She may have a larger role in the MCU too, since she's rumored to have involvement in the upcoming Phase Four film The Eternals. It's unclear whether she'll be reprising her Starforce role or playing a brand new character, but get it, girl! The actress has also just been cast in Steven Soderbergh's latest project, titled Let them All Talk. She'll be acting alongside none-other-than Meryl Streep for the under-wraps role. That cast also includes Lucas Hedges and Candice Bergen.

Chan will also be getting a promotion of sorts for the planned Crazy Rich Asian sequels. Astrid's continuing story will reportedly play a larger role in the next film in development as her relationship with Harry Shum Jr's Charlie Wu (shown in a cameo at the end) will be further explored, following the events of the books.

Awkwafina (Peik Lin Goh)

The true breakout of the Crazy Rich Asians cast is Awkwafina, of course. The 31-year-old has quickly become one of Hollywood's trendiest talents since her scene-stealing role as Rachel's hilarious best friend Peik Lin in the 2018 summer movie. Before that role lit up the big screen, she appeared earlier in 2018 in Ocean's Eight and had gained popularity for her YouTube channel. Once she uttered the iconic words " bok, bok, bitch," he life was never the same.

Awkwafina recently wowed critics for her performance in Lulu Wang's drama The Farewell, which has a 99% Rotten Tomatoes score and could receive Oscars attention. She's also done voice acting for The Angry Birds Movie 2, Netflix's upcoming The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, 2020's The SpongeBob Movie: It's a Wonderful Sponge and will reportedly play Scuttle in Disney's live-action Little Mermaid.

Awkwafina also has a role in Jumanji: The Next Level coming this December, alongside The Rock, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, Danny DeVito and Danny Glover. Then she is joining the MCU in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Oh, and she'll also star with Meryl Streep in Netflix musical Prom! Plus, she's creating her own television show for Comedy Central called Awkwafina, based on her experiences living in Queens. She's literally doing it all!

The Crazy Rich Asians cast members are becoming actual realizations of the movie title that propelled them into stardom with all the projects they have on the way!! Considering each of their careers have exponentially grown since the rom-com dazzled audiences, it's clear the movie left an impression on Hollywood and made way for more Asian lead roles in the mainstream.

Which Crazy Rich Asians Breakout Star Are You Most Excited To See In More Roles?

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The Cast Of Crazy Rich Asians One Year After Its Huge Success

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Written By Sarah El-Mahmoud As 2019's summer season reaches an end, we may remember it as a moment when moviegoers couldn't get enough of live-action remakes and superhero genre epics. But when looking in restrospect to last summer's movie offerings, Crazy Rich Asians was the standout movie of the season that turned some tides for Hollywood with its massive box office and critical success.

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I plan to use this article because it talks about the history of white people being cast in roles meant for Asian people. This is why the release of Crazy Rich Asians is important, it represents actual Asians and their entirety instead of replacing them with white characters. It shows the Asian representation that the film industry lacks.

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On an unusually empty street in New York City, a single cab drops off a woman clad in diamonds and a Givenchy dress in front of Tiffany's & Co. As she casually gazes up, the iconic opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany's is underway. But it's not long before many viewers are jolted out of the film's transporting charm with the introduction of Mr. Yunioshi, a bucktoothed man with a loud, thick Asian accent played by Mickey Rooney.

Rooney's portrayal of Yunioshi has come to epitomize ethnic stereotypes and often prompts protests whenever the film is screened. But, at the time of the classic film's release in 1961, Hollywood already had a long history of casting white actors in Asian roles-a tradition known as "yellowface."

Yellowface dates to early forms of minstrelsy when ethnic white actors would darken their faces and use prosthetics and costumes to appear Asian. The term itself came from similar acts of blackface that were popular, when white actors colored their skin to caricature black people and culture.

"In minstrelsy, that was part of the performance. Putting on a costume, and everyone knew you were in a costume, and then using that yellowface performance to ridicule or villainize Asians in a way that was entertaining for its audience," says Nancy Wang Yuen, Associate Professor at Biola University and author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism.

One of the earliest known performances of American yellowface comes from the theatrical show, An Orphan of China, performed in 1767 and based on a play by Voltaire. This early exposure of dramatized Asian culture would persist for centuries, particularly in film.

Among the first appearances of yellowface in film was in a work by D.W. Griffith, best known for The Birth of a Nation, a racially-charged epic featuring characters in blackface that became so popular it reignited the Klan. Before that film, Griffith targeted Asians through yellowface in his 1910 short, The Chink at Golden Gulch.

"Like a lot of Griffith's films at that period it was about a white woman in jeopardy and peril, and a white man coming to save them," says Dr. Daniel Bernardi, author of Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness.

Yellowface characters would persist through the 1930s, as contrarian and villainous characters in The Mask of Fu Manchu, or in meek and withdrawn roles as in Madam Butterfly. Even as Asian characters became more complex in the 1940s and 50s, the roles were still played by white actors, like Katherine Hepburn in the 1944 drama, Dragon Seed.

Why not cast ethnically Asian people in Asian roles? One reason was the Hays Code, an internal set of guidelines that major studios enforced before films could be distributed from 1930 to 1968. The code included an array of requirements that were indicative of society in America, including the prohibition of any sexual encounter between actors of different races. With that restriction, hiring an Asian person as a lead actor in a film would rule out that character having any sexual relations with another unless they were Asian as well.

This code could help explain why the 1937 film The Good Earth featured two white actors in the lead roles as Chinese farmers - Luise Rainer would become the first actor to win an Academy Award for a role in yellowface for her performance in the film.

Casting white actors was also part of a crude box office calculation. Jenn Fang, founder of the Asian-American blog Reappropriate, explains that since white actors were better-known and seen as more relatable to audiences, producers figured featuring them would generate more ticket sales. When white actor Warner Oland replaced Asian lead actors in the Charlie Chan films of the 1930s, the films skyrocketed to success, making it hard to argue with the results.

Until the mid to late-2000s, there was also no public outcry over yellowface roles, according to Fang. Actors saw chances to play different ethnicities as a challenge to be taken on and show their versatility, offensive or not. That creative liberty is something that Bernardi explains should be examined thoroughly.

"You cannot deny the history of yellowface being patently and overtly racist and painful to a host of people," says Bernardi. "And actors need to act. And that if we start drawing strict racial lines when it comes to casting, we only redefine the problem that exists now."

Instances of blatant yellowface have become scarcer in recent years, although it has been replaced with another strategy-altering lead characters to allow for white leads without the use of prosthetics and makeup. Whitewashing continues to be common, as in the casting of Scarlett Johansson in the 2017 film, Ghost in a Shell, which was based on a series made up entirely of Japanese characters.

(Credit: Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros Pictures/Everett)

The long history of erasing Asian actors in films makes the release of 2018's Crazy Rich Asians, which features an all-Asian cast, that much more significant. The film marks the first time that Hollywood has produced a movie with an all-Asian cast since the critically-acclaimed film, The Joy Luck Club, was released 25 years earlier. And with growing appetite for diverse representation in media, Crazy Rich Asians could represent just the beginning.

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Casting White People in Asian Roles Goes Back Centuries

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On an unusually empty street in New York City, a single cab drops off a woman clad in diamonds and a Givenchy dress in front of Tiffany's & Co. As she casually gazes up, the iconic opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany's is underway.

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I plan to use this article because it talks about the cast, which is clearly all Asians. It also mentions how there hasn't been an all Asian cast in 25 years. This is significant because it can shed light on Asians being more represented in movies, especially since there isn't a lot of that going on.

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From left, the "Crazy Rich Asians" director Jon M. Chu and his cast: Ken Jeong, Awkwafina, Constance Wu, Gemma Chan, Michelle Yeoh and Henry Golding. Credit... Rozette Rago for The New York Times

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - In January 2017, the director Jon M. Chu announced an open casting call for Asian and Asian-American actors for his movie adaptation of "Crazy Rich Asians." Recorded in the kitchen of his West Hollywood home (you can see his fridge in the background), the online plea instructed anyone interested in joining his all-Asian cast, from aspiring actors to "cool personalities with hidden talents," to post a two-minute video of themselves on social media. "We are looking for you," he beamed.

The call was an enticing one. The romantic comedy was going to be a major feature film, with a reported budget of $30 million; its inspiration, the best-selling novel by Kevin Kwan, had already sold millions of copies. And then there was the sheer singularity of it all. How often did a Hollywood filmmaker go looking for a whole bunch of Asians for anything? The last time a major Hollywood film set in the present day showcased a majority Asian cast was a whopping 25 years ago, with "The Joy Luck Club" in 1993. Many of the folks Mr. Chu was seeking now weren't even alive then.

For Asian and Asian-American viewers, the film, which opens on Aug. 15, is important not just as something of a cinematic Halley's comet - before "Joy Luck Club," there was "Flower Drum Song" in 1961, and then, what? There's also an eager hope that if this movie succeeds, it just might stave off another quarter-century drought. Producers use something called "comps" - recent films similar to the ones they're pitching - to help sell studios on their ideas and budgets. For the producers of "Crazy Rich Asians," there weren't any. For scores of Asian-themed films to come, the hope goes, "Crazy Rich Asians" could be that comp.

When Mr. Chu made his online pitch, the film seemed a godsend for Asian actors, aspiring or otherwise. Forget a few token parts here and there; in this one film, Asian actors would play everything: the romantic leads and sympathetic sidekicks, the comic foils and cads, the faces in the crowd. With more than 4 billion Asians on the planet, how hard could it be to cast this thing?

[T he actors talked about the casting process and working on the film.]

Pretty hard, as it turned out. The talent was there. But as roles were considered and cast, the filmmakers contended with questions about identity amid the Asian diaspora. Could an Asian play an Asian-American? Could a Malaysian play a Singaporean? And what about an Asian guy with a white mom or dad - could he even be in the running?

In Hollywood today, some of the most contentious debates continue to center on just who can play whom. In 2016, the lack of Asian male leads in movies was highlighted by the project #StarringJohnCho, which reimagined "The Martian," "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and other hits as if they starred the gifted Korean-American actor. Last month, Scarlett Johansson dropped out of the coming biopic "Rub & Tug" after her casting as a transgender man sparked a backlash from trans actors and activists. And Hollywood has gotten increasing flak for whitewashing, the practice of casting white actors in roles envisioned as Asian. Think of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in "Doctor Strange" or Ms. Johansson (again) as Motoko Kusanagi in "Ghost in the Shell."

Many of these debates wouldn't be nearly as fraught "if there were enough roles to go around," said Nancy Wang Yuen, the author of "Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism." She added: "We shouldn't be fighting over scraps. We should be fighting for the system to expand, so that all of us can get access to roles."

Indeed, according to a recent study by Ms. Yuen and others, 64 percent of television series in the 2015-16 season didn't have a single Asian-American regular; another report revealed that of the top 100 films of 2017, nearly two-thirds didn't include a single Asian or Asian-American female character.

On a recent morning, Mr. Chu was here in his West Hollywood home, recounting the joys and struggles of casting his all-Asian feature. Sporting a white baseball cap and gray T-shirt, he talked about hiring legends (Michelle Yeoh) and relative unknowns (Henry Golding), Asian stars (Singapore's Fiona Xie) and Asian-Americans on the rise (Awkwafina).

Mr. Chu also explained why he had cast such a wide net in the first place, supplementing the usual Los Angeles and New York casting calls with a five-continent search and an online open call. "We just didn't want to miss anybody," he said. "I wanted this to be the 'Avengers' of Asian actors."

The search began in 2013, when the producers Nina Jacobson ("The Hunger Games"), Brad Simpson ("Pose") and John Penotti ("Awake") secured the rights to Mr. Kwan's book. In the story, Rachel, a Chinese-American professor at New York University, travels with her London-bred professor boyfriend, Nick, to Singapore, where he was born. Once there Rachel discovers two things: Nick's steely mother, Eleanor, thinks Rachel is beneath her, and Nick - and the rest of his family - is obscenely, stupefyingly wealthy.

As it turns out, there were questions about casting even before the book hit stores. Mr. Kwan said a producer who wanted to option the book had suggested that he make Rachel white. Mr. Kwan refused.

"It didn't surprise me," said Constance Wu, the Chinese-American actress who ultimately secured the role and who has been a vocal critic of Hollywood whitewashing. "I'm just glad that Kevin stuck to his guns. It takes a lot of courage to say no to something, especially if you're scared that everything might slip away if you don't say yes."

Early on, Ms. Jacobson and Mr. Simpson had certain actors in mind, like Ms. Yeoh, who was on everybody's wish list for Eleanor. Unlike most of her castmates, Ms. Yeoh had appeared in dozens of films with all-Asian casts, like the Jackie Chan classic "Police Story 3: Super Cop" and the Oscar-winning "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," so, in some ways, this was nothing new. But those weren't Hollywood productions. "It was very important for me to see an all-Asian cast here," she said. "Twenty-five years? I don't even understand why it's taken so long."

For other roles, the producers sought the help of veteran casting directors with connections to actors throughout Asia, like the Canada-based PoPing AuYeung ("The Forbidden Kingdom"). They also looked at stage actors in New York and London, and checked in with some of the world's top drama schools, particularly in their search for the man who would embody Nick. "Ordinarily when you're casting and maybe looking to break somebody, you go to the big theater programs," Ms. Jacobson said, adding, "But they were like, we have not had a male Asian graduate in years."

When Mr. Chu announced his open call, thousands of videos poured in. Working actors from the United States, Singapore and elsewhere submitted auditions alongside those outside the industry who figured they had nothing to lose.

Among the hopefuls was Cheryl Koh, better known as the YouTube singer Cheryl K, whose videos have garnered more than a million views. Although she was trying out for a role, any role, it was her 15-second, a cappella snippet of Jessie J's "Mamma Knows Best" that convinced the filmmakers to give her a shot at singing the song under the opening credits, a Mandarin and English version of the Beatles hit "Money."

"When I got the news that Jon wanted me to do it, I couldn't stop screaming," she said.

The cast soon became increasingly international. There was Gemma Chan and Jing Lusi from Britain; Chris Pang and Remy Hii from Australia; Pierre Png, Ms. Xie and a host of others from Singapore; Ronny Chieng and Ms. Yeoh from Malaysia; Lisa Lu and Jasmine Chen from China. Nico Santos had spent his childhood in the Philippines before moving to the United States and co-starring on "Superstore"; Mr. Chieng was born in Malaysia and had gone to school in Australia before getting a regular gig on "The Daily Show." Among the American-born crew, there were actors who hailed from Detroit (Ken Jeong); Queens (Awkwafina); and Richmond, Va. (Constance Wu).

"Ken Jeong had to fly out to Kuala Lumpur just to shoot for a couple of days, and it wasn't a ton of money," Ms. Jacobson said. "But he was like, I want to play any part that you have for me in this."

With the entire world to pull from, the filmmakers faced several concerns about who they could cast to play what. There were the accents, of course. Whoever played Nick had to nail a British accent, which left out many of the Chinese box-office draws under consideration.

And then there was the Singaporean sounds of Nick's friends and family. "This is the only accent I can do," said Mr. Chieng, who grew up in Singapore. "I don't know if you've heard many people with this accent, but it's pretty specific, let's put it that way."

With much of the action taking place there, there was a push to get as many Singaporeans as possible. If that wasn't possible, the producers said, they wanted to understand when a non-Singaporean could fill a Singaporean role.

"We definitely always had 'Memoirs of a Geisha' in our heads," said Ms. Jacobson, referring to the 2005 film that starred three prominent Chinese actresses as Japanese women. (Unlike "Crazy Rich Asians," that film, directed by Rob Marshall and based on a book by Arthur Golden, was a period piece, set in Japan before and after World War II.)

In the end, only a handful of YouTube hopefuls got parts in "Crazy Rich Asians" - a woman in a text messaging scene here, a groomsman there. But now, said Mr. Chu, he has "the most amazing database of Asian talent that can speak English."

One of the last actors to be hired was Henry Golding, who auditioned for Nick. On paper, he was perfect. He was handsome and charismatic. Born in Malaysia to a mother from the Iban tribe there and a white British father, he had grown up in London, where he had acquired the requisite British accent, then spent much of the rest of his life in Asia, where he had worked as a travel host for BBC and Discovery Channel.

The fact that he had never acted before seemed to only add to the Cinderella charm of his story, which went something like this: With just a few months to go before filming started and no Nick, an accountant with the production in Malaysia told a line producer about this sexy travel host "all the girls were gaga over." From there, Mr. Golding's name went up the chain.

But when his casting was announced, the actress Jamie Chung, among others, criticized the decision. Ms. Chung, who is Korean-American, had been told by Mr. Chu that he was looking only for Chinese-Americans for the role of Rachel, so casting of a half-white actor as Nick seemed like a betrayal.

Asian-American journalists and bloggers wrote about the controversy, noting Hollywood's historical preference for biracial Asian actors (such as Nancy Kwan and Keanu Reeves) and hinting (sometimes more than hinting) that biracial Asians weren't "real Asians." The controversy became so heated that Mr. Golding and other stars were compelled to address it in interviews and online posts.

Ms. Chung walked back her comments soon after - "I am sincerely sorry about the ignorant comment I made earlier in the year," she tweeted - and apologized to Mr. Golding.

"I think it's fair to question motives of why they're choosing me instead of someone else," Mr. Golding told me. "It ensures that the studio knows, that everyone creating the story knows, that people are watching."

Even so, he said, "I never felt I wasn't suitable for the role because I was half-white. I've always seen myself as Asian, so I never had any qualms about that. I was much more concerned if I could act."

For a while, Mr. Chu admitted, the questions about casting disturbed him, particularly the questions about Mr. Golding. "And then I realized that I was only getting angry at the people who felt that they had been burned. They were people like me who had watched Hollywood whitewash things, and watched roles go away because someone said an Asian man can't be the lead of this or that."

Much of the current whitewashing, Ms. Yuen said, stems from manga and Marvel films that "draw from these Orientalist tropes, whether it's Asians in the past or Asia in the future. But Hollywood doesn't know how to incorporate Asians or Asian-Americans into that. It's like they want our look and our stories and our martial arts, but they don't want Asians."

With more and more people talking about diversity in casting and calling out examples of whitewashing, Mr. Chu sees positive developments, particularly for Asian-Americans. This week Netflix will begin streaming "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," a coming-of-age tale starring the Vietnamese-American Lana Condor. And on Aug. 24, two years after #StarringJohnCho began hyping the actor as "the star we deserve," there's "Searching," a thriller starring, yes, John Cho.

"If we make a decent showing on that first weekend, there are like six Asian-American lead movies set up at different studios," Mr. Chu said. "They're not greenlit. Everyone's waiting to see how this one does. But if this one does well, we'll immediately have more chances. And if it doesn't, we'll just have to do it again."

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'Crazy Rich Asians': Why Did It Take So Long to See a Cast Like This?

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WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - In January 2017, the director Jon M. Chu announced an open casting call for Asian and Asian-American actors for his movie adaptation of "Crazy Rich Asians."

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I plan to use this because it mentions the variety of languages that Nick's family speaks. The different languages and dialects represent the amount of diversity in Asian communities. It's not just one language that these people are speaking, there are multiple that they grew up learning and knowing because it was essential to their culture.

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Additional information

Author information

Joanna Ut-Seong Sio
Joanna Ut-Seong Sio is Assistant Professor of Chinese Linguistics at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund ['Sinophone Borderlands - Interaction at the Edges' CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000791].

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Joanna Ut-Seong Sio Joanna Ut-Seong Sio is Assistant Professor of Chinese Linguistics at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University. This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund ['Sinophone Borderlands - Interaction at the Edges' CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000791].

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I plan to use this because it mentions how Eleanor is prejudice against Rachel because of where she's from. Rachel follows her passions and is happy, however Eleanor doesn't like that. Eleanor likes tradition and wants Nick to be with someone who is stable and is successful like his own family.

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I plan to use this article because it mentions how one producer wanted to cast a white woman for the lead role. Clearly, that didn't happen, but this just shows that white people are favored when it comes to, well, anything. It also mentions how the movie touches on racism in the beginning scene.

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A still shot from the film Crazy Rich Asians. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

T he official trailer for the film adaptation of the bestselling novel Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan features many of the hallmarks of a contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy. The movie, out on August 15, stars Henry Golding and Constance Wu as two attractive young professionals, Nicholas Young and Rachel Chu, whose relationship is tested through a series of personal differences, poor choices, and frustrating miscommunications.

Though both characters work as academics in New York-Nick is a professor of history, Rachel of economics-he is the scion of an old-money Singaporean Chinese family, while she grew up in the United States with her Chinese mother in a single-parent household. Nick invites Rachel on a trip to Singapore to attend his best friend Colin's wedding, giving her the opportunity to meet his family and his childhood friends. But Nick doesn't foresee the consequences of introducing his middle-class girlfriend, whom he's been dating for more than a year, to his snobby, ultrawealthy clan in Singapore.

Much of the excitement surrounding the trailer and speculation about the film have focused on the non-white cast. It is noteworthy that Crazy Rich Asians will be the first major English-language studio film with Asian American characters featuring a primarily Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club (1993), an adaptation of Amy Tan's seminal novel about the tumultuous relationships between Chinese immigrant mothers and their second-generation American daughters. Yet the central conflict in Kwan's novel-and, presumably, in the movie-is not about race but rather about class differences between Rachel and Nick. (Full disclosure: I met Kevin Kwan at a dinner party in Hong Kong when the novel was first published, and we've been in touch ever since.)

Despite Kwan's focus on class, issues of race and representation still clouded the making of the movie. During a public Q&A session I led in Vancouver earlier this year, Kwan shared that early on in the adaptation process, a prospective producer wanted to cast a white woman in the role of Rachel. Hollywood studios have whitewashed characters in such productions as Doctor Strange, Ghost in the Shell, Aloha, and 21, either replacing Asian characters with white ones or casting white actors to play Asian characters. (An infamous example of yellowface is Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's.) Kwan vetoed the request: Rachel does not have to come from a different ethnic background from Nick to serve as a foil to the world of dynastic Asian wealth. As a middle-class Asian American, her character is already an outsider, and for much of the book, she struggles to fit in with Nick's family and friends.

But there is perhaps a more crucial point underpinning Kwan's focus on class differences. As the name suggests, Crazy Rich Asians subverts the tired portrayal of Asian characters in Western literature as quiet, hardworking, forgettable, and often poor. Kwan's characters are vocal, vibrant, memorable, and they give non-Asian audiences a view of how high society operates in some Asian nations. Through Rachel, we meet the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts of Asia, wealthy families who have run part of the world in a discreet way for generations. Crazy Rich Asians goes beyond capturing the lives of the nouveau 1 percent. Kwan takes us to see a segment of society to which we would not have access unless we were born into it.

K wan's novel is best described as a family drama. The Crazy Rich Asians trilogy-the second and third book are titled China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems, respectively-excels in nuanced representations of the Chinese diaspora across Asia and the United States by following the Young family's history over three generations.

Judging from the trailer, the film offers the same focus. Shots of New York and Rachel are juxtaposed with ones of Singapore and Nick, setting up a journey between west and east through cultural differences. The trailer continues with speculation, then confirmation of Nick's family background:

Rachel: I hardly know anything about them. Every time I bring them up, Nick changes the subject.

Friend: Maybe his parents are poor and he has to send them money.

Cut to the airport, where we see a luxurious first-class lounge and a large private suite on a plane:

Rachel: So your family is rich?

Nick: We're comfortable.

Rachel: That is exactly what a super rich person would say.

As the trailer unfolds, we learn there is rich, and then there is crazy rich-each quick cut shows symbols of mad money: sleek sports cars, women dripping with jewels posing for the paparazzi, opulent homes, and private airstrips. Yet some of Kwan's subtle eye for detail might be lost as the story plays out on the big screen. The trailer shows one character, for instance, telling Rachel that Nick's family is involved in real estate development, a nearly universal indicator of wealth. Here, the film diverges from the novel; Kwan's description of Nick's background suggests the Young family's money is old, and its origins are more mysterious.

That Nick's family comes from old money is significant. In the books, the Youngs and their old-money friends do not associate with new-money families and definitely do not consort with the middle class (unless to give orders), which is why Nick's relationship with Rachel is considered the scandal of the moment. This tension might be familiar to old-money families everywhere; as Tad Friend writes in his memoir Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor:

This was the age-old anxiety about new money (there are Brahmin families that insist that any money made during or after the War of 1812 is new). The problem Wasps have with the nouveau riche isn't so much the nouveau as the riche. It's envy, felt as disapproval, of what all that unfettered money allows them to do. Old money, having received its money, treats it with custodial anxiety; new money, having earned it, believes it should be used.

The movie may still touch on the divide in Asia between old money and everyone else. The trailer shows a clip of Rachel calling Nick the "Prince William of Asia." ("That's ridiculous," Nick replies. "I'm much more of a Harry.") It's no accident that Rachel brings up royalty. In the book's view of Asian society, Nick is a prince and Rachel is a commoner. None of her earned accomplishments, not even a faculty position at New York University, can change her place in the social order; for Nick's family, she was an unsuitable match from the moment of her birth. In chronicling Rachel and Nick's troubled romance, and through various side plots, Kwan's novel makes it clear that old money will never approve of new money or clever social climbers, no matter the latter's level of wealth and privilege.

Perhaps the best embodiment of this clash is one of my favourite characters, the audacious Taiwanese soap-opera star Kitty Pong, whose literary foremother is Edith Wharton's shameless social climber Undine Spragg from The Custom of the Country. Every scene Kitty appears in is deliciously comedic because she upends all the values that the old-money families hold dear. She wears a sheer dress that reveals her nipples when she meets her old-money boyfriend's extended family. Disregarding protocol, she addresses a sultana as "your honor," asks whether the woman's diamond brooch is real, then follows that question with, "How many carats?" Kitty breaks the rules because she does not understand that there are rules in the first place. She makes a mockery of the strict class conventions that govern what was once called polite society; her audacity forces us to question the social rules that we follow each day without an iota of critical thought.

T hough Crazy Rich Asians is not about race, Kwan doesn't shy away from discussing racism. The opening scene of the novel (minor spoilers ahead) operates as a fantasy on several levels, revealing how class and race intersect when extreme wealth rather than poverty is at play. Set more than twenty years before the main narrative, it features a young Nick and members of his immediate and extended family who have travelled from Singapore and Hong Kong to London to accompany one of his cousins to boarding school. Once they reach their hotel, which has been owned by an aristocratic family "since the reign of George IV," and where they have a confirmed reservation, a white manager denies them accommodations. The family discovers they have nowhere to stay in London after their long journey:

[Nick's aunt] Felicity peered at the balding, red-faced man, the situation suddenly becoming abundantly clear. She hadn't seen this particular brand of superior sneer since she was a child growing up in the waning days of colonial Singapore, and she thought this kind of overt racism had ceased to exist.

The reversal occurs when Felicity's husband recalls that the hotel's owner happens to be a golfing buddy of his-and goes on to buy the property from him over a quick phone call. In her first act as the new owner, Felicity fires the manager. In this scene, having money softens the blow of racism, delivering a vicarious moment of triumph for every person of colour who has been subjected to race-based mistreatment.

As much as I hope the movie will address these issues of class and race, I also hope it will transcend them. Last year, I watched Hidden Figures, a film about black female NASA mathematicians in 1961. I was so taken by the story, my body felt buoyant in the darkness of the theatre, bathed in the light reflecting off the screen; I had nothing to do but enjoy a history I had not known before. I was transported by the power of those pioneering black women authoring their own narratives. I cried the kind of happy tears normally reserved for weddings. I hope Crazy Rich Asians brings forth the same emotions: both films show people of colour as the heroes of their own stories rather than as one-dimensional background players.

A film does not have to be tragic like Joan Chen's Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl (1998)-a story set during the Cultural Revolution-to show us something about a culture, to reveal a bit more about the human condition. With the relentless focus on systemic injustice in Hollywood films featuring non-white lead characters, it can be easy to overlook the fact that people of colour have stories that exist outside of trauma. We can have fun, oscillating between the serious and the frivolous with ease, not too woke to laugh from the belly even if we perceive the world to be on fire. Our love stories can be a celebration of our own beauty and excellence. This joy, this escape, is what I wish to experience when I see Crazy Rich Asians.

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Crazy Rich Asians is Not About Race | The Walrus

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T he official trailer for the film adaptation of the bestselling novel Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan features many of the hallmarks of a contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy. The movie, out on August 15, stars Henry Golding and Constance Wu as two attractive young professionals, Nicholas Young and Rachel Chu, whose relationship is tested through a series of personal differences, poor choices, and frustrating miscommunications.

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I plan to use this article because it challenges the movie based on the ethnicity of the cast. A lot of those represented were of Eastern Asian descent, while the movie is based in Southeast Asia. It's thought that Asians with a lighter colored skin was preferred over darker colored.

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In Singapore, the state is attempting to govern the ungovernable.

Chris McGrath / Getty

The movie Crazy Rich Asians, adapted from Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel, has been widely celebrated in the United States as a big step toward diversity: It's a Hollywood movie with an Asian cast. But in Singapore, some people are complaining that the film doesn't capture their country's actual diversity. That's even granting the film's focus on people who are crazy rich (not-to avoid confusion-crazy and rich, though some are both). "The focus is specifically on characters and faces of East Asian descent, which plays into issues of racism and colorism that still exist, not only in the US but in Asia," the Singapore journalist Kirsten Han writes in Vox. The film's "all-Asian boast," in her view, is "nothing more than a perpetuation of the existing Chinese dominance in mainstream media and pop culture." Sangeetha Thanapal, an Indian Singaporean writer and activist, takes issue with the way the movie is being sold as "this big win for diversity, as this representative juggernaut," telling a New York Times reporter, "I think that's really problematic because if you're going to sell yourself as that, then you bloody better actually have actual representation."

To be fair, Kwan's novel-which was satirizing his Chinese players more than celebrating them-wasn't meant to cover the Singaporean waterfront. But the way Singapore handles national identity and ethnic difference makes for a fascinating comparison with the United States. It's a bold experiment in ethnic engineering, and, since Singapore has existed as an independent country for little more than half a century, that experiment has been witnessed in its entirety by many of its inhabitants. (It boasts the third-highest life expectancy in the world; the United States is 31st.) The national project was always to be, in a sense, multinational. It's worth taking notice of how this was achieved, and at what cost.

First, a caveat. Singapore itself may be crazy rich in that it has the highest concentration of millionaires in the world (152,000 households qualify), and a strikingly high per-capita GDP, but it's not like Liechtenstein or Qatar; it's no theme park of bling. In fact, it's a largely middle-class country where most people live in public housing (Singapore's solution to the housing-cost problem that blights San Francisco), although they generally own their flats. But here, as in so many aspects of Singapore, you can see the vigorous engineering of what its officials like to call "racial harmony."

Those public-housing blocks are subject to the Ethnic Integration Policy, which enforces quotas; the government doesn't want single-ethnicity enclaves, and the housing authority won't approve sales that violate its ethnic ratios. This is big. Ethnicity is often territorialized; that's why in America, inner city became a synonym for black, and in France, say, the banlieues signal beur. When a French prime minister decries the phenomenon as apartheid, though, it's because he sees it as an impediment to national unity. So you might think that the Singapore state's commitment to integration involves a commitment to assimilation-and you'd be deeply mistaken.

The Lion City ( singa is Malay for "lion," pura is Sanskrit for "city") has always defined itself, in part, by its ethnic heterogeneity. Its citizenry is about 76 percent Chinese, 15 percent Malay, and 7.5 percent Indian. And the trauma that shapes its domestic policies to this day took place in the summer of 1964, when a Malay procession celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad was beset by interethnic clashes and, with startling speed, race riots scourged the island. A similar riot took place not long afterward. "Our diversity is our strength" would have been a hard sell. So when Singapore's national independence was certified in 1965, its leaders saw the place as supremely susceptible to violence among groups of varied descent. Its National Pledge, formulated that year, begins, "We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion." Race, language, and religion were considered the three lethal fault lines. The question was how to stabilize them.

One strategy would have been erasure. And an earlier version of the pledge began, "We, as citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves to forget differences of race, language, and religion and become one united people." The shift in language was significant. Lee Kuan Yew, the country's prime minister for its first three decades, and members of his circle had made a calculation. If Malay families or Indian families thought the state was hostile to their heritages (notably, those of language and religion), they would be hostile to the state, in turn.

At independence, the ruling party decided that all citizens would be categorized, for government purposes, into one of four "racial" groups: Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other, in what came to be called the CMIO system. Choosing a language of government that was associated with any of the major groups would have significantly disadvantaged the other two major groups. So the government made the same decision that had been made in many other parts of the former British and French empires in order to avoid ethnic conflict: It stuck with the colonial language as the official language of government. Lee also calculated that being Anglophone would help Singapore enlarge its role in global trade, the lifeblood of a port city.

At the same time, the government adopted the following complex of policies. Malay was designated as the national language, recognizing the status of Malays as the indigenous people of the region. The national anthem is in Malay, as are the parade commands of the Singaporean armed forces. All citizens would learn English in school. If you were Chinese or Indian, you would also learn Mandarin or Tamil, respectively. (More than half of the island's Indians were of Tamil-speaking ancestry.) If you were Malay, you would study Malay. Everyone had to be at least bilingual, with your second language to be determined by your ethnic origin. And if you ever felt that you had been discriminated against or derogated because of your origins, the government had your back.

What's not to like? In America, minority groups have always pursued rights, respect, and recognition through exemptions and accommodations. Religious groups could invoke the First Amendment's "free exercise" clause against rules that burdened them. Catholics sought a sacramental-wine exemption from Prohibition; Native American groups later sought a waiver from drug laws forbidding the use of peyote. The agricultural Amish have asked to be exempt from laws that determine school-leaving age. Observant Jews and Muslims ask that public facilities, such as prisons, accommodate their dietary requirements. Sikhs in the U.S. Army have asked for exemptions to wear turbans and beards.

Especially with more populous groups, accommodations can involve significant provisions from public institutions-sometimes local, sometimes national. A Glendale school district, for instance, has established a holiday for the commemoration of the Armenian genocide. On a national level, the NAACP advocates for affirmative action, positive discrimination to undo the effects of past discrimination; the more rigorous enforcement of civil-rights laws; and a national holiday to commemorate the emancipation of the slaves. Bilingual education, after many setbacks, had a big win in California a couple of years ago. School districts there must provide the option of bilingual education if 30 parents (or 20 from one grade level) ask for it. That's what liberal accommodation looks like.

If you're an advocate for ethnic minorities, continually battling for every advance, Singapore's proactive approach can look like a dream come true-crazy woke. But we should be careful what we wish for. Here's the critical difference: Singapore's program of ethnic management isn't about accommodation; it's closer to entrenchment. Parents aren't safeguarding the transmission of cultural identities; the state is. It's almost as if UnidosUS, the NAACP, the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, and the like were state-run enterprises. And when identity politics becomes a matter of statecraft, it takes on some rather odd features.

Take bilingual-education policy, which has generally grown more stringent over the decades. It's not an option, as it is in the United States. It's compulsory; you have to learn a language associated with your ethnic group. But which? For most of Singapore's history, even non-Tamil Indians (about 48 percent) had to learn Tamil, which typically left them unable to communicate with grandparents who might speak only Hindi.

Then there's the fact that the ethnic Chinese were taught Mandarin as their "mother tongue." In fact, the Chinese immigrants who came to Singapore over the centuries spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese; only 2 percent spoke Mandarin as a first language. To go by the numbers, it's a little as if the United States had required Latino kids to learn Portuguese. Lee Kuan Yew himself didn't learn Mandarin until he was in his 30s, but he evidently thought that Singapore's Chinese majority could use some unification, and blithely dismissed their actual mother tongues as mere "dialects." (Like a lot of American parents today, he figured that knowing Mandarin would have practical advantages, too.)

The implicit assumption that ethnicity is unitary also runs up against the fact that people sometimes marry across the CMIO lines. Their children have a decision to make-as they do on Racial Harmony Day, when school kids are supposed to wear traditional garments that reflect their heritage. Meanwhile, the one distinctively Singaporean language-the English Malay Chinese Tamil creole called "Singlish"-has been subject to official disapproval. In short, it's not the language you or your ancestors actually spoke but the identity the state has settled on for you that determines which language is yours. There's no denying that the CMIO system reflected existing ideas about ethnic identity in Singapore: If it hadn't, it would not have worked at all. But it entailed a radical simplification of a highly complex ethno-linguistic reality.

And the promotion of racial harmony in Singapore isn't simply a matter of gentle suasion. Under Singapore's Sedition Act, it's a crime to "promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore." That's a potent prohibition; after all, given our human clannishness, commentary on differences always carries some risk of creating ill will. In 2012, a senior staff member of the National Trades Union Congress, who was a permanent resident of Chinese ancestry, was fired for complaining about a Malay wedding held in the public space of her apartment building. Her profanity-laced Facebook posts suggested that Malays were cheap (if they paid "for a real wedding," she groused, "maybe then the divorce rate won't be so high") and inconsiderate. "How can society allow ppl to get married for 50 bucks?" she went on.

These are not, plainly, the sentiments of someone who has a fair and balanced view of Malays (whose divorce rates, for the record, appear to be lower than average). So it's not surprising that her posts, which were widely circulated, prompted outrage, or that complaints to her employer cost the woman her job the next day. But things could have gone much worse for her. Three years earlier, a Christian evangelical couple in Singapore was sent to prison for violating the Sedition Act (and the Undesirable Publications Act) when they mailed out tracts that denigrated Islam and Catholicism as false religions. In the wake of the bad-tempered Facebook posts, law-enforcement officers visited the offending party and issued a warning; taking the hint, she moved back to Australia, where she was born. This is a high price to pay for an irritable posting on the web. As you'd expect, sometimes remarks about other groups that seem less obviously bigoted can also land you in trouble.

There's a complex bargain here: If the state helps protect ethnic identities in Singapore, it also polices them. Last year, an imam was expelled from Singapore for insulting Jews and Christians, and two Christian preachers were banned for denigrating Islam and Buddhism. The country has a minister in charge of Muslim affairs who issues strenuous warnings to his coreligionists against "self-radicalization." The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act provides for the state to issue restraining orders against clerics who promote hostility between religions-or, yes, disaffection with the government.

Singapore's extraordinary efforts to avoid internal cleavages, through a national project of respect for racial and religious differences, embody the promise and perils of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called the "politics of recognition." (He's from Montreal, so for him Quebecois language politics is front of mind.) In this influential model, the benevolent state is to confer public acknowledgement on various identities. And state recognition is certainly a way of being respected; the trouble is that it's also a way of being reified. I've called this the Medusa Syndrome: When the state gazes at us-with its identity cards, educational stipulations, and other instruments of recognition-it invariably fixes and rigidifies a phenomenon that's neither fixed nor rigid. The strategy is never going to be adequate to the real-world complexities, to compound identities that can grow as pleated as an accordion. But it may be the only strategy that such a managerial city-state has.

In later years, Lee Kuan Yew's speeches became less focused on values and aspirations and more on policy, precisely because the Singaporean identity had been to some degree stabilized. If the state he created was watchful and intrusive by the standards of a Western liberal democracy, it had also convinced most of its citizens that they were engaged together in a meaningful national project. A friend who spent much of her childhood there once put it like this: The people of Singapore felt watched but also seen. The death of Lee in 2015 produced a vast and genuine outpouring of grief in Singapore. There was a week of national mourning with flags at half-mast. Nearly 450,000 people paraded past his coffin in Parliament over three days and nights, with public transportation running 24 hours a day to enable their visits. But the state-imposed silence about intergroup difficulties remains. Someone is still always watching; younger Singaporeans may not any longer be quite so glad to be seen.

Westerners tempted by the Singapore strategy might note that even there, racism has proved recalcitrant to the statecraft of identity. In a sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, Kwan has a scion of one of his Chinese dynasts observe that his parents and their crowd have "always been racist and elitist to the extreme." When he decided to marry an Indian woman, he relates, his father told him, "If you don't care about your own future, think about the children you will have with that woman. For eleven generations, the blood will never be pure." When it comes to entrenching ethnic difference, there are ways and there are ways.

The truth is, to set out to govern identities is to set out to govern the ungovernable. Whatever the state does, ordinary people will ignore the boundaries it sets. In the first decade of this millennium, interracial-marriage rates roughly doubled in Singapore. Now a quarter of new marriages cross those boundaries between C, M, I, and O. The point isn't that the government of Singapore should ignore the ethnic and religious identities of its citizens. But it will have to acknowledge that it's no longer just the society that's multiracial; more and more of its citizens are, too.

Maybe some future Singapore-set rom-com will take that on.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor of philosophy and law at New York University and the author of The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity.

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In Singapore, the state is attempting to govern the ungovernable. The movie Crazy Rich Asians, adapted from Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel, has been widely celebrated in the United States as a big step toward diversity: It's a Hollywood movie with an Asian cast.

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I plan to use this article because it mentions how men are basically controlled by the women in this movie. The mother of Nick kind of makes decisions for him by telling him what to do. It shows that the men are just followers and the women are the one who hold all the power.

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It's a small moment: Rachel Chu is in bed, admiring her boyfriend, the extremely handsome Nick Young. She pulls her glasses away from her face in a cartoonish gesture. "Hubba hubba," she says.

This scene in Crazy Rich Asians, fleeting though it is, captures something crucial about the film: its celebration of the female gaze.

The movie, which topped the box office in its first weekend with earnings of $34 million, has been praised for offering meaty roles to Asian and Asian-American actresses, who remain underrepresented in Hollywood. In the top 100 films of 2016, just 5.7 percent of speaking characters were of Asian descent, according to USC's Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative. And as Vox's Alex Abad-Santos has written, the movie is groundbreaking in its depiction of Asian men as desirable and sexy, unfortunately a rarity in American popular culture. But there's another way Crazy Rich Asians breaks with most contemporary American movies: by telling its story, at key moments, through women's eyes.

The men of Crazy Rich Asians look amazing - and the women take notice

Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu unabashedly encourages his audience to gawk at the film's male leads. Henry Golding, who plays Nick; Chris Pang, who plays his best friend Colin Khoo; and Pierre Png, who plays Nick's brother-in-law Michael Teo, all appear shirtless at some point, often with the camera lingering lovingly on their muscles.

Png has said he had to work out for one of his scenes, in which his character emerges from a shower. "I am, by nature, on the scrawny side," he told Harper's Bazaar Singapore. "I had to bulk up within a short time - three weeks."

But the audience doesn't just watch the men of Crazy Rich Asians - we watch the women watching the men. Rachel's playful gesture with her eyeglasses is just the beginning. When Nick arrives at a party in a beautiful white suit, Rachel's friend Peik Lin Goh (Awkwafina) gawks and exclaims, "He's like the Asian Bachelor, " a moment that appears in one of the movie's trailers.

Later, Rachel checks out her boyfriend in a tuxedo and notes approvingly that he should wear one more often.

Crazy Rich Asians as a whole pays extended homage to the well-cut suit, from Nick's white linen look (from the Malaysian label Wardrobe) to the navy tuxedo worn by Charlie Wu (Harry Shum Jr.) in the movie's mid-credits scene. Chu and costume designer Mary Vogt clearly put as much thought into the menswear in Crazy Rich Asians as the womenswear, and it shows - the men look amazing, and the women notice.

Then there's a moment between Nick and his mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh). Rachel has spilled wine on Nick's shirt, and he's gone upstairs to change. As he's stripping, giving the audience a clear view of his muscled torso, Eleanor walks in and suggests he put on a blue shirt. She helps him into it.

"How do I look?" he asks.

Her response: "Perfect."

It's not a sexual moment (though Michelle Ruiz at Vogue detects some Oedipal undertones). Rather, it's a telling exchange between a mother and the son she's been preparing since childhood to be a leader in his family - we learn later in the film that she sent him to live with his grandmother so he would be in a better position to inherit the family fortune. Eleanor cares what her son looks like because it reflects on her and on their whole family. When she looks at him and pronounces him perfect, it reflects the goals she's had for him for decades, and how close those goals are to fruition.

When women are the ones looking, they have power

Moments like this one - a woman evaluating a man's appearance - are unusual in mainstream movies.Film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term "male gaze" in a 1975 essay to describe the way women often appear on film: as passive images to be looked at both by male characters and by the audience. Men in movies, meanwhile, get to be active; they are the ones doing the looking, the ones who desire rather than the ones who are desired. They make the decisions.

For Mulvey, male heroes also act as stand-ins for the audience. "As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist," she writes, "he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence." Looking, in essence, is power.

More recently, critics and film students have started using the term "female gaze" to refer to a rarer phenomenon: an active female point of view represented onscreen, either through the perspective of a female filmmaker or female characters. If the male gaze reduces women to static sex objects, the female gaze turns them into protagonists. No longer just the ones who are looked at, they're now the ones who look.

One famous recent example: the scene in season 4 of Game of Thrones in which Daenerys Targaryen invites swordsman Daario Naharis to disrobe, and sits back and watches as he does.

"The thrill of being invited by the camera to regard a naked man in an explicitly erotic context as a woman drove home how rarely I've felt that when watching mainstream TV, let alone 'prestige' TV," Lili Loofbourow wrote at Salon when the episode aired in 2014. "Only male arousal wins awards."

Since then, Game of Thrones has catered more frequently to a female perspective, adding more male nudity as well as a lesbian character who turns her female gaze on women. But Loofbourow's still right - women on TV and film remain more looked-at than looking.

That's why it's groundbreaking for Crazy Rich Asians to tell its story from a female point of view, in a very literal sense. When Rachel hubba-hubbas at Nick, she's not just expressing her desire for him - though that in itself would be unusual in a pop-cultural landscape still primarily centered on male desire. She's also stepping into the active role - she's the one whose desire drives the action forward, even though the action in this case is just a light-hearted exchange between two lovers.

When Eleanor pronounces Nick perfect, meanwhile, she demonstrates the power of the female gaze. In that moment, she decides what Nick wears, how he presents himself downstairs to family and friends. Her control over that moment mirrors her control over all the characters in the movie - she's the one whose decision nearly splits Nick and Rachel up, and whose reversal allows them to marry. She's the one whose gaze truly matters, the one everyone has to impress.

As Mia Mercado notes at Bustle, Asian and Asian-American women have typically been either marginalized or fetishized (or both) in American films. "In the past, whenever I saw an Asian woman in a movie, she was probably going to be peripheral, hypersexual, or really good with knives," she writes. "But I don't feel peripheral in my own story."

By giving the female characters the power to look at, ogle, and appraise the men in their lives, Crazy Rich Asians makes them central to the story. They, not the men, are the surrogates for the audience, and moviegoers - millions of them, according to the box office figures - are invited to see the world through their eyes.

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Crazy Rich Asians shows us desire - and power - through women's eyes

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It's a small moment: Rachel Chu is in bed, admiring her boyfriend, the extremely handsome Nick Young. She pulls her glasses away from her face in a cartoonish gesture. "Hubba hubba," she says. This scene in Crazy Rich Asians, fleeting though it is, captures something crucial about the film: its celebration of the female gaze.

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I plan to use this article because it talks about how the main character goes against the standards of Asian traditions. She acts more independent and doesn't depend on her family's wealth to get her by. It sheds more light upon female empowerment in the media.

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With the new romantic dramedy Crazy Rich Asians, based on the bestselling novel by Kevin Kwan, Warner Bros. is making a rare venture into films with an all-Asian cast. But the Asian romantic comedy is already a wildly popular genre that's spawned a variety of online fan communities, and it comes with its own set of heavily used tropes, such as buffoonish gangsters who hold the female lead for ransom, or a male lead who gets into a car accident and ends up with amnesia. One of the most common tropes, the evil mother-in-law, appears in Crazy Rich Asians, but the filmmakers subvert it in a quietly revolutionary way, transforming the portrayal of Asian women in Western media. The characters in Crazy Rich Asians are familiar types, but they aren't the usual American clichés of tiger moms, dragon ladies, or sexualized cardboard characters. They're a little more human than that, which is unusual and welcome.

Crazy Rich Asians introduces a familiar premise from those Asian films and TV shows: ultra-rich young heir Nick (Henry Golding) falls for NYU professor Rachel (Fresh Off the Boat's Constance Wu) and brings her home to Singapore to meet his extended family, but his mother Eleanor ( Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star Michelle Yeoh) disapproves of Rachel, and sees her as too independent and American. This is a common plot for popular Asian dramas like Boys Over Flowers, an iconic Korean series based off a Japanese manga and adapted into many forms, including the new Netflix original series Meteor Garden.

In the standard Asian-drama version of the trope, a rich man takes an interest in a woman from a poorer background, and they fall in love. When he brings her to meet his family, his evil mother decides the woman isn't wealthy enough, and plots to keep the two separated, often using bribery, bullying, and even reintroducing the man to his long-lost childhood crush. His young love interest is intimidated, and realizes she can never fit in with this rich family. And the man is forced to choose between his snarky mother and his soon-to-be wife. Inevitably, he chooses the wife, and wins her back.

Rachel gets to choose whether to marry Nick or let him go

Crazy Rich Asians changes the dynamic largely by fleshing out the characters, and shifting the balance of power to the female lead rather than her boyfriend. Director Jon M. Chu and screenwriters Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim have all said in past interviews that in their film, they gave the agency to Rachel, not Nick. In the end, Rachel is the one faced with the decision of whether to marry Nick or let him go so he can maintain ties with his beloved mom.

Lim, who Chu brought on to add cultural authenticity and a female perspective to Chiarelli's script, explained at a talk after a Writers Guild of America screening that giving Rachel the power in the story was important because of the established power dynamics of a middle-class woman coming into an immensely wealthy family. "You want to make sure that she's got agency in her decisions. So ultimately, what it became, it wasn't about, 'Does the guy choose me or his family?' It had to be that Rachel made the decision, she was the one who had the card and gave it away. And so it was her decision to make, and it was heartbreaking for her to do. It wasn't an easy or glib thing, but she did it out of love, and out of respect and honor for this world that she'd been brought into."

In Kevin Kwan's novel, his version of Eleanor is a shallow adversary

But the director and screenwriters didn't want to lose touch with Eleanor, either. As the antagonist of Kwan's novel, Eleanor is more clearly a shallow adversary who spends much of her time scheming against Rachel, and snooping through her family details. Kwan's version of the character feels like she was transposed from a drama like Boys Over Flowers or School 2017 - she's willing to go to horrendous depths to see her son maintain his social status and wealth.

Yeoh told Chu, according to , that she refused to take the role if the film portrayed Eleanor as so conniving. "'If you expect me to be a villain the way she is in the book, then I'm not doing this movie,'" Chu recounted Yeoh saying, "'I can't be mustache-twirling. I need to make this person a full human being, and I'm going to defend our culture in the best way possible, and you defend the American culture, and we'll let the audience decide.'"

"Eleanor was very representative of some of the most beautiful women I've met in Asia who take a second seat, because that's how you manage your husband's position in the society," Yeoh told The Hollywood Reporter. "And I don't think it's just Chinese women - I think it's very universal to be self-sacrificing, first to your husband, and then to your children."

That meant that Crazy Rich Asians ends up not only being an opportunity for Asian-Americans to see themselves represented on-screen as positively and vividly as they are in Asian media, but also for Asian characters to be reflected in a more feminist and appreciative light. Lim added more culturally specific scenes where the characters gather to craft dumplings or confront each other over mahjong. Eleanor becomes not a mustache-twirling villain, but a respectable matriarch with her own hardships and desires. She shares tender moments with Nick on-screen, and faces humiliation from her own mother-in-law, Ah Ma (Lisa Lu, The Joy Luck Club).

Those moments are crucial for painting Eleanor as not just another judgemental mother-in-law trope, but a more fully realized woman, defending previous generations' cultural values. While Asia can be deeply patriarchal, it also has its outspoken, confident women, like some of the legendary icons featured on the film soundtrack. As Chu said in an interview with the, Crazy Rich Asians offers role models for Asian women in ways that other stories don't. "I think about my daughter who was just born a year ago, and the world I want her to live in," Chu said. "I want her to live in a world where she's seeing Constance Wu, Michelle Yeoh and Lisa Lu be these strong independent people that don't need a man in their life to be fulfilled, and that love themselves and know that they're worth every inch of their existence, and can be anything and do whatever they want."

"We usually see Chinese people ... as ancient and in this other time."

Stories about growing up as a second- or third-generation Asian immigrant often focus on the culture clashes between America's focus on individual freedom and the personal "pursuit of happiness," and the way Asian traditions value self-sacrifice and respect the family, in order to benefit future generations. The clash can leave younger generations bitter. Chu told IndieWire that he wanted to push back against the clichéd depiction of traditional Asian culture in film, and treat them more like glamorous old-Hollywood stars: "We usually see Chinese people, Asian people as ancient, and in this other time, definitive time, and it's just not true. This idea that old, classic, Hollywood movies could have starred Asians with just as much style, just as much pizzazz... I was really excited to dip our whole movie into this color and this vibrancy."

And Eleanor is part of that vibrancy - she stands in the way of the film's central love story, but she does it as a stalwart defender of Asian culture. While she tells Rachel that in her family, "we understand how to build things that last," sneering at the idea that people should prioritize their own happiness over their family's success, her background lays out a compelling character story that gives her strong emotional reasons for wanting to see Asian women stay in traditional gender roles.

In the novel, Eleanor speaks of how much she has given up for her son's sake ("I haven't sacrificed my whole life for you just to see you waste everything on that girl"), but Nick laughs it off, saying, "I'm not sure what you mean, when you're sitting here at the chef's table of your twenty-million-dollar apartment." Yet in the screenplay version, that humiliating moment for Eleanor is turned into a triumphant intimidation, as she towers over Rachel and denigrates her as unworthy of Nick: "You will never be enough."

"This hold that parents have on their children...it comes from a place of deep devotion."

As Lim described it at the WGA talk, these character interactions depict a common experience for young Asian women entering a new family, that "every female in your family feels like they own you." She told The Hollywood Reporter, "This hold that parents have on their children is a specifically Asian thing. It presents itself in really aggressive ways sometimes, but it comes from a place of deep devotion."

Crazy Rich Asians acknowledges often-seen aspects of traditional Asian family culture -filial piety, notoriously mean in-laws, disdain for outsiders and foreigners - and couches them in emotional context and understanding. It passes no judgment on whether Asian-Americans, in taking steps away from their ancestors' values, should feel guilty over not meeting those standards, and it expands the evil mother-in-law trope into a more humanized mom who's painfully relatable. In the process, Chu and his team attach a new flavor of cultural understanding to an old genre that was in need of innovation.

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How Crazy Rich Asians turns a traditional Asian rom-com trope into a modern statement

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With the new romantic dramedy Crazy Rich Asians, based on the bestselling novel by Kevin Kwan, Warner Bros. is making a rare venture into films with an all-Asian cast. But the Asian romantic comedy is already a wildly popular genre that's spawned a variety of online fan communities, and it comes with its own set of heavily used tropes.

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I plan to use this article because it talks about the role of women in the movie. Asian women are given more representation to speak out and have a voice.It also explains how these women are able push through the hardships that they faced.

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By giving its female leads room to explore the complexities of their relationships, this Asian-led rom-com goes beyond the boundaries of its genre and centers their agency for the world to see.

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