It was not long ago that the actor and writer Joel Kim Booster first began going to auditions only to quickly realize that the roles available to him as an Asian American man were severely limited.
“It does not get better from here, no matter how many Chinese-food delivery boys you play,” he recalled being told by other Asian American actors.
But Booster kept at it. And eventually, in 2022, he got to portray a gay Asian American man in “Fire Island,” a groundbreaking rom-com that he also wrote. “So much of that movie,” Booster said, “is just a literal transcript from my life.”
As it turned out, things did get a little better for Asian American men in Hollywood during the decade that Booster spent toiling. And he senses that the momentum has continued in the two years since “Fire Island” debuted.
Many of the newest Asian and Asian American stories seem unconcerned with “the white gaze,” he said. And so “the conversation has sort of moved on for a lot of people,” he said, adding that his movie “almost feels a little retrograde now.”
Indeed, since the 2018 blockbuster “Crazy Rich Asians” became a box office hit, Asian and Asian American stories and characters have proliferated in American pop culture. And after decades of degrading, often emasculating portrayals, Asian and Asian American men like Booster have been at the center of the new work, often playing the sort of hunky hero parts that Hollywood long kept out of reach.
The year “Crazy Rich Asians” premiered, HBO’s “Insecure” introduced Alexander Hodge as the romantic interest known as “Asian Bae.” The next year Randall Park co-starred with Ali Wong in “Always Be My Maybe,” which Park and Wong co-wrote with Michael Golamco. And in 2021, Jimmy O. Yang starred in a Christmas rom-com, “Love Hard.”
Asian American men like Booster and Park have seized the moment to work behind the scenes, too. Park directed “Shortcomings,” the 2023 film that stars Justin H. Min as an angsty, flawed Asian American protagonist. And Sean Wang’s coming-of-age film “Dìdi” premiered this summer, offering a look at what it was like to grow up Asian American in the early days of social media amid California skateboard culture.
Waves of representation can be cyclical, and those who study film and TV are quick to point out that representation is still lacking and that many of the characters who do manage to make it onscreen are often still marginalized in frustrating ways.
But as the number of Asian Americans has risen across the United States and audience members have shown an appetite for their stories, many actors, writers and directors say it is clear that roles for Asian American men have evolved, and the smattering of new, more nuanced parts is helping to propel a shift in how Asian American men are perceived.
“All of us want to push that narrative of Asian males being more desirable,” said Manny Jacinto, who got his break playing a hot but dumb “himbo” on NBC’s “The Good Place” and is now gearing up to star as Lindsay Lohan’s husband in an upcoming “Freaky Friday” sequel after a stint in “The Acolyte” as a Star Wars Sith Lord.
“And the thing is,” he continued, “those opportunities aren’t really being given to us. So it’s very much up to us to create them.”
Emerging from a racist history
Many 20th century depictions of Asian American men in American cinema were stereotypical at best: the Chinese supervillain Fu Manchu; Long Duk Dong, a socially maladjusted foreign exchange student in “Sixteen Candles” who enters scenes to the sound of a gong; and bucktoothed Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” played by Mickey Rooney with a wildly over-the-top accent.
Even the virtuous early Asian and Asian American heroes — the Bruce Lees, Jackie Chans and Pat Moritas of the film world — were lauded for their martial arts mastery but largely seen as asexual.
(Asian women in Hollywood have frequently encountered the opposite problem: hyper sexualization, fetishization and objectification. One celebrated pioneer, Anna May Wong, began her ascent to global fame as early as the 1920s, breaking out in “The Thief of Bagdad” and starring in films like “Shanghai Express.”)
South Asian men, meantime, were often slotted as terrorists, taxi drivers or caricatures of effeminate mama’s boys: “Either the most dangerous or the least dangerous thing,” the actor Kumail Nanjiani said. “Nothing in between.”
Over the years, this lack of meaningful representation took a toll on many Asian American men.
“‘I’m not into Asian guys’ — I heard that a ton of times when I was single,” Park said. “What can you say to that? It’s like, ‘OK, that’s your preference.’ But if you really dwell on it, there are a lot of things that go into that worldview. And I do think the images we see play into it.”
That is part of the reason some actors, writers and directors have pushed to show audiences different sides of themselves — and to present different ideas about what an Asian American man can be.
Nanjiani, for instance, became a superhero. He was featured in the 2021 Marvel blockbuster “Eternals” at the same time that Simu Liu was starring in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” (Though, notably, neither of their characters has a love interest.)
Nanjiani said he “didn’t want the first brown superhero to also be the first nerdy superhero.”
“I wanted to look like someone who could take on Thor and Captain America,” added Nanjiani, who reshaped his body, adding significant muscle for the part. “I wanted this guy to be like a playboy, you know? I kind of wanted him to be like a brown Iron Man or Batman.”
Love stories without ‘grand statements’
Many of the Asian American actors who have been cast in leading romantic roles in recent years emphasized that they did not seek them specifically to counter dated tropes. Instead, they said, it is worth studying smaller, more subtle creative choices in the films and series they have been a part of because it is there that the shifts in representation may be most visible.
Park winds up with Wong in “Always Be My Maybe” even though he plays the average-Joe best friend and is competing for Wong’s affection with Daniel Dae Kim, in the role of the rich heartthrob, and Keanu Reeves, playing a parody version of himself.
“The goal was to tell a great love story, not to think too hard about countering any specific stereotype or making any kind of grand statement about Asian American identity,” Park said.
Min recently starred as a romantic lead in “The Greatest Hits” opposite Lucy Boynton, and said his character was not specifically written as Asian. Once it was decided the character would be Korean American, “it didn’t require a scene where, like, he’s suddenly eating kimchi jjigae with his parents,” Min said.
And in the Christmas rom-com “Love Hard,” Yang’s character, Josh Lin, gets his happy ending after initially trying to catfish his love interest.
Lin, Yang said, is “a really good man who ends up getting the girl. And I think that’s very romantic.”
Imperfections on display
Some of what Asian actors and writers have sought to portray about themselves and their romantic lives when given the chance is complicated — and intentionally unflattering.
Booster said he was confident and sexually active until he graduated college and downloaded Grindr, where he quickly discovered that as an Asian man, he was unwanted.
“It taught me to hate myself in a way I never even realized I was supposed to before,” he said of the racism he encountered. “I had no idea I was undesirable until I moved to a major city and was exposed to a gay community like that.”
He baked that experience and others into “Fire Island,” which he then starred in alongside Bowen Yang, a “Saturday Night Live” favorite.
Wang’s new film, “Dìdi,” similarly works to reflect aspects of his own life growing up in the Bay Area in the 2000s.
The protagonist, Chris, is told he’s “pretty cute for an Asian” by his crush. A squirrel is shown telling Chris that no one loves him. And after he is labeled “Asian Chris” by new skateboarding friends he is trying to impress, he insists to those friends that he is actually half Asian, which they later discover is a lie.
“Girls would say to me, ‘Oh, you’re the cutest Asian I know,’” Wang said. “When I was 13, I really wore that as a badge of honor. They meant it as a compliment. No one was trying to be subtly racist.”
“But when you’re 13,” he added, “you just internalize all of that.”
Uneven progress
Actors and scholars agree that it will take a lot more than a few years of improved Asian American storytelling to erase a century of poor portrayals. Some acknowledged that progress is usually followed by regression.
Although 2023 saw “Everything Everywhere All at Once” win the Best Picture Oscar and surfaced several shows like “Beef” and movies like “Joy Ride,” 2024 has offered up relatively little outside of “Dìdi,” which debuted in late July.
Gedde Watanabe has seen a lot of these sort of stops and starts in the 40 years since he played Long Duk Dong in “Sixteen Candles.” He knows that movies wield power, and he wonders what would have happened if he had more power on set back in the 1980s. How might he have addressed the gong, the accent and the use of the word “Chinaman”?
But for all of his character’s flaws, Watanabe insists that Long Duk Dong did reflect some important aspects of reality.
“He wanted a girlfriend, he wanted to fit in,” Watanabe said. “Those are things that, universally, I can understand.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
This story is part of a series on how Asian Americans are shaping American popular culture. The series is funded through a grant from The Asian American Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection and focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of this series.
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