 | | Toma Vagner |
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Playing a Hot Mess Is Liberating |
Ashley Park did not tell her mother much about the drugs, the sex or any of the other debauchery in "Joy Ride," the over-the-top comedy in which she is co-starring. |
So perhaps it was understandable when, at South by Southwest, just before the Lionsgate film was set to premiere, Park's mother approached one of the screenwriters, Teresa Hsiao, with a question: If swear words were removed, would the movie still have to be rated R? |
"Teresa was like, 'Oh, I don't even know how to explain it,'" Park recalled in an interview. |
Moviegoers will be able to decide for themselves when their irreverent movie opens Friday. Compared with "The Joy Luck Club" and "Crazy Rich Asians," in which the most egregious transgressions involved earning poor grades or simply being middle class, the threesomes and cocaine reveries of "Joy Ride" are eye-popping. Arriving in the months after "Everything Everywhere All at Once" made Oscar history with its best-picture win, "Joy Ride" is one of several film and TV projects to present Asian American characters who are both deeply flawed and fully fleshed out. |
The people making and watching the work agree: It's about time. |
In April, Netflix released "Beef," a series about two rage-filled Asian Americans surreptitiously seeking to destroy each other. Last month, the comedy "Shortcomings" played at the Tribeca Festival and introduced viewers to Ben, a self-hating, mopey, movie-theater manager played by Justin H. Min. And the world will soon be able to join Park and her friends on a business trip to China that goes off the rails in "Joy Ride." |
Taken together, these productions represent an important moment in the relatively short history of Asian American lives onscreen. For decades after the 1993 drama "The Joy Luck Club" proved a landmark hit, the handful of movies with Asian American casts mostly offered family-centric stories filled with generational hardship, sacrifice and culture clash. But now, in part thanks to the 2018 blockbuster, "Crazy Rich Asians," audiences are finally getting to see all dimensions of the Asian American experience — even the weird, bad and raunchy parts. |
"Being Asian American is a part of who I am, but it's not all of who I am," said Randall Park, who is making his directorial debut with "Shortcomings" and sees himself in Ben. |
 | | Sabrina Wu, left, Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu and Sherry Cola in "Joy Ride."Ed Araquel/Lionsgate |
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"What I'm conscious of are these other things that make up my human experience — those imperfect things, those everyday things," he added. "And I feel like to be able to share those stories — that's what we're aiming for." |
Margaret Cho was among the first Asian American women to go onstage and talk openly about race, sexuality and other topics that some had deemed taboo. Ticking off a list of things she didn't excel at — "I don't have martial arts skill. I was not a professional skater. I was not a good student" — Cho said in an interview that she was "very much not fitting in with what was Asian American at the time." |
Still, even though she also was not, as she put it, "a 'Joy Luck Club' girl," the success of that 1993 drama led to a big break both for her and for Asian Americans writ large: a starring role in a TV sitcom centered on a Korean American family. "All-American Girl" debuted on ABC in 1994, though it lasted only 19 episodes. |
There would not be another Asian American sitcom for 20 years, when Yang's son, Hudson, starred with Randall Park on "Fresh Off the Boat." The intervening years were a period of "narrative scarcity," said Yu. There were so few Asian American stories emerging — save occasional indie breakouts like "Better Luck Tomorrow" — that the "initial stabs" had to be "be kind of like our best foot forward — putting on our best face, showing them what we can do," Yu said. |
"There was this underlying feeling of 'Don't air out our dirty laundry, don't let them see us fighting,'" he added. "It was like, we've got to put out something that's more palatable, more friendly to everybody." |
Yu, who created the long-running blog Angry Asian Man in 2001, came up with a term for this feeling with his friends. They called it the "rep sweats" — the anxiety they felt any time they watched an Asian American onscreen. It was a pressure emanating from the fact that those appearances were so few and far between. |
Read the rest of the story here. |
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