Crazy Rich Asians - The Awakening

I read some of the reviews about Crazy Rich Asians to find out what people were crazy about. Here are a few paragraphs from a Bourree Lam, she called herself American, about what was so startling to her about this movie. It is about Asian men, that there are Asian men that are really men, just like Joe and John, that can be desirable, and can speak and believe it or not, are human beans on this world. Before this Crazy Rich Asians,  there were no Asian men, only white men. Wow! What a great discovery.

This is a little bit from her article in Yahoo News titled Crazy Ripped Asians.

'This has hardly been the case in America.

Before the 1900s, Asian males were often portrayed as dangerous to Western society. In the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act and Yellow Peril, Asian men were depicted as cartoonishly cold-hearted villains. Anxieties that Asian men may marry white American women led to racist portrayals of Asian men as evil, feminine, and generally undesirable. “The Asian male figure was conjured as an Other who is threatening and dangerous at worst, and distasteful and dismissible at best,” said L.S. Kim, an associate professor of film and digital media at UC Santa Cruz, of that era.... But I posit that there’s one aspect of the movie that we can all agree on: I’m talking about the abs. All one thousand of them.

Serving up male bodies to gawk at is one of the oldest tropes of the rom-com genre. These movies are made for swooning, and swoon we did. Have you ever seen so many Asian Adonises who have misplaced their tops in one movie? Singapore is known for its tropical climate, but is it codified that a man must spend half of his waking hours (and 100% of his sleeping ones) airing out his upper half?

It’s not superficial, either. This display of Asian male beauty is fighting a decades-old narrative in America, a racist one where Asian male bodies were either portrayed as made for kung-fu or made for being laughed at. If you know the history, you might end seeing the abs in Crazy Rich Asians in a slightly sharper light.'

This Bourree Lam must have swooned over the male Asian bodies that she had never seen before all her adult life. Is she 25 or 35? She could not be older as she remembered this western bias existed only for decades, not centuries. Where had she been? Oh in America of course, she is American. And there were no Asian men in America, or at least in her life or in her association. 

This is not the only awakening. Since Bruce Lee kicked open the white men's only door of Hollywood nothing really happened after that. Perhaps if Bruce Lee could carry on kicking for a few more years, think would have changed a bit more. It was like they repaired and put back the broken white men's door after Bruce Lee left.

It seemed that every writer or actor/actress, I mean of Asian origin has suddenly woken up to the fact that there were no Asians in Hollywood other than the stereotyped, very nerdy, no character, the cartoons, or kung fu fighters. They have awakened, they have removed their blinkers, that Asians are also human beans but strangely non existence in Hollywood or in the USA!

Wow, unbelieveable. This is a great scientific discovery since they discovered the theory of gravity or homo sapien originated from apes. Now every Asian actor/actress is standing up and asking the same question that they did not think should be asked in the world of movie making.  But this is the world of the bananas. They did not know the existence of Bollywood and the movie world of Hongkong, Taiwan and now China. These movie industries don't exist or don't count. Their only world of make belief is the Hollywood stereotyped of James Bond, Tom Cruise, and who else, their white gods. And they were comfortable living in this world of white gods and nothing else. Now why would Hollywood want to cast Asians when their stories are western and catering to a western audience?

This is perhaps the greatest happenings of Crazy Rich Asians, the awakening of the bananas, that before this movie, they don't exist and they did not know. Now they know. But unfortunately this is going to be another flash in the pan incident and would be over when the light is out.