Disney's AmericanBornChinese reunites ‘Everything Everywhere’ stars Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu in supporting roles—making the afterglow of Asian Hollywood’s most recent triumphs impossible to ignore.
—a series that brings Sun Wukong, the legendary Monkey King from Asian folklore, to the streaming era.
There’s a cynical view to take of this premise, which Netflix has also lifted for an separate animated series. Is Hollywood simply branching out into international IP as it continues its quest to swallow down any recognizable content, along with its own tail? But either way, that effort doesn’t diminish the industry’s tangible embrace of overlooked narratives, or the role Hollywood can now play in helping to pass these stories on to new generations, especially within diasporic audiences.
’s 2006 graphic novel, in which the story of a third-grader named Jin Wang is juxtaposed against both Sun Wukong’s legendary escapades and a tertiary character named Chin-Kee, who’s basically a walking, talking racist stereotype. These intertwining plots intelligently represent the opposing forces living inside the headspace of a typical second-generation Asian-American kid.American Born Chinese
often feels in danger of tipping over its own weight. Here, Jin is a high school sophomore obsessed with fitting in at his majority-white school until a “FOB” kid from Taiwan named Wei-Chen transfers in. Microaggressions and Asian-identity tropes ensue, from recognizable classics to more updated forms . And while it’s all pretty expected fare for pop Asian-American identity politics, the show never gets preachy. On, no one ever says the words “race” or “racism” out loud.
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