No place for Asian heroes in Hollywood blockbusters

• Source: Global Times
• [21:48 July 28 2010]
• Comments

Illustration: Liu Rui

By Daniel Wong

The mega-budget fantasy-action movie, The Last Airbender, tanked spectacularly this month after a strong opening weekend, dropping 67 percent of its initial audience.

I have to admit I cheered at the belly-flop, not just because it is a terrible movie, but because it takes a fine animated TV series full of Asian heroes, and replaces them with a bunch of extremely white kids for the live action version.

The original TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender was screened on US children's channel Nickelodeon from 2005-08, but soon attracted an audience of adult fans. The protagonists were depicted as culturally and ethnically East Asian (or, for one culture, Inuit). Yet when it came to casting the live-action version, the call went out for white actors first, and the eventual choices were, literally, blonde-haired and blue-eyed - with the sole exception of a villainous character.

A similar incident occurred in Australian film recently, when a white actor was cast as half-Chinese WWI sniper Billy Sing, an Australian war hero at Gallipoli. Sing's Chinese heritage is obvious in photos of him, but the director chose to cast his own son in the part and, just to rub it in, cast a blonde-haired actor as Sing's Chinese father. In a country where anti-Asian prejudice is still common, this wiping-away of Chinese-Australian heritage is particularly disgraceful.

But the truth is that it's hard for Asian actors to be cast as the heroes anywhere in the West.

Growing up as a British boy of Chinese descent, I became aware of the lack of Asian heroes on cinema and TV very early on.

I loved action movies, but the heroes were all square-jawed white guys, from Bruce Willis in Die Hard to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando and Terminator 2. The exceptions, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, were confined to the martial arts ghetto - and Chan was a figure more comic than manly.

The lack of strong Asian male role models went beyond the cinema. Cultural prejudices, both inside Asian-American and British-East Asian communities and in the wider culture, stereotype Asian men as weak, mother-dominated, and effeminate. The lack of Asian sports stars, for complex socio-economic reasons, contributes to this. Asian men appear as victims, not as heroes.