Better Luck Tomorrow: Asian Flavor of the Month, or the Beginning of a New Era for Asian Americans in Film? (3 of 4)

What does it all mean? It could be all an indie jumble of ambiguity, but Lin seems too racially conscious for that. BLT seems to chronicle the journey of at least a sector of Asian America. Are some of us hell-bent on academic and material achievement, but not concerned with the psychic costs, or the things we give up along the way? And the model minority image is given the lie by racism; we are still despised, invisible, misjudged. We are Ben’s dream girl, the brainy cheerleader Stephanie who despite her beauty and intelligence still plays second fiddle to a white girl in Steve’s affections. The transformation of the boys from quirky nerds to badass gangsta kingpins seems like an Asian American revenge fantasy come true: the ugliness of the violence seems to reflect the ugliness of the institutional violence against Asian Americans – all that repression and pressure to achieve turning into its opposite. In the end, we are in that German convertible, riding with Stephanie and Ben into some unknown tomorrow. But like Ben, maybe we are able to choose what the path will be. Ben, who is so good at going along to get along, finally says, no, I must go my own way. There’s something freeing about that, something that smells like self-determination. And like him, we have to stop listening to others’ ideas about who or what we’re about. It’s up to us.

No Working Class Hero
But the catch is, the “us” is a relatively small percentage of us. Where BLT has sparked the most interest seems to be among people like the current Asian American students and recent graduates of private colleges and universities. These are the people for whom the somewhat precious lives of the BLT characters is recent history: they can relate. Yet in focusing on these rich kids with complicated problems, the movie partially reinforces the model minority myth. With Asian American populations polarizing even further into the very rich and the very poor with the impact of the latest recession, many of us long for working class Asian American heroes and heroines to root for.