Asian Pacific American Film Voices Shattering the Stereotypes

"The Debut" (2000)
"Flipside" (2002)"
"Better Luck Tomorrow" (2003)

“I’m sick of silence, sick of being voiceless.” UC Berkeley student, Theresa Vu emcees on the empowering track “We Will Not Be Moved”. We ARE sick of silence, sick of being voiceless—sick of being the supposed “submissive”, “passive”, Asians—sick of this model minority stereotype. We are sick of the bucktoothed-rice-hat-wearing Asian dude in those old silent cartoons. We are fed up with the way Asians are portrayed in the mass media. Geisha girl, dragon lady, exotic, Charlie Chan, China doll, Miss Saigon, Madame Butterfly, single Asian female seeking their white knight—these are some of the characters that Asian Pacific Islander Americans find offensive. Some API’s travel away from the highly Asian populated San Francisco Bay Area and a whole new ignorant world comes to our plate, judging us by the color of our skin. Dr. MLKJ would not exactly call it just that, but the ignorance of APIA culture is widespread. Vu’s lyrics express her newfound knowledge on APIA history, “I had it, the madness, I literally shook, hearing tales never told in a history book…” There is an entire APIA culture that mainstream American audiences do not know.

Today is yesterday’s tomorrow, and we’ve got some better luck since our debut. So let’s look to the flipside of the mainstream—the underground, where a positive image of the APIA is formed.

Asian Pacific Islander American film is on the rise. We’re proving the mainstream media that we’re not just Asians—we are Americans and we are a part of this country’s history and culture. We are getting a piece of the pie. Evan Leong, director of the “Behind-The-Scene/Making of Better Luck Tomorrow” documentary says Hollywood doesn’t recognize Asians as a demographic watching movies (or any other media coverage for that matter), this film will probably let America’s mainstream know that we deserve a piece of the pie too. Most of what Hollywood gets a glimpse of in Asian Americans is the stereotypical characters: martial artists, the model minority, the enemy in wars, and the female seeking their white knight. Asian Pacific American actors are looking for something other than those stereotypes—characters that break those stereotypes and give a more accurate representation of APIAs in real life. Traveling away from the San Francisco Bay Area, my friends and family receive comments like “Oh wow, you speak good English” to “Do you do karate?” People in Hicksville are only eed to so much of the APIA image, and it hasn’t been a positive one.