Sometimes, Hollywood unwittingly reveals important but little-noticed political chasms.
This summer, “Crazy Rich Asians” did precisely that. A rare Hollywood production with an all-Asian cast and attractive Asian-Americans in leading roles, this blockbuster hit earned rave reviews and was broadly hailed as historic.
But there was a small Hollywood pretense, a little white lie that went largely unnoticed.
The pretense, however, is a reminder that the success of this movie in America has been fueled in part by identity politics. “Asian-American” in many ways is a made-up political construct, and inevitably, a movie touted to serve that construct is built on flimsy foundations.
The little white lie in “Crazy Rich Asians” manifested itself when the female protagonist uttered a few lines in Chinese. Her pronunciation was jarring and imprecise, and her knowledge of the Chinese language was rudimentary at best. Yet, in the movie, she was passed off as someone who spoke the language fluently.
Hollywood fudges like this all the time, though usually in movies where proper Chinese pronunciation has no particular significance. For those who wish to see more Asian faces on the big screen, a protagonist speaking Chinese poorly was hardly a defect. For those who reject identity politics, however, culture is not the same as race, and language is a quintessential part of culture. It simply cannot be whitewashed away.
Certainly, Chinese-Americans are no less American if they do not speak their ancestral tongue or are more interested in football than modern China. America is a free country, and its citizens can be as interested, or uninterested, in their cultural or racial heritage.
For those of Chinese descent who do take their culture and heritage seriously, the political correctness of American society has mandated that different ethnicities that have little in common, and may not even resemble each other in appearance, be lumped together in the racial category of Asian-American.
Where tokenism is the main concern, real differences among groups or individuals make zero difference. In other words, to a corporation, a university, or an institution that wishes to be politically correct and wants an Asian person to fill (or be prevented from filling) a slot, all Asians look alike.
These differences have spilled out into the political sphere, and have become the latest undercurrent in heated debates among Asian-Americans about efforts to end racial preferences that discriminate against them in higher education.
Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit group, is currently suing Harvard University for decades-long racial discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admissions. Oral arguments are scheduled to begin in mid-October.
The case has pitted Chinese-Americans who vehemently support affirmative action against those who see it as a racist system that keeps them or their children from being judged by merit. The former group tends to be comprised of those who were born or raised in this country and speak the Chinese language poorly or not at all. The latter group increasingly consists of first-generation Chinese immigrants who have begun to organize politically rather than let established political activists speak for them.
The pro-affirmative action group loudly proclaims, as they have for decades, that affirmative action encourages diversity and is therefore good for everybody, including Asian-Americans. Their opposition is increasingly questioning why those who do not speak their language, share their immigration experiences, or understand the financial and other sacrifices they have made to enhance competitiveness in the college admissions process should be entitled to represent them.
Simply put, those who have immigrated to the United States from China are different in many ways than Chinese-Americans who were born and raised in this country. Language is a key indicator, but it is by no means the only one, that even people of the same ethnicity cannot be randomly lumped together for political purposes.
Yet modern identity politics emphasizes identifying with someone because of their ethnic or racial makeup, not because of their experiences, struggles, or opinions. In real life, that is simply not enough.
It is not enough on film either. The storyline of “Crazy Rich Asians” revolves around a Chinese-American economics professor from New York who travels to Asia for the first time with her boyfriend, and discovers that he is the scion of a wealthy family in Singapore. Much drama then ensues when his family rejects the young couple’s romance, pronouncing her a self-absorbed American who is insufficiently Chinese.
The female protagonist’s ability to speak fluent Chinese was supposed to be a sign that her American-ness aside, she had real Chinese bona fides.
As it turns out, this was all a sham. Whatever the movie may have intended, the female lead was insufficiently Chinese after all.
Similarly, when Asian political activists insist that they know what is best for other Asian-Americans, that is often a sham as well. Much like the female protagonist from “Crazy Rich Asians,” they do not speak Chinese nearly as well as they claim.
Language matters because it is a key part of culture. If you look at Asian-Americans who have been raving about “Crazy Rich Asians,” they are generally not first-generation immigrants.
By contrast, Chinese immigrants who left their homeland to come to America did not grow up being fed America’s identity politics and are not beholden to it. They know they may not agree with each other on everything, but they see a starting point for finding common ground. That starting point is not the identity politics that gave us decades of racial discrimination against Asians in university admissions at Harvard and elsewhere. Should the lawsuit against Harvard succeed in reversing these egregious university admissions policies, that will truly be historic.
Ying Ma (@GZtoGhetto) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential Blog. She is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto , which has just been released in audio book. During the 2016 election, she served as the deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC, and the deputy policy director and deputy communications director of the Ben Carson presidential campaign.
