In 2006, the moderately successful Disney Channel premiere movie Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior was released. The movie had a budget of $5 million, a pittance compared to other films but more than Disney Channel’s iconic hit, High School Musical. The film stars Brenda Song and Shin Koyamada. Wendy Wu (Song) is a popular, beautiful, and confident high school teenager. She is also one of two candidates in the election for Homecoming Queen. However, her life is changed when a strange monk, Shen (Koyamada), comes to her California suburban home and claims that she is actually the reincarnation of a mighty female warrior and her destiny is to battle the ghost Yan Lo. Wendy must navigate her journey to the Homecoming Queen throne while simultaneously saving the world from all-encompassing evil.
The film explores common strains seen in the Asian American adolescent community: the tension between family and individual, the desire to assimilate, the importance of cultural heritage, and the growing pains of high school. Additionally, while the film highlights Wendy’s identity as a Chinese-American, it does not make her ethnicity the sole driver of the plot or the sole aspect of her character. Wendy is portrayed as a multidimensional, confident, and likable Asian American protagonist rather than a flat 2-D persona. Growing up as an Asian American adoptee, surrounded by white faces in the archetypal football playing, barbecue grilling American suburb, this movie offered a sense of fascination and relief that I had never experienced before. Seeing a protagonist whose face resembled mine, kicking ass (literally), conjured a feeling that I needed to know who I was and explore my heritage because I had finally seen it represented on the big screen.
Today, more than 15 years later, the consumer base is demanding more diversity and representation in mainstream media. And though it may seem that this shift of media conglomerates prioritizing more representation has been a sudden revelation of 2020's renewed activism and the Black Lives Matter movement, it is actually the manifestation of a long and slow push that started more than 20 years before. Made in 2006, Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior is a product of the beginning of a cultural shift that we are only now starting to identify in mainstream media. This film and other content like it offer insights into the question of representation in the entertainment industry, specifically Asian American representation, and suggestions as to how we can move forward.
Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior (2006) came about when media companies recognized that they were neglecting an entire base of consumers, consumers who could not necessarily relate to the typical white-dominated storylines that often blurred one into the other. But the question became “Where to showcase these new, experimental films?” without the risk of alienating the existing consumer base? Children’s TV was the answer. Lower budget, lower viewership, lower risk, children’s TV such as Disney Channel was a perfect platform to premiere atypical content.
I recently attended a talk by Justin Chon, actor/director of movies such as Gook and Blue Bayou. Chon had a lot to say about Asian and Asian American representation in the media. A point that resonated with me was his observation that child and adolescent media is often more diverse, representative, and progressive than adult media. For example, other POC (people of color) child and adolescent content from this era include animated classics such as Jake Long: The American Dragon, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Proud Family, Emperor’s New Groove, Lilo and Stitch, etc. These movies and series became moderately successful relative to red carpet feature films. They demonstrated that media productions with POC main characters were not a waste of time, money, or resources. However, it is essential to note that the majority of the voice actors playing these characters are not, in fact, POC individuals themselves. This observation only reinforces the claim that in this era, media companies produced POC media with a superficial, less intentional purpose than many of the POC films and series debuted in the present. Media companies sought to tokenize POC faces, making only a perfunctory effort to include minority representation in mainstream productions. Tokenization enabled these companies to achieve their real goal, which was to attract consumers and thus increase profit rather than rendering a more diverse portfolio.
With the rise of social media, consumer activism, and a general desire in cultural attitudes for more accurate representation, the past 20 years of a once slow shift in mainstream media has finally hit its stride. POC-centered films are no longer being debuted solely on children’s TV channels but on red carpets. Budgets for POC-centered media productions have gone from $5 million (Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior) to $100 million (Justin Chon’s Pachinko). But while it is heartening, empowering, and comforting to see diverse faces in theaters, we must not forget the prominent reason why media conglomerates (with boardrooms of predominantly white men) consented to the start of this movement in the first place. As a new wave of content hits the big screen, let’s not be afraid to call out any vapid and exploitative ventures for what they are. For a small list of POC-centered movies and series to watch out for, explore the footnotes at the end of this piece.¹
With the current overwhelming support for mainstream media ventures such as Squid Games, Parasite, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, as well as pop culture figures such as BTS, Ken Jeong, Black Pink, and more, it seems as if Asian Americans are being accepted into mainstream society, not as the ‘Other,’ but as another puzzle piece in the racial configuration of America (a configuration that has predominantly been conceived as either black or white, leaving little room for others). It could seem like being Asian American is even in vogue. Just ask Ariana Grande.³ But that assumption is damaging and dangerous to the Asian American community. At a time when Asian Americans, predominantly Asian American women, are being targeted for hate crimes at an unprecedented rate, the idea that the public has accepted us into mainstream society is blatantly false. And the model minority myth and Hollywood’s upholding of it have only exacerbated the complex and dangerous place we hold in America’s collective imagination.
As I write more specifically on Asian and Asian American representation in the entertainment industry, it is vital to recognize the role that the model minority myth has played in Hollywood’s embrace of Asian and Asian American-centered media. Princeton scholar Anne Anlin Cheng articulates this myth in her 2021 New York Times article: “They are thought to be “white adjacent,” but of course, they can never belong to the club. They are persistently racialized, yet they often don’t count in the American racial equation… Asian-Americans exist in a weird but convenient lacuna in American politics and culture. If they register at all on the national consciousness, it is either as a foreign threat (the Yellow Peril, the Asian Tiger, the Spy, the Disease Vector) or as the domestic but ultimately disposable prism for deflecting or excusing racism against other minorities.”²
In 2006, Asian American characters such as Wendy Wu offered an easy cop-out for media conglomerates who hoped to produce new content with POC faces but sought to maintain a moderate disposition in the eyes of white-centric mainstream culture. Model minority myth has painted Asian Americans as the ‘other,’ like all POC communities, but has undermined us into a 2-D, non-threatening element. It is why Asians are often stereotyped as submissive, hardworking doctors or lawyers, quietly following society’s rules and regulations, but are not white enough to be considered a central part of said society. This generalization allowed media conglomerates to produce children’s shows with Asian American protagonists without much fuss. These characters checked two main boxes: a POC face as the main star, thus dispelling any accusations of racism or discrimination, and characters that embodied the model minority personality: hardworking, intelligent, good family values, etc. This characterization made the Asian American element non-threatening to white viewership. By making years of Asian American centered media that solely focused on one flat dimension of the Asian American experience, the media industry has only exacerbated the model minority myth by representing Asian Americans as the ideal “Other,” the “ideal” person of color, while also reinforcing a singular shallow and inaccurate portrayal of the Asian American experience. Upholding the model minority myth within the entertainment industry and profiting off it has only further damaged the community and compounded existing systemic issues around race, gender, intersectionality, and class. We must cherish productions such as Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou, which reveals an untold facet of the Asian American experience with intention and care in the hopes of expanding what it means to be an Asian American within the popular imagination.
As we move forward into this new era of content production, now at its highest volume ever due to the digital revolution and the rise of streaming and social media, it is crucial to remain critical of Hollywood and its motives. More representation on all levels, e.g., race, class, gender, ability, is vital to progress. But we need to be careful that tokenism, a product of capitalism and from which the model minority myth arose, is called out for what it is. Because when the representations in media are only there to check the boxes rather than portray the multidimensional human experience, we do ourselves a disservice as viewers, consumers, and people.
- Killers of the Flower Moon (Nov. 2022-Film), Pachinko (Mar. 2022- Apple TV), Vanishing Half (TBD- HBO Series), The Sympathizer (TBD- HBO Series)
- Anne Anlin Cheng, “What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About Asian America,” The New York Times, February 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/opinion/anti-asian-violence.html
- Google Ariana Grande + Asianfishing
