When I first watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, I thought I was the only one dazzled by Ke Huy Quan’s masterful performance as Waymond Wang. “Who is this guy?” I asked my friend as Quan morphed from meek laundromat owner to intergalactic badass and back again, the transitions moving faster than a weaponized fanny pack. “He’s amazing!”
Turns out, it wasn’t just me. Quan’s acting skill and ebullient personality won him many fans. Quan beamed in interviews as he described his triumphant return to the Hollywood screen after a 30-year hiatus from a front-of-camera presence. He stifled tears as he accepted the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, a moment he’d never thought possible.
Once a child actor with leading roles in The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Quan abandoned his acting career as a young adult, instead working behind the scenes in the film industry, owing to the lack of roles for Asian men. Quan explained in a New York Times interview, “As I got older…there were just not a lot of offers. When there was one, the role was very stereotypical, and you had every Asian in Hollywood fighting for it.”
As I read Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu’s allegorical novel about Asian invisibility in U.S. culture, the difficulties Quan and other Asian American performers face were on my mind. In the book, a community of Chinese American actors try to earn roles, or simply living wages, as bit players on a police procedural called Black and White. Yu described the premise in a 2020 interview: “Everyone’s seen Law and Order, and you have the two leads in the front, and they’re discussing the case. And way in the back, pretty much out of focus, is, like, an Asian guy unloading a van. I was like, what if you told the story from that guy’s point of view?”
The extras in Interior Chinatown dream of being seen for their full potential but are repeatedly reduced to caricatures. Willis Wu, the novel’s protagonist, aspires to land the best-possible role for an Asian actor, Kung Fu Guy. Instead, he gets cast as various incarnations of Generic Asian Man. Relegated to playing Background Oriental Male or Delivery Guy, Willis admires the spotlight given to the main actors, whose stories actually seem, from his perspective, to matter:
Black and White always look good. A lot of it has to do with the light. They’re the heroes. They get hero lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. Designed to hit White’s face just right, anyway.
Someday you want the light to hit your face like that. To look like the hero. Or for a moment to actually be the hero.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Willis doesn’t envision himself a hero, either in Black and White or in the story of his own life. A study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that 30 percent of the top-grossing films of 2018–19 either had no Asian American and Pacific Islander characters or featured such characters delivering five lines or fewer. The AAPI actors I spoke to reported that, like Willis, they are relegated to minor parts delineated by narrow stereotypes.
Bobby, an Asian American actor and a teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, regularly encounters such limitations. He said, “When I was doing community theater, I had the opportunity to play a wide variety of fun and interesting roles due to color-blind casting. It was when I became a professional actor [in a union] that things started to change. I would only be called in to audition for very specifically Asian roles and I needed to fit that ‘type.’”
Lesley, a working actor and writer in Los Angeles, finds that roles designated for Asian actors reflect a few stereotypes: “I’m not hot-hot, I don’t do martial arts, and I don’t do an accent, so that already takes me out of three of the major hiring categories.” She has also been asked to sound more “Asian” during jobs. “First of all,” she explained, “Asian is not an accent. And they would never ask, Did your parents speak [an Asian language] at home? Do you speak that language at all?”
Notably, the casting types described by Asian actors, like those in Interior Chinatown, are not linked to specific nationalities or ethnicities. Roles for actors like Willis are labeled Asian or Oriental, despite the show’s Chinatown setting; the dream role of Kung Fu Guy, referencing a Chinese martial art, is barely an exception. For Willis, repeatedly playing a Generic Asian Man with no history or cultural background alienates him from his own identity and even his own body:
This face that feels like a mask, that has never felt quite right on you. That reminds you, at odd times, and often after two to four drinks, that you’re Asian. You are Asian! Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.
Asian American actors find ways to stay connected to their craft without relying on Hollywood casting, as Quan did by taking jobs that included assistant director and fight choreographer. Lesley told me, “Commercial casting is way more diverse than regular film and television casting. I think they understand that diverse people buy things and like to see themselves in ads, but this hasn’t quite made it to the rest of the entertainment industry.” And Bobby commented, “As an Asian American actor, I cannot wait around and hope for opportunities to come my way. I have the power to write the stories I want to see. I get together with my friends, and we create a theater show or make a short film together. Those have always been such rewarding creative experiences for me.”
As Quan once did, Willis ultimately renounces his leading-role aspirations and expands his life beyond the world of Black and White. “I can’t do this anymore,” he tells one of the lead players after a glorious stint as Kung Fu Guy leads to his character’s death. In fact, he declares in the novel’s dramatic climax, “Kung Fu Guy is just another form of Generic Asian Man”—a disposable stereotype lacking depth, nuance, and humanity.
Leaving the world of Black and White is a disappointing if necessary choice for Willis, but the parallels for the U.S. film industry are devastating. How many talented Asian American actors have received the message that they don’t belong on the big screen? The past few years have brought several notable films and shows with Asian American leads, and Hulu is planning a series based on Yu’s novel. Let’s hope the world doesn’t lose out on the next Ke Huy Quan and all the joy and brilliance they could bring us.•
Join us on June 15 at 5 p.m., when Yu will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Interior Chinatown. Please visit the Alta Clubhouse to discuss the book with your fellow California Book Club members. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
