Upon arriving at Yale in 2020, Sam Ahn, who has always been interested in theater, couldn’t help but notice the absence of a prominent Asian American theater community at Yale.
Now a junior, Ahn spends his Friday evenings in a brightly lit room on the second floor of the Asian American Cultural Center for board meetings of the Asian American Collective of Theatermakers (AACT). Fellow board members Olivia O’Conner and Maya Li sit across from Ahn on gray and blue couches and discuss the events they are planning and the new club members they’ve welcomed.
Ahn created the AACT in September 2022 to give Asian Americans interested in theater what he craved as a first-year—a “place people could point to and say, ‘Oh, look, a thriving Asian American theater community.’”
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Although Ahn’s primary passion is theater, not film, the two worlds are intimately connected. Seeing Asian Americans flourishing in the broader performing arts world, whether it be on stage or screen, is crucial to achieve the type of community that Ahn seeks to build at Yale.
With the recent success of Asian American films such as The Farewell (2019), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), conversation has erupted about Asian American representation and recognition in Hollywood.
Now, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once—a film with Asian American leads, a majority Asian American cast, and an Asian American co-writer and co-director—is leading in Oscar nominations for the 95th Academy Awards. The film already won several Golden Globes, with Michelle Yeoh receiving Best Supporting Actress for her role as Evelyn Quan Wang. She is the second Asian American actress to ever win a Golden Globe in that category.
The recognition Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO) received at the Golden Globe and Academy level thrust the question of Asian Americans’ place in Hollywood into the forefront of public consciousness. What impact does the incredible success of one film have on an entire industry? Is the system that has kept Asian Americans from gaining recognition in Hollywood being overturned? Can young performers like Ahn finally look to Hollywood and see themselves reflected in a vibrant Asian American community?
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The idea of belonging is central to the conversation about the role of Asian Americans in Hollywood. When Asian Americans first entered the industry in the early 19th century, they were cast in flatly stereotyped, caricatured, and villainized roles.
Anna May Wong, who is considered the first Chinese-American movie star in Hollywood, rose to such prominence that her face now graces the American quarter. Yet, during her time in Hollywood, Wong was consistently typecast in roles that perpetuated harmful, hypersexual stereotypes about Asian American women—a Mongol slave in The Thief of Bagdad (1924), a prostitute in Shanghai Express (1932), and a nightclub dancer in Piccadilly (1929). Only recently have Asian Americans played the role of the hero or the dimensional lead.
Ryan Zhou ’22.5, a Film and Media Studies Major, contends that early Hollywood set up the industry for the underrepresentation we see today. “Back when Asian Americans were first coming onto the scene in Hollywood, a lot of the time they were portrayed as this idea of the orient, which was this alienated, foreign concept that was not fully American… Given that that was the introduction of Asian American people into Hollywood, I think it really set the stage for the under-appreciation to come.”
Industry award statistics demonstrate how evident under-appreciation is. Since the first Oscars ceremony in 1929, the Academy has given 3,140 awards. Prior to this Oscar season, Asian Americans had been nominated for 336 and won 75—just 12 of those wins being for acting roles. This year, Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO) was up for 11 Oscars, making it one of the highest-nominated Asian American films in history.
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It is impossible to discuss EEAAO, however, without acknowledging the films that preceded it and paved the way for its success. In recent years, the most prominent trailblazer was Crazy Rich Asians, the first all-Asian film out of a major Hollywood studio since Joy Luck Club in 1993. Soojin Park ’25 believes a movie like Crazy Rich Asians had to walk so a movie like EEAAO could run. “For a very long time, studios didn’t believe there would really be an audience for ‘Asian’ stories. The success of a larger-than-life, mainstream movie like Crazy Rich Asians was necessary to prove that there was a market for stories about characters that weren’t necessarily the traditional ‘face’ of Hollywood,” Park said in an email to The Politic. “The movie was a breakthrough in a collective, public recognition of Asian American narratives and made the production of a more niche, independent film like EEAAO possible.”
One critique of Crazy Rich Asians, however, is that its story is not representative of the Asian American experience, as it focuses on exorbitant wealth and a rarefied Asian lifestyle. The movie is primarily set in Singapore and centers on a wealthy family of Han Chinese descent. It follows Rachel Chu, an Asian American economics professor, as she navigates life with her fiancé’s family, who live like royalty in Singapore. In contrast to the wealth displayed in the film, Asian Americans are the most economically divided racial group in the United States. While the film was lauded for its entertainment value, acting, and popular appeal, it is fundamentally unrelatable for most Asian Americans. “The movie meant a lot to see Asian people on screen, but in terms of identity and wanting to relate to the identities portrayed on screen, it ultimately didn’t really connect with a lot of actual Asian American people,” Natalie Semmel ’25, a Film and Media Studies major said.
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One of the factors behind EEAAO’s success is the way it does manage to connect with its audience. Its inclusion of themes like immigration, economic struggle, and familial conflict struck a deep chord with Asian American audiences. When Diza Hendrawan ’25 walked out of the theater after seeing the film for the first time, they were crying. “I can’t believe that that was a movie…I feel like I was literally tossed through a washing machine,” they said.
Another of EEAAO’s draws is the realistic portrait it paints of the Asian immigrant experience in America. Story aside, simply hearing Asian accents presented in such a realistic and inoffensive way was particularly meaningful to Ahn, who remarked that the accents in EEAAO reminded him of his parents’ accents. Ariane De Gennaro ’25 echoed, “I saw my mom in it… and her mom too. There was fighting, but there was so much love…It’s really meaningful to see that portrayed in such a big movie.”
Moreover, despite the film’s portrayal of a Chinese American family, it develops themes that many audience demographics, not solely East Asians, may relate to; the film is fundamentally a movie about immigrants, family, generational trauma, and relationships. “I was just happy to see a story like that being told. Being the child of two [Polish and Indian] immigrants in this country…well…there aren’t a lot of stories like that…EEAAO’s story is told through the experience of a Chinese immigrant and her family, but it is also universal,” Aiden Thomas ’25 told The Politic. Hendrawan agreed, describing the film as having bottled a complex but deeply relatable feeling—the emotional push and pull of two people yearning for something better when neither of them knows where to start. It is that feeling that, according to Hendrawan, lends this story its universal reach.
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The success of EEAAO is a testament to the value of amplifying Asian American stories—but, if a film like EEAAO can be so well-received, why don’t we see more films like it being produced? This partially has to do with profit concerns, as Asian American stories have not historically been able to generate substantial revenue.
“Films are not made only as art. They’re made to make money, too. And films are incredibly expensive to produce. It’s kind of impossible to want to make a film and be making it about a subject that’s not making money, and I think there has been a notion that Asian American movies will not make money,” Semmel said. Ahn expressed a similar sentiment, saying that a film like EEAAO would be seen as a definite risk by producers and executives.
Joy Liu ’25, an Ethnicity, Race & Migration major, described the battle of getting an Asian American story produced as a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” According to Liu, a story about Asian Americans may get greenlit, but, seen as a financial risk, it often won’t receive the right amount of budget or promotion that it should from its production company. As a result, it doesn’t do well at the box office, and Hollywood executives walk away with the assumption that Asian American stories won’t sell. Between Joy Luck Club in 1993 and Crazy Rich Asians in 2018, there was not an Asian American movie that was a box office hit. Even The Farewell (2019), for which Awkwafina won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress—the first Oscar in the category to be awarded to an Asian American—grossed only 21.3 million worldwide. A Star is Born, which received an Oscar the same year, grossed 436 million worldwide.
If Asian American stories are not perceived as money-makers, what, then, is a money-maker? The answer is as much a who as it is a what. There is a certain pool of stars that Hollywood pulls from when casting a movie for their reliable audience draw. For example, Dune (2021) features a slate of critically acclaimed stars, including Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, as the film had an imperative to at least recoup its $165 million budget. A star-studded, name brand cast was a way to hedge its bets. Given the historic whiteness of Hollywood, there are comparatively few Asian American stars.
Getting an Asian American film greenlit can be very difficult without a popular name attached that can guarantee revenue. Thus, when the industry wants to showcase an Asian hero, it plucks one from the same, very small basket of Asian American actors. “In the past few years of movies, I’ve seen certain Asian people being selected as the Asian people. A movie needs an Asian person—great, Michelle Yeoh! Or, I feel like Henry Golding [who starred in Crazy Rich Asians, Monsoon, and The Gentlemen, among others] is just the Asian male star,” Ahn said. “It seems that casting directors think these Asian stars can represent all of Asian Americans. I would like to see newer faces.”
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Part of this cycle of underrepresentation is that Asian Americans are underrepresented not only on Hollywood’s stage, but behind its curtain as well. According to a 2020 study by UCLA, the people who make decisions about budgeting, marketing, casting, and directing for films—those who occupy Hollywood’s executive suites—are overwhelmingly white.
Across the 11 major and mid-major studios in Hollywood, as of 2020, the Chairs/CEOs were 91% white, the senior management teams were 93% white, and the unit heads, who are responsible for casting and marketing, were 86% white. As of 2019, people of color represented only 9% of studio heads and had less than proportionate representation among total actors at around 32.7%. When you isolate Asian Americans, these numbers get even smaller.
Not only is racism a large factor in the underrepresentation of Asian Americans in Hollywood, nepotism is too. As Hollywood is a historically white industry, those who are able to leverage connections to obtain positions on film sets are usually white. It is not uncommon for producer and director roles, for example, to be secured through family or friend connections—connections built by generational footing in an industry in which other races have only recently begun to accrue success. “There’s just a lot of nepotism in general in Hollywood that flies under the radar,” Zhou told The Politic. He asserted that while not everyone who secures a position in Hollywood through nepotism is famous, it still happens quite frequently. The fact that Hollywood is presently and has historically been a white-dominated industry, combined with the heavy hand of nepotism, means that the majority of people working behind the scenes are white.
What results is a pervasive, normative whiteness in the film industry—in front of the camera, behind the camera, and even editing the footage. In the time Zhou spent working on indie film sets, he noticed that the vast majority of even the supporting characters were white. Zhou noted that the success of EEAAO may be creating an illusion of ease of access for aspiring Asian American actors. “Just because Michelle Yeoh won a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Oscar — I don’t think that’s an accurate representation of how difficult it is for Asian Americans to get roles. I think that, even though there is this push to have more diversity in terms of the stories that are being told, there is still an undeniable consistency in the fact that the biggest films are always the ones that have a lot of white actors in them,” he said. Thomas echoed his sentiment, saying that audiences have been conditioned to watch a white hero.
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In 2023, we are coming into a moment of greater diversity, not just in terms of casting, but in terms of the types of stories being told. Yet, there is still undeniably much progress to be made. Being an Asian American in Hollywood means fighting to create a name for yourself in an industry that has systematically oppressed you—a system that still sidelines Asian American stories. Asian Americans in Hollywood are left in a confusing spot, trying to define their place in an industry that has long excluded them.
De Gennaro dreams of a future with an entirely different definition of representation and diversity. “I want to be at a place where we see representation…just depicting the lives of people. And it’s not that important what their identity is other than how it contributes, authentically, to the story,” she said. “Diversity doesn’t have to be the point,” De Gennaro continued, “it should just be something that naturally happens as a byproduct of us trying to tell good stories and trying to feature good actors.”
As is evident from its performance at the Oscars, EEAAO is a landmark film for Asian Americans. Some may even call EEAAO a turning point in Hollywood’s history. Ahn, however, is cautious with his optimism.
“I’ve always been suspicious of claiming victory because of the standalone products that receive acclaim,” he said. “I think it’s really easy to get complacent and say, ‘oh, look, Asian American have triumphed in the entertainment industry,’ when really, you’re not addressing the roots of the issues in Hollywood. If anything, I think claiming victory is just a distraction from all the work that needs to be done…Everything Everywhere All at Once is a really good movie… I cried when I was watching it. But I don’t think we can just say we’ve won the good fight. Because we really haven’t.”
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While the status of Asian Americans in the larger entertainment industry may remain somewhat ambiguous, within smaller theater and film communities, meaningful strides are being made. This semester, Ahn is directing an all-Asian production of Love Letters at Yale which opens in early April. Love Letters, a play by A.R. Gurney, chronicles a decades-long relationship between the wealthy Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner—characters who have historically been played near-exclusively by white actors. The halfway point of the play is the passing of the Hart-Celler Act (1965), which overhauled U.S. immigration policy by increasing access for new immigrant groups.
The unspoken undercurrent of Andrew and Melissa’s dialogue in Love Letters is that they belong completely in America. While they struggle throughout the play, Andrew and Melissa never question the security of their position in their country. Ahn selected Love Letters for this very reason. “It’s a provocative idea to me that we could have Asian people speak the words of someone who has never questioned their place here when that’s so intrinsic to the Asian American identity… The play is about loneliness, but it’s also about connecting in that loneliness, which really speaks to the Asian American experience,” he said. Love Letters is Ahn’s most recent effort to vitalize the Asian American theater community at Yale. Through the play, Ahn is carving out a space for those like him, while acknowledging that lasting power is not built—nor dismantled—overnight. Both Ahn’s small-scale production of Love Letters and the blockbuster EEAAO are part of the same concerted effort to combat the systemic exclusion of Asian Americans from performing arts and build a community for Asian American artists of all kinds. Everything Everywhere All at Once has made great headway: it is up to everyone else to continue the work.