At last – Asians have arrived in Hollywood!

IT took 88 years from the first Asian to be nominated for Oscar’s Best Actress Award before Malaysia-born Michelle Yeoh’s ground-breaking win last year in ‘Everything, Everywhere All at Once’.

That same year, Ke Huy Quan, a Vietnamese-born Chinese-American whose debut was in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ in 1984 had also taken home the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.

Last Sunday at the Annual 76th Emmy Awards, New Zealand-born Japanese actress Anna Sawai won the ‘Best Leading Actress’ for her role in the hit television mini-series ‘Shogun’. Another Japanese actor, the veteran Hiroyuki Sanada, also clinched the Emmy for ‘Best Lead Actor’ for the same series.

Earlier in 2021, South Korean actress Youn Yuh-jung also won the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in ‘Minari’. Its main actor Steven Yeun, another South Korean, also won two Emmys this year and one Emmy last year for his lead role in the hit television series ‘Beef’.

Although headlines around the world had, at the time, acclaimed Yeoh’s Oscar nomination and labelled her as the ‘first Asian woman’ to receive the accolade, she was not the first Asian woman to be nominated. That honour goes to Merle Oberon, who was nominated for her role as ‘Kitty Vane’ in the 1935 film ‘The Dark Angel’.

However, at the time Oberon had hidden her South Asian heritage; she was actually born in Bombay in 1911 to an English father and a Sri Lankan mother who had Maori ancestry.

Hollywood has a dark racist history with actors of colour, one of the reasons why Oberon had kept her ancestry secret.

Very few Asian actors were open about their identity till very recently. One of the most notable who became known as Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star was Anna May Wong, but she had struggled to land leading roles.

Due to the ‘Hays Code’ enacted by the major Hollywood studios, which was effective from 1935 to 1968, strict and restrictive rules had to be followed by the Motion Picture Association at the time.

Due to this, an actress like Anna May Wong could never be cast as the main romantic lead opposite a white actor.

In recent years, the likes of Ang Lee who won Oscars for ‘Brokeback Mountain’ in 2006 and ‘Life of Pi’ in 2013; and Bong Joon-Ho who won Oscars for directing, screenplay and ‘Best Picture’ in 2020 for ‘Parasite’; there were at least five other lesser-known Asians who had won between 1956 and 1985.

China-born James Wong Howe won the Oscar for cinematography for ‘Hud’ in 1964, and another for ‘The Rose Tattoo’ in 1956.

Japanese night-club-singer-turned-actress Miyoshi Umeki won ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in ‘Sayonara’ in 1957.

Chinese-American film editor Richard Chew won for editing for ‘Star Wars’ in 1978.

The first person from India to win an Oscar was Bhanu Athaiya, the ‘Best Costume Design’ for ‘Gandhi’ in 1983.

Finally, Dr Haing S Ngor, a Cambodian, was awarded the Best Supporting Actor’s Oscar for ‘The Killing Fields’ in 1985. He, tragically, died of a gunshot wound in 1996 outside his Los Angeles home.

Accolades, acclaim and awards aside, there were many Asian actors and actresses and those who worked in the film industry who had, over the years, made their contributions towards advancing their fellow Asian artistes within the business.

Many were successful, but even more did not have the spotlight shine on them.

My earliest personal memory of an Asian face on the silver screen as a young boy has to be the ‘Fu Manchu’ films, which in the mid-1960s had Christopher Lee playing the role, and Peter Sellers in the 1980s.

Despite being in the public eye for over 90 years, Dr Fu Manchu, a popular Chinese villain, has only ever been played on screen by white men.

As a boy turning the corner on puberty in 1960, the arrival of ‘The World of Suzie Wong’ and a sensationally-beautiful, all-clad-in-a-body-hugging-cheongsam actress by the name of Nancy Kwan, had turned my world around. The love story, the exotic location of Hong Kong’s Wanchai District and the scintillating screenplay had made deep and long lasting impressions.

This was followed quickly the following year by ‘Flower Drum Song’, a Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit musical, which the soundtrack had included the songs ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’, ‘You Are Beautiful’ and ‘A Hundred Million Miracles’.

For me, at least, it was a tragedy that Nancy Kwan had never received the acclaim due to her for some odd reasons.

Two years earlier, in 1958, another Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, ‘South Pacific’, had among its many stars two actresses whom you might think were Asians but were not: Juanita Hall, an Afro-American, and France Nuyen, a French actress.

If ever there was a remake, you could bet that Asians would be cast now!

In 1993, Hollywood struck gold with its all-Asian ensemble casting of Oliver Stone’s production of an Amy Tan novel directed by Wayne Wang. The movie was called ‘The Joy Luck Club’ and 31 years later, in my opinion, it is still the best movie of what epitomises the ultimate Asian story.

Film critic Roger Ebert gave one of the best reviews of ‘The Joy Luck Club’: “These stories are about Chinese and Chinese-American characters, but they are universal stories. Anyone with parents or children, which is to say, everyone, will identify with the way that the hopes of one generation can become both the restraints and the inspirations of the next.

“The Joy Luck Club is like a flowering of talent that has been waiting so long to be celebrated. It is also one of the most touching and moving of the year’s films.”

If you have yet to watch this movie, I urge you to do so!

Although Hollywood has a long way to go in its quest for diversity and equal representation of work by people of colour, and especially Asians, we have in the past 70 years, since ‘Godzilla’ in 1954, a lot to be proud of in terms of Asian representation in the impact on global pop culture in general, with films in particular.

In my personal opinion I have a list of the 10 most important Asian films that were made and have created their own space and influence in the world of the cinema, in chronological order starting from the most recent:

• 2019 – Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-Ho (Korean);
• 2018 – Crazy Rich Asians, directed by John M. Chu (Chinese);
• 2005 – Memoirs of a Geisha, directed by Rob Marshall (American);
• 2003 – Old Boy, directed by Park Chan Wook (Korean);
• 2000 – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, directed by Ang Lee (Chinese);
• 2000 – In the Mood for Love, directed by Wong Kar Wai (Chinese);
• 1993 – The Joy Luck Club directed by Wayne Wang (Chinese);
• 1986 – A Better Tomorrow, directed by John Woo (Chinese);
• 1973 – Enter the Dragon, directed by Robert Clouse (American), and;
• 1954 – Godzilla (Gojira), directed by Ishiro Honda (Japanese).

The Asian representation in Hollywood has increased significantly over the last 15 years.

A new study by the University of Southern California has shown that from 2007 to 2022, the percentage of Asian characters with speaking roles took a leap from around three per cent to nearly 16 per cent within that period.

However, the vast majority of these were still in supporting roles.

The overall the prospects are still dim. Sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen told NBC News in 2021: “Hollywood is something that repeats what has worked before. The early representation of Asians were just East Asians, and the stereotypes were the accent, the exotic, the villain.

“All those tropes have not changed for 100 years. Because Hollywood just reproduces itself.”

* The opinions expressed in this article are the columnist’s own and do not reflect the view of the newspaper.