#anw the concept of nuance is like

[jaggedwolf]

Seeing the difference in the commentaries on Crazy Rich Asians between Asian-American writers and Singaporean writers, and the comparisons to Black Panther has crystallized some thoughts for me.

Obviously the Black Panther comparison is meant in terms of the impact on popular culture and on representation, not genre or plot, but the films do share a crucial similarity. 

They’re these huge American-produced endeavors with all-POC casts that are...not set in America. Isn’t that a little bit funny? A little convenient? 

It’s easy to overlook it for Black Panther, of course, because Wakanda is fictional, an impressive hypothetical. Wakanda is whatever Black Panther says it is, because it doesn’t exist. It can be the magical backdrop it needs to be with little baggage.

Crazy Rich Asians has the magical backdrop of Singapore. Except it actually exists. For those familiar with certain strains of racial discourse in the USA, the use of Singapore as a convenient setting of “Asianness” smacks of a familiar romanticization-exoticisation of the homeland. In order for those dual attitudes to function, one needs to ignore inconvenient facts like the 26% non-Chinese population and Singapore’s own complicated immigration histories.

Who cares! It’s unfair to ask more of a fun Asian romp than we do of fun White romps! We didn’t ask Ant-Man and the Wasp to express white diversity! (An actual tweet I saw)

Nope. An American film setting itself in Singapore gets to be subject to this criticism, because no matter the Hollywood racial politics at play here, there’s also the global ones at work. The big Hollywood machine determining how a country is seen.

It’s a great opportunity for the cast and the director, a win in the American context. That doesn’t mean people can’t critique it in a Singaporean context - a context where there’s still the assumption Singapore is unprepared for non-Chinese minister, where Malay soldiers are often blocked from sensitive positions because they’re seen as terrorism risks, where job ads frequently say “Chinese-speaker required” when the job doesn’t require it, where implicitly immigration into the country is controlled to ensure our relative racial populations stay the same. 

People aren’t being petty about what kind of Asians are in this film - they’re pointing out all the ways it falls into the same old tropes about what does it mean to be Singaporean. About whose stories get to be Singaporean stories.

It’s a film based on a book by a Singaporean-American author who hasn’t lived there since he was 11, who doesn’t know the difference between a Sikh and a Gurkha, and I doubt he cares. It is it’s own kind of symbolism that this is the book with an all-Asian cast that got turned into a Hollywood film. 

I hope the film does fantastic, given that all Hollywood cares about is money. I hope it’s everything people want it to be. 

But the film doesn’t care about my Singapore, and I get to point that out too.