It's really interesting to read all of these posts, stretching all the way back to 2007, especially because in the last decade, this issue with diversity in Hollywood has been heating up, with more and more Asian Americans joining the debate and producing more of their own content.
I found my way over here after watching Ming Na's "I Am" Campaign interview, found here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Cape
I am an Asian Canadian woman and I read Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club in high school, and while her depiction of the characters and their experiences did not entirely resonate with my own personal experiences, I was simply impressed that we were reading something by an Asian author in school. I was also struck by the fact that there were literary representations of Asians thinking about their experiences as members of a first-/second-generation Asian immigrant community at all. I was inspired by the very fact that someone was writing about this and that Hollywood had made it into a movie! For that reason, Ming Na has always been such a huge inspiration to me as one of the first Asian faces in a leading role that I encountered on my TV screen--and one who would go on to play such a variety of roles at that. (Anyone notice that the actor who played Lindo in this movie played her mom in Agents of SHIELD, and an actor from Mulan played her dad?? Awesome.)
Discussions about representations of gender are obviously just as important as the issues surrounding representations of race. But the discussion here in this thread just confirms my overarching conviction that whatever you think of this movie, we simply need more diversity in all aesthetic representations of identity issues, gender issues, race issues. Without more examples of diverse experiences in Hollywood or elsewhere, it's hard to keep works like Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, or the more recent Fresh Off the Boat, from being expected to bear the heavy burden of representing everyone's voices in this community.
All these posts also make me think about the question of how people define art for themselves--when you think of a movie like this, are we looking for it to be as realistic as possible for all or most people or a particular community? Is it meant to be primarily an honest depiction of personal experience? How can/does one person's creation speak to a more universal community? Is the work responsible to be historical accurate in all ways? Is it meant to convey a moral message? What's the balance between being a good individual, cohesive story in and of itself, and being politically correct and/or aspirational?
Art is such a personal thing, especially when it starts to overlap with political discussions. I think we've made huge strides in the last decade in terms of the diversity issue, especially with new platforms like Netflix, but obviously, we have a long way to go as well.
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