Crazy rich failure

Fun fact first: Asia is home to about 60% of the world's population.  About 4.5 billion people.

Fun question: Can you generalize 4.5 billion with a word "Asian"?

Fun answer: Yes, but only here in the US!

Here in the US, one can easily shock most people by referring to, say, Iranians or Bangladeshis as Asians.  It will shock them because most Americans think only of Chinese and other Far East Asians as Asians.  The rest?  We are from shitholes, of course!

The box-office champ Crazy Rich Asians has done a lot to further reinforce this screwed up understanding.  (Nope, I haven't seen the movie, nor do I have any plans to watch it.)

The film has been "heralded as a milestone for Hollywood"

Not a single central or even auxiliary character is played by a white actor. On the few occasions when white people do feature, they flash across the screen as extras: as plane passengers or, on a giant container ship chartered for an over-the-top bachelor party, as bikini-clad beauty queens for hire.
Asian-Americans, including among the cast, hail this as a breakthrough moment in American cinema.

Well, ok.  But, that is the American perspective.  What is the reaction from Singapore, which is the locale for the movie? The film "ignores all Asians other than the Chinese kind."

One-quarter of Singapore’s population is not ethnic-Chinese, but of Malay or Indian descent. Yet when Malays feature, it is as valet-parking attendants. Indonesians are masseuses. As for the pair of Sikh guards at the Young family mansion, their buffoonish performance is as excruciating as Mickey Rooney’s as the Japanese photographer living above Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Brown bodies, writes one anonymous film-goer, were disembodied “footnotes”: mere openers of doors or cleaners of homes. “Crazy Rich Asians” is not just “money porn”, she goes on, it is also, to many South-East Asians, “othering porn”. What passes as a victory in Hollywood can look like a glaring failure in Singapore.

And, how about in China?  You know, the "Asia" that most Americans think about?

Well, the movie "may not even be released there":

Under China’s strict quota system, a limited number of foreign films are approved for import every year and some experts are skeptical about the movie’s chances. The depictions of profligate spending and vast wealth inequality in “Crazy Rich Asians,” they say, might not sit well with Chinese officials amid the country’s growing push for positive “core socialist values.”

How about the content of the movie?

Dong Ming, a Shanghai film critic, said: “Maybe the content of the film wouldn’t get censored but it’s a question of whether the film would even be popular in China.”
“Chinese people really dislike this kind of westernized Chinese culture,” he added, comparing the movie to American Chinese food staples like General Tso’s chicken and fortune cookies. “The flavor is not authentic.”

We are a crazy rich people!

The diminished expectations of good ol' Americans

As trump and his party go all out in their racist war against immigrants, one of these days even his own minions will begin to understand that it is not white supremacy that made America great, but that only immigrants can make America great again.

Take the case of two comedians with origins in India: Aziz Ansari and Hari Kondabolu.  Both their fathers are medical professionals who immigrated from India, thanks to the changes in the legal framework in 1965. In Kondabolu's case, his mother too is a medical professional.

These two guys are not surgeons or lawyers, but they ventured into comedy--despite their stellar academic credentials and not because they could not make it.

Ansari and Kondabolu typify the American way of life, which the US army has crafted well into its recruitment campaign: Be all that you can be!  If all that you can be means not being a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, that is ok too.

The parents, the immigrants, work hard so that their children and and grandchildren can do what makes them happy in life.  This is not a new American concept, however.  John Adams wrote in one of his letters to his wife, Abigail:

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History and Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

John Adams wished that his grandchildren ought to be able to pursue painting and poetry if that is what they wanted to do.  That is the American dream!

Such a wishful dream for his children is what this op-ed author--a highly successful son of immigrant parents from Asia--writes about:

I’m temperamentally unable to mimic my father’s succeed-at-all-costs immigrant mind-set, an instinct I share with most of my generation. And maybe that marks our immigrant parents’ ultimate triumph: We have become American. As part of the American parenting mainstream, I aim to raise children who are happy, confident and kind — and not necessarily as driven, dutiful and successful as the model Asian child. If that means the next generation will have fewer virtuoso violinists and neurosurgeons, well, I still embrace the decline.

Imagine an America that is walled off against immigrants.  In addition to a real decline in population--immigration and their fertility rates help the US not become a Spain or Russia--we will also have fewer people who are driven to succeed in medicine, or high tech, or ...

The author writes:

When I became a parent, I felt the wonder and uncertainty that accompany the awesome responsibility of fatherhood. But I was absolutely sure of one thing: The childhood I devise for my two young daughters will look nothing like mine. They will feel valued and supported. They will know home as a place of joy and fun. They will never wonder whether their father’s love is conditioned on an unblemished report card.
I’ve assumed this means my daughters might someday bring home grades or make life choices that my father would have regarded as failures. If so, I embrace the decline.

May our diminished expectations lead to happy lives!

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