Conversations about Post-Trauma Art
This piece touches on several ideas mentioned in The Asian Media’s Burden, which I wrote a few months ago. Not required reading, but related.
I was speaking to one of my friends last week about Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, sharing our thoughts on everything from the merits of the fight scenes to the attractiveness of the cast. Despite our consensus that the movie could have been better, we agreed that the opening up until the flight to Macau was executed with nuance and enjoyable to watch.
We also agreed that there were many potential pitfalls that were avoided. I was thankful that there were no cringe Asian jokes and especially glad that it didn’t set up the “good Asian versus bad Asian” conflict. He then said he appreciated that there was no “trauma porn”. Though I could infer the meaning, I really didn’t know how it applied in this context. When I asked him for examples, he offered concepts such as lunchbox moments or go back to your country taunts.
He went on to explain that too much of Asian American media consists of tellings and retellings of these racist experiences, that these moments have somehow become representative of Asian American work. He was tired of such stories. He craved something with more elegance, and less the worn narrative crying of racism. This, he explained, is why he preferred Asian media from Asia. There was more opportunity for subtlety, and the stories told weren’t always the same.
This sentiment had also been expressed by a good friend of mine who promised to write something about it, but got lazy. He said he enjoyed how Chinese cinema depicted youth, in particular young men reveling in the neon underworlds of Taiwan and Hong Kong in the films of Tsai Ming-liang or Wong Kar-Wai. At first, he had difficulty enunciating exactly why he liked them so much, saying only that they felt free, that the protagonists seemed to experience a freedom that is not only non-existent in present-day Asia, but even in America.
After some consideration, he noted that the protagonists seemed free because they were unconstrained by the knowledge of their race. He then went so far as to postulate that Asians will never like freely like that again: the ones in Asia are chained by societal expectations and intense competition, while the ones living in the West are bound by an intense awareness of their race. I thought this was a fascinating idea.
The synthesis of these two conversations is a much more nuanced interpretation of Asian American art than either of them taken alone. I think it’s undeniable that this so-called trauma is not only present, but virtually universal to the Asian American experience. If so, it would only be inauthentic to exclude it from Asian American stories. It would also be prohibitive to reduce all Asian American art to “trauma porn”; though similar experiences can be common, each story is more than comparable racist incidents.
Asian movies, be it Taiwanese romcoms or Hong Kong arthouse cinema, do seem to be given a greater rein than Asian American movies. This is because they are produced and mostly consumed in a space where being Asian is the default. Similar to how movies starring white people and their problems can show detail and depth that minority produced content in the West often can’t, these movies produced in Asia don’t have to deal with the weight of “being Asian”; there has to be some plot aside from Asian-ness, or perhaps there can be a plot aside from Asian-ness. It is small surprise then, that these movies can be more enjoyable and celebrated by Asian Americans; it’s a lot easier than reading an Asian book for example.
However, it’s one thing to celebrate Asian art from Asia, and another to do it at the expense of Asian American art. As I’ve written about before, Asian American movies and Asian Asian movies are for different communities and address very different themes. Asian American culture is still young and needs time to grow; its own community members choosing to consume other art in lieu of it would only stifle its development. For Asian Americans to have our our Kanye, we have to have our Langston Hughes first. I tried to make the the same analogy about writing, but all the contemporary Black writers I could think of continued to stick mostly to the Black experience: Octavia Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead. Perhaps a community’s art will never be post-trauma if the community continues to experience trauma.
That being said, it would be nice to see more Asian art through whatever medium that captures a bit more than ‘racism bad’. By that criteria, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and Little Fires Everywhere succeed. But I doubt either of my friends would hold these as premier examples of Asian American storytelling; not merely because of their mainstream popularity, but also because of the lack of anything distinctly Asian central to the plot. And therein lies the paradox: the story must be uniquely Asian, yet not center around racial experiences, one of the most accessible unique features of the Asian American experience.
However, some stories bridging this gap come to mind. Wong Fu Productions, an Asian American YouTube channel produces some annoying shorts that are representative of all I find problematic about Asian American culture. However, it also produces many touching stories about the millennial experience, particularly the Asian American millennial dating experience. Shorts such as Strangers Again have been watched by many Asian Americans because it is neither trauma porn, nor is it erasure of the Asian American experience.
Minari is a recent movie about a Korean father who has moved his family from California to rural Arkansas with dreams of making it big as a farmer. I was slightly disappointed in the movie because I thought it promised more than it delivered. However, the friend I mentioned at the beginning of this piece found that it met his criteria for Asian storytelling without trauma. The focus was on the immigrant pursuit of stability as opposed to specific anti-Asian racism, but the family was markedly Asian American. After hearing his explanation, I’m inclined to agree with his evaluation of Minari: it was a beautifully shot and written movie carried not by its few scenes of anti-Asian racism, but emotion and the pursuit of the American Dream.
As this trend continues, we will likely see Asian American art with more nuance. Perhaps as society progresses, we will even see movies where Asian Americans aren’t burdened by the consciousness of their race. But that’ll come in due time; as the Asian American experience moves post-trauma, so will its art. Maybe we’ll have better luck tomorrow.
