Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

Full disclosure: This past weekend, I spent my Saturday night in New Jersey in the company of something like tens of thousands of screaming tween girls, their equally excited mothers, and plenty of iPhone-wielding dads who gave each other knowing looks across the aisle. A friend of mine was working on a story about Justin Bieber, or more specifically, his signature hair swoosh, and so as part of the reporting process, I found myself at the Prudential Center in Newark, head bobbing to Bieber’s tunes and marveling at the epic proportions of a YouTube craze gone viral.

 

These days, masculinity in the media is taking on forms other than the Old Spice guy’s booming voice and log-rolling antics -- try ballet dancers and grand jetés in place of He-Man and power-punches. Bruce Beresford's Mao's Last Dancer is the kind of film that many Asian Americans have been long waiting to see following the questionable representations found in films like The Hangover and The Last Airbender (comical angry Asian mob bosses and sinister villains, respectively).

With the controversy surrounding the summer releases of The Last Airbender and The Karate Kid, it's obvious that the fight for fair representation in Hollywood is a marathon, not a sprint. We might (or might not) have come a long way since the days of Mr.

 

The story is familiar: Asian American high schoolers toil away night and day, shuttled between school in the daytime, cram schools at night and a multitude of extracurricular sports, music and art classes in between. Tack on a few leadership roles and a volunteer stint or two, and long before they’ve ever taken their first college course or sauntered into their first internship interview, these kids already have overflowing resumes.

One year after feel-good Bollywood-esque flick Slumdog Millionaire took the cinematic stage, sweeping the American awards circuit with eight Oscar wins, the Mumbai momentum keeps on rolling. From Bollywood big screen to situation sitcom small screen (that's a mouthful) -- TV's latest additions to what one historian refers to as the "ethnic comedy mix" features Asian American leads. Two new comedies -- Fox's Nevermind Nirvana and NBC's Outsourced -- represent the latest in culturally inclusive primetime: both are ensemble shows centered around Indians and Indian Americans.