Over break, I sat down with a number of the books from this course to start my final project, trying to pick a central topic to work around. As I was doing this, my grandmother turned on one of her favorite movies Crazy Rich Asians, which I had never seen. I stopped my homework (the first step in procrastination) and watched with her. One of the key ideas of the movie is the Chinese-American status of the female protagonist, Rachel Chu, and the lack of value her boyfriend’s mother gives to her for not being “Chinese.” This reminded me of the discussions we had in Donald Duk, as well as No-No Boy and a few other novels concerning the “double status” associated with Asian Americans.
It never really occurred to me that this was still a concept that is dealt with. (the book the film was based off of was published in 2013). This got me considering all the talk about self-identity and the concept of “home” for each novel and seeing how every piece interacts with the idea of expectations v. reality of self-identity and home.
Just wondering if anyone else has seen this movie and maybe thinks about it differently now that we’ve read so much literature from Asia, or if anybody else has thoughts on how home has/hasn’t been defined.
I love this movie! Although I hadn’t really thought about the concept of “home” as my final project, I can definitely see why you could relate that to both the literature we’ve read and this movie! With this movie, I can also see themes of displacement and feeling like you’re not enough of one or the other and this overall feeling of “otherness” a lot of Asian-Americans have.
I watched this movie over the summer and I really liked it!!! You should try “Kim’s Convenience” on Netflix – I wrote a blog post earlier this semester about the series. I also love the ending of how she proves herself to the mother-in-law. I won’t add any more details to avoid spoiling it for someone else.