My reaction to the viral whitewashing video

Time for a brand new topic, I'm going to be talking today about that video which has been shared so much on social media - the one condemning the whitewashing of Hollywood, casting white actors in Asian roles. In that video, a cute young East Asian girl goes into a comic book store in America and with delight, picks up a manga comic book that depicts her culture: 'Ghost In A Shell' after scouring through shelves and shelves of other books depicting white characters. Fast forward a decade and we see a beautiful Asian young lady walking down the street and when she sees Scarlett Johansson cast as the lead in the same movie, she is absolutely devastated. The short film is well made and is designed to accuse Hollywood casting directors of racism, shutting out talented Asian actors from roles that really should be played by Asian and not white actors. It does have a very valid point but I am also left somewhat torn.

Because what I am about to say is going to make me so hated by the Asian community from America to England to Singapore. I get the feeling that the only response to a video like that is wholehearted agreement and condemnation of casting directors for racism. But please, allow me to share my story and my point of view. I grew up in Singapore, a very multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country where one was often shoved into a box based on your ethnicity: Chinese, Malay, Indian, Eurasian, others. However, when it came to children in the playground or in the classroom, we all spoke English as a lingua franca and one's skin colour didn't really matter that much. I was crazy about gymnastics and my best friends growing up tended to be those who shared my love for the sport, since I spent very long hours training in the gym. One's skin colour or ethnicity didn't come into the equation at all: I would befriend anyone who shared my passion for gymnastics. I'm not saying that there's no racism in Singapore - there definitely is. especially with the older generation. But growing up in that environment, I suppose perhaps rather naively, I believed that my generation would be the one where we finally eradicated racism and our skin colour would no longer be an issue. Yeah right.

I was also extremely lucky with my further education which took me to the UK and France - by the age of about 21, French had replaced Mandarin as my second language and at the age of 40, Mandarin is my 5th language after French, Spanish and Welsh. Some people would consider me a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside but I don't care. I suppose a lot of that stemmed from the fact that I never got along with my parents but I was never openly confrontational with my dad - he was a highly unreasonable man who wasn't that educated. You can't ever engage in an argument of any sort with him, even when he is wrong, he would just shout and drown you out with volume and when I was young, he would end that argument by hitting me. That led to me developing a very passive-aggressive approach to our relationship where we keep the veneer of civility but I do everything I can to prove to him that I'm so white and hate his Chinese culture. Growing up, I refused to watch a single Chinese movie, I refused to read a single Chinese newspaper, I refused to touch a Chinese magazine or listen to any Chinese pop music. I did an extremely good job in totally whitewashing myself culturally just to spite my father by making sure that my cultural experience and identity growing up was totally white and I strictly banished any elements of Chinese culture from it.

So sue me - I've rejected my Chinese culture by choice.

I have a distant, formal but still civil relationship with my parents today, we barely ever talk since I live 8 time zones away. I don't think they know how to react to my cultural rebellion, as my two sisters are still painfully - nay, make that stereotypically Chinese. I picked this method of rebellion because I didn't want to make it personal, now that would be way too painful. Each time my father refused to listen to me or hit me, I would blame his culture for it - I would blame the way he was brought up which conditioned him to react like that. My parents took very little interest in me as a child and even less interest in me as an adult. I've always said that my blog readers know far more about me than my own parents. My parents don't know what I do for a living. If I took it personally, I would then have to confront the question, "why do my parents hate me?" Or, "why do my parents want to have children but then take so little interest in their own children?" As a self-defence mechanism, I blamed their culture instead: it became a convenient scapegoat for my pain whilst growing up and it continues to be that convenient scapegoat for me today as the pain of rejection is still there.

So if I were that cute little Asian girl wandering into the comic book store, I would have done the complete opposite: I would have bypassed all the comic books from Japan, Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong and reached for those from America with white characters. I grant you that perhaps my experience is quite different from those Asian kids who grew up in happy families, but I just wanted to contest the assumption that all Asians somehow have this need to see Asian faces all the time in media. Now, there is a Facebook group entitled, "Let's try to get more British Chinese/East Asians into TV, film, theatre and radio". along with other Facebook groups trying to encourage more diversity in casting in the UK. I sit silently in these groups after having fallen out with two people in the East Asian group - both of whom are fellow British Chinese actors. Let me share with you the reasons why I fell out with them.

Woah I've had some major disagreements with those guys.

One of these guys, let's call him Kong since his family is from Hong Kong kicked up a big fuss about the fact that British-Chinese people have paid their TV license fees for years in the UK but have had their 'cultural needs' ignored. I disagreed with that on so many levels: I'm British-Chinese, but I'd love to see more French, Spanish and Welsh programmes on the BBC because I speak those languages better than I can speak Mandarin and if someone really has a desperate need to watch say a Cantonese drama series from Hong Kong, then you have the internet these days. Heck, even back before the days of broadband internet, British Chinese people would just rent DVD box sets (or videos for VCRs, if you wanna go back to the 1980s) to get their fix of Hong Kong dramas - they didn't wait for the BBC to finally broadcast a Chinese movie on one of their channels. Likewise, I also have plenty of British friends who don't have a drop of Chinese blood in their veins, but take an active interest in Chinese culture and some even speak Mandarin more fluently than I ever can. By that token, the BBC should increase their Chinese content on their output not to appease the British Chinese community, but it should be done in the name of education: making everyone - white, black, Asian - more aware of cultures from all over the world and I think that is definitely a good thing.

What was Kong's reaction? He labelled me a traitor to the Chinese community for preferring white culture over Chinese culture. He said that I was part of the problem and not part of the solution. It suffices to say that he was extremely angry with me - I found that hard to comprehend because Kong was brought up in the UK and spoke English as a first language, I thought he would understand why I would not feel particularly 'Chinese'. I then tried to reason with someone else who joined in the argument - let's call him 'Yiban' since this guy is half English and half Chinese. I thought, okay Yiban is mixed, surely he can understand my point of view? Nope, he was even professing to be more 'Chinese' than me and despite having been brought up in England and he even accused me of having a the mentality of a 'colonial subject' - because I was raised in Singapore, I was the brown colonial subject all too grateful to be allowed into the West and happy to accept any terms and conditions set by the white masters in charge. I found that rather insulting of course as they were imposing their preconceived notions on me and I really, really hated that.

I thought they were approaching the issue the wrong way.

You see, many actors dream about becoming big stars from a young age and they go into the industry with a one track mind - to become famous. I took a very different route, having established myself a career in finance before turning to acting at the ripe old age of 28. I never entered showbiz with dreams of becoming a superstar, rather it was more a case of, "I live in London and if I never even give this a go, I'd die with a heart full of regrets - all I want to do is give it my best shot, so I can turn around and say that I've tried my best." I think life is a balance between testing yourself by climbing steep learning curves and sticking to what you know best. I don't want to get so comfortable doing what I do that I never venture out of my comfort zone - yet I don't want to spend all my time feeling incompetent and unable to cope with what is expected of me at work. Sometimes I deliberately do something difficult just to prove to myself that I am still young enough at heart to take on new challenges. The process itself may not be fun but I believe we grow so much mentally and emotionally each time we successfully climb a learning curve like that.

But I have carved myself a good niche in the world of corporate finance, doing distribution for fixed income products. I am based in London and deal with clients around the world: I love the moment when I finally Skype them and they see that I look Chinese, they usually get a shock because I had been speaking to them in Spanish, French or Welsh and they don't expect to see someone who isn't white. I would go as far as to say that the world of finance is light years ahead of the world of showbiz - my skin colour simply isn't an issue. If I want to deal with the French market, the only barrier to entry is my ability to speak French fluently. The work I do is determined by my skills and ability rather than my skin colour, so you can imagine the culture shock I had when I became an actor and found casting directors asking me questions like, "you're Chinese, do you do Kungfu? Do you speak Mandarin or Cantonese?" Do I find such questions insensitive or even offensive? Yes, because this will never ever happen in the world of corporate finance.

Perhaps many people will hate me for my reaction to this, but I pick my battles in life. I pick the path of least resistance and have returned to the world of finance, having had my fun as an actor. Recently some of my East Asian actor friends were protesting at the play in London which was set in China but had an all white cast - there's a part of me that's angry of course with that kind of casting decision because it is wrong, but then there's another part of me that thinks, "do you know how little they pay actors in theatre? I barely even touched theatre as an actor, I preferred to do TV and films instead because the money is so much better." There are so many battles to fight if you want to consider the amount of injustice that goes on in the world. I do have friends on Facebook who keep posting angry stories and I almost get the impression they thrive on this sense of injustice, like they are making the world a better place by using social media to draw attention to everything from war to pollution to dishonest politicians to the plight to refugees to sexist bigots. Gosh, may I just celebrate the fact that I am able to say, "yes there is racism in showbiz, let me run back to the world of banking where there is far less racism." How many actors actually have a plan B to turn to? 

It is ironic that the one industry that everyone seems to be so happy to condemn and hate - financial services (aka 'wanker bankers') is so much more progressive when it comes to racism compared to the supposedly more progressive, liberal media industry for the creative and artistic types. But then that's life for you, it is never straight forward and I suppose hardly anyone ever straddles two such different industries the way I have for so many years. I guess I hate anyone assuming what I need, what I want, what I think, what I like - "oh you're Chinese, so you must need/want/desire the following things." So whilst I don't doubt that the people who made that video had only the best intentions to challenge whitewashing in Hollywood, I also react very negatively when people start making assumptions about me. It is not like I am deliberately turning a blind eye to the situation, but rather I am simply grateful that it doesn't affect me personally. If I were that young Asian girl in that video, I would have simply shrugged my shoulders instead of getting upset when I saw Scarlett Johansson in that poster. As Whitney sang, "it's not right, but it's okay."

What do you think about the issue of 'whitewashing' in Hollywood? Are you personally offended or affected? Or are you quite happy to shrug your shoulders? Are you simply glad that we're talking about something other than Irene Clennell on this blog at last? (Yes people, we have moved on.) Let me know what you think, many thanks for reading.