After watching the new Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, data analyst Kevin Chen said he felt proud of his Chinese ancestry.

"Finally, Hollywood's Chinese dragon is true to the legend that is not malevolent and does not spit fire," said the 35-year-old, who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in the Bay Area in northern California.

"The characters are deep and well-rounded, not like the geeks or nerds that we are often portrayed as," he added.

The movie tells the story of martial arts warrior Shang-Chi－Marvel's first Asian superhero－and depicts cultural images related to Chinese mythology and culture. To date, it is the top-grossing release during the coronavirus pandemic in North America.

Featuring a cast mainly from East Asia, the film is viewed by industry observers as a major step in improving representation of Asians and Asian Americans in mainstream media in the United States.

The 1990 Institute, which is dedicated to engaging the people of China and the US through education, philanthropy and collaboration, said the movie is "a golden opportunity to rewrite the narrative around Asian masculinity, and a chance to stand up, be noticed and change the game."

The institute, which is based in San Francisco, has recently produced a video to explore the film's role in challenging Hollywood stereotypes about Asian men.

Asian male characters have traditionally been portrayed on the silver screen as geeky, sidelined or emasculated, and are denied the chance to have romantic relationships.

Brian Yang, an actor and co-founder of Giant Leap Media, said the auditions he had and the parts he played were for roles such as a Chinese delivery boy.

"I did a bunch of (US comedian and television personality) Jay Leno sketch comedy pieces where I was always the butt of jokes as an Asian person," he said in the video made by the 1990 Institute.

He said Hollywood has traditionally had a narrow focus when it comes to Asian roles. "It doesn't pull back and show you the wider picture of how vibrant and how different our community is," he added.

A new study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, or USC, which assessed Asian lead roles and speaking parts in 1,300 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2019, found that Asians were "erased, silenced and stereotyped" in popular movies.

Among these films, only 44, or nearly 3.4 percent, had an Asian/Pacific islander lead or co-lead. This proportion did not change to any significant degree in each year covered by the study, falling short of the 7.1 percent of the US population that identifies as Asian/Pacific islanders.

Among the 200 top-grossing films in 2018 and 2019, nearly half did not have Asian characters, or only gave them five or fewer lines of dialogue, the study found.

It said most portrayals of the Asian community fall into the categories of "silenced, stereotyped, tokenized, isolated, sidekicks or villains". Stereotypes still evident in top films include the persistent emasculation of Asian/Pacific islander males－58 percent of whom were depicted as having no romantic relationships.

Power struggles

Brian Keum, a professor of social welfare at the University of California－Los Angeles, or UCLA, whose research focuses on reducing health and mental health disparities among marginalized individuals and communities, said Asian males have been emasculated since first arriving in the US in the mid-1880s.

Stereotypes of being effeminate, less attractive and less manly emerged when male Chinese immigrants were forced into jobs as launderers, cooks and domestic servants after being banned from mining and construction jobs, Keum said.

According to a study by researchers at the College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, stereotypes based on Asian men are also rooted in centuries-old power struggles, and were a way to keep groups marginalized by depicting such males as being less manly than those from other races.

Examining photographs from six popular US magazines, the researchers found Asian men were underrepresented in such publications, rendering them "invisible" in media depictions.

Sessue Hayakawa, an Asian, was one of the biggest Hollywood stars during the silent film era of the 1910s and 1920s. However, it was downhill for him after this time.

The 1990 Institute's video states, "Hollywood was complicit in an embarrassing whitewashing and allowing a cultural icon to be the butt of jokes."

Anna May Wong, considered to be the first Chinese American Hollywood movie star, fought racial stereotypes throughout her life. Despite her talent and beauty, she was mainly offered only small or stereotypical parts and was never able to secure a traditional leading role.

She was refused the part of the Chinese character O-Lan in the movie adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's novel The Good Earth. The role went instead to a Caucasian actress. For decades after her death in 1961, Wong was remembered principally for the evil "Dragon Lady" and demure "Butterfly" roles she played.

Film scholar Celine Parrenas Shimizu said Asian women are stereotyped as "hypersexual, but docile," and this image took hold in the US with the emergence of films and artworks after the country led wars in Asia.

Only six of the 1,300 films studied featured an Asian woman in a lead or co-lead role, and these females are "sexualized" on screen, the USC report said.

Asian girls and women were often shown in sexy attire, with some nudity, and referenced as more physically attractive than Asian boys and men, the report added. Three of 24 Asian women in 2019 were "hypersexualized", including one in a complex leading role, it said.

In turn, the stereotypes rendered on film have influenced the perception of Asians in daily life.

Caroline Hsu, a political science student at UCLA, told campus newspaper The Daily Bruin that media depictions of Asians affected the way she viewed herself growing up.

"I felt my purpose was to serve others. I was supposed to be arm candy to a guy, I was supposed to serve food, I was supposed to paint nails… and I think the media… made us just look like indentured slaves or workers," Hsu said in the article, which was published in April.

"In films, especially when we see these sorts of Asian stereotypes, it makes us think that we're boxed into this certain definition of ourselves."

Sean Niu, producer of the Bund to Brooklyn podcast, said,"Asian Americans were actually here at the start of the film industry in the days of black-and-white silent movies, but along the way, there were a lot of struggles and many obstacles.

"Even in recent years, we've had to fight whitewashing, with people such as Scarlett Johansson playing a character that is written to be Japanese in Ghost in the Shell, and Tilda Swinton replacing an Asian monk in Doctor Strange. It's definitely still a work in progress."

Progress achieved

Janet Yang, executive producer of The Joy Luck Club, the first major film with an all-Asian American cast, is positive about the progress that has been made.

"That (whitewashing) won't happen again," she said in a recent episode of Niu's podcast. "There was such an outcry about that, and it really, almost definitely, affected the box office of those movies."

Compared with some 30 years ago, when The Joy Luck Club was being made, Yang said the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians was "a true hallmark of change", and with the release of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, "we've just jumped to a whole other level".

Yang, from Giant Leap Media, organized a sellout screening of the Marvel production at a 1,100-seat theater in Los Angeles to increase community engagement. He said, "The idea of having an Asian face as the hero in a Marvel story is definitely going to open people's eyes."

Ron Han, editor-in-chief of POC Culture, a news and information site dedicated to promoting and highlighting people of color in pop culture, launched an online fundraiser on behalf of the Boys & Girls Club of West San Gabriel Valley in California to take more than 120 children to see this film at a private screening.

"As an Asian American kid born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley, I rarely saw myself represented properly on screen," Han said on the fundraiser's campaign page.

"Proper representation of different cultures is critically important for all children so that they understand that people of all colors and backgrounds are to be embraced and valued. …Shang-Chi has the opportunity to make a powerful impact on the way Asian children see themselves," he said.

"Growing up, I remember watching a lot of movies, and people that look like me were pretty much (depicted as) emasculated nerds."

While there is still a long way to go, there has been "a lot of improvement from a lot of different elements", he said, citing the example of Shang-Chi as "an opportunity to showcase Asian American men in a different light".

"I'm encouraged to say that things are not only changing because of the film, but also because of culture in general. I think people are more open about understanding what sexuality means or what masculinity means," Han said.

Warren Lam, writer, director and president of Creative Fugitives, which he founded in 2005 to work with producers, studios and brands, said masculinity is evolving, along with audiences. His next feature film is a coming-of-age thriller that follows four Asian American teenagers taking a cross-country road trip to confront those responsible for an Asian hate crime.

"You don't have to be muscular to be masculine. As a community, we don't have to take that. We can represent strength, character－all the hero characteristics. That is more important, not how you look," Lam said.

Comparison made

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has been compared to the 2018 movie Black Panther in terms of its potential cultural significance.

But The 1990 Institute's video points out that Shang-Chi is not the first Asian hero film, a distinction that goes to the 1994 release The Crow, starring Bruce Lee's son, Brandon Lee.

The institute said branding Shang-Chi as the first Asian superhero movie is a marketing strategy, while Black Panther was promoted as the first black superhero film, but that accolade should go to the 1998 release Blade.

The video points out that other films with Asian leads have not received the same level of attention, because outside of the mainstream, those movies do not have the same level of marketing hype.

"Despite the shortcomings, Marvel's Shang-Chi is part of pop culture, and has created a platform for conversation," the video states.

Janet Yang said Asian Americans are now part of the national conversation in the US, particularly after rising anti-Asian racism and hate crimes brought the Asian community to the attention of a mainstream audience.

"People are getting smarter. News is traveling faster. We are speaking up. It takes negativity to get people to pay attention," she said.

Cultural creators in the Asian community "are in a phase where they are trying to be normalized", Yang said.

"Not everyone is crazy rich, and not everyone knows how to sucker-punch like Bruce Lee," she added.

"That normalization process means … just a basic drama where people are not acting extreme in one way or another, and people just want to watch us because we're interesting characters and we're not wearing Asian-ness on our sleeves. It's part and parcel of who we are, but it's not the most salient fact about us."

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