https://twitter.com/loudlysilent/status/1028029611450556416
I am posting a link in The Linkery that is itself a list of links. Wooooooooo
I haven’t seen Crazy Rich Asians yet, nor have I read anything yet. I’m just … linking them without reading. There should be some kind of (anti-)badge for that. “Warning, linking without reading.” I will cry a lot when I see it. I’ve only seen this trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ-YX-5bAs0
I like Michelle Yeoh a lot. As a teenager my youth group (at SJCCC, which then stood for “san jose chinese catholic church,” but now has a new name and abbreviation, SJCCM that I learned looking it up because I felt like linking to it too for some reason) did a 45-minute long parody movie of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and I played Michelle Yeoh’s character, hewing so closely to the original that multiple other parents thought we’d simply dubbed her voice over mine. (That wasn’t a compliment–her Mandarin wasn’t that good. lol)
At least as a teenager I was making parody movies instead of killing myself as part of palo alto’s suicide clusters. That’s something.
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wanted to follow up (and refute my own posts? lol)
- i did not cry during the movie nearly as much as i thought i would.
- i was surprised (but should not have been) at the extra layer of michelle yeoh’s character also being unwanted by her mother-in-law. i liked it.
- i enjoyed the built-in explanations of “asian-american” (really han chinese of a certain economic class) culture in the writing, like awkwafina saying “banana. yellow on the outside, white on the inside” and candace’s character rolling her eyes and saying “i know what a banana is.” explaining what it is in a way that still lets the viewer suspend disbelief that the characters are having a normal conversation. it’s effective because my friend said, after the movie, “i’ve never heard the term ‘banana’ before” and i was surprised even though this is another thing that shouldn’t surprise me. i said “that’s because you didn’t grow up a banana in america!” he said “you’re not a banana. also, the word we used was coconut” and i laughed wildly and said “i’ve never heard that before!!!” and he said “that’s because you didn’t grow up black in america!” THIS IS HOW TO IDENTITY
- i like my subconscious telling you things like “awkwafina was awesome” by me writing her name but attaching “'s character” to candace
on articles, i have read these two, and they are truly hilarious side-by-side. it will be obvious to anyone who knows me that i’m on the second one’s side.
i’ll come by and edit later cuz i can’t find it now. it’s an article by a han chinese man about his his grandparents were so poor they broke pencils in half to save them and now he has a degree from harvard.
the second article i wanted to talk about is by my friend ari, and is awesome. Crazy Rich Asians and What We Lose in the Fight for Respectability | Hyphen Magazine