Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 73

Film and Asian American Literature

67

What is so interesting about Hollywood’s latest portrayal of the Asian
American experience and community, though, is that some Asian American writ
ers have played an inadvertent, corroborating role in helping perpetuate cultural
stereotypes. In “Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies,” Chinese Ameri
can scholar King-Kok Cheung suggests that if, as Japanese American scholar and
poet Garrett Kongo charges, ethnic presses and ethnic studies programs in the past
tended to valorize texts that are bitter, brashly political, and accountable to an
ethnic community, “the commercial presses seem to have favored works at the
other end of the spectrum: those that are optimistic, apolitical, autobiographical”
(17). Interestingly enough, the latter are indeed works which have received
Hollywood’s attention and been adapted to the silver screen.
Chin ese American novelist Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club was first pub
lished in 1989. Portraying middle and upper-middle class Asian American experi
ence, the book was a commercial success. It opened doors for many struggling
Asian American writers. Nineteen ninety-one, for instance, saw publications by
several Asian American writers (Tan’s The Kitchen Gods Wife, Frank Chin’s Donald
Duk, David Wong Louis’s Pangs o f Love, Gish Jen’s Typical American, Gus Lee’s
China Boy, etc.). The success of The Joy Luck Club was not unnoticed by Holly
wood. Several major film studios had indicated interest in buying the movie rights
of the manuscript. But Tan insisted on having full control of the manuscript. With
the support of Oliver Stone, Tan reached an agreement with Disney and invited
Wayne Wang to direct the movie.
Considering Hollywood’s proclivity to tailor movie scripts to public taste
and demand, it is not so difficult to understand Tan’s decision to have full control
of the manuscript. From Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest to Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple^ Hollywood has demonstrated again and again its will
ingness and propensity to sacrifice artistic probity in exchange for success at the
box office. Whereas Tan’s determination to protect the integrity of the manuscript
is applaudable, together with Ronald Bass she made several important changes in
the movie script which not only raise questions about the issue of how culture
should be represented but also seem to confirm how Orientalism responds “more
to the culture that” produces it “than to its putative object” (Said 22). In fact. The
Joy Luck Club's, success is itself controversial. Similar to critics’, especially Afri
can American scholars’ reaction to the popular TV sitcom “Cosby,” The Joy Luck
Club is being criticized as a book describing Chinese yuppies’ life style and
prolongating the myth of Asian Americans being the “model minority.”
In Chinese American writer and critic Frank Chin’s article, “Come All Ye
Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” the author divides Chinese and
Japanese American writers into two groups: Asian American authors and Ameri
canized Asian Authors. Chin posits that only those Asian American writers who