Jon M. Chu’s all-Asian Hollywood rom-com opened with high stakes. As Forbes reviewer Scott Mendelson puts it:

It did. Opening with a $34M first week and reigning the #1 box office spot for three consecutive weeks, Crazy Rich Asians ultimately brought Warner Bros. $239M, making it the #6 highest-grossing rom-com of all time (boxofficemojo.com). Yet in an age of tent-pole movies, CRA flailed in one key aspect — the international market. Only 26.8% of its box office came overseas, and in the world’s second largest film market, China, CRA mobilized $1.2M over 3200 screens — 0.6% of what it made in the US across the same number of screens. 

As the first Hollywood film in a quarter of a century to feature majority Asian characters, CRA’s failure in China is baffling. By all predictions, CRA was supposed to enamor China to a newly-inclusive Hollywood the same way Black Panther invigorated the African continent. Fingers began to point. Variety ran an article on the irrelevance of “hot-button US identity politics” to the Chinese (Frater & Davis). Channel News Asia, Singapore’s leading media, accused the producers of not “understanding the Chinese psyche” (McGregor). Implicit in the post-mortem is ridicule of Hollywood’s presumption that it can appeal to an other like the Chinese. Afterall, “culturally specific humor...[is] difficult to translate” (Fritz, LA Times). As Simon Critchley in On Humor argues, “jokes return us to a common, familiar world of shared practices, the background meanings implicit in a culture” (16). If there is no shared practice, no “congruence between the joke structure and social structure”, how can comedy travel?

In this essay, we will examine just what went wrong in the reception of Crazy Rich Asians in China. Specifically, we will analyze recurrent themes across three types of primary sources — American publications, Chinese publications, and Chinese review aggregators — and explore how a film which satirizes and transgresses wealth became interpreted as an attack on Asian culture. Crazy Rich Asians is ultimately a case study on what happens to comedy’s relationship to power structures when expanded into a global context — how comedy, power, and cultural specificity interact.

To analyze variations in reception, we need to first identify a normative interpretation of comedy in CRA.

In an interview with the Chinese state-owned Global Times, director Jon M. Chu describes CRA as a satire: “...it's not about 'crazy rich' or 'Asians' actually, it's about the opposite of that - it's about how all those things mean nothing” (Huang). Indeed, despite its dazzling frames — reviewers have described CRA as “a voyeuristic smorgasbord into extreme wealth” (Taylor, Global Mail) with “an eye-watering amount of high fashion to rival that in The Devil Wears Prada” (Ho, Time) — the film takes a condescending tone to wealth. It depicts the wealthy as caricatures, exemplified by their most ridiculous vices. There is Eddie the banker obsessed with “optimal angles” and connections; Alistair and Bernard as the embodiment of fuckboy lust; and the Aunties, with their pretend Bible study, the source of endless gossip.

CRA encourages us to “laugh from feelings of superiority” over the portrayed wealthy (Critchley 2). Even the most spectacular displays of wealth in the film are framed by outside characters who offer judgement. During the shopping riot of Araminta’s bachelorette party, for example, Mandy is there to quip, “nobody loves free stuff more than rich people”. When we see the palatial opulence of Peik Lin’s family, Peik Lin herself is there to mock, “it’s modeled after the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles...and Donald Trump’s bathroom”. Henri Bergson posits humor as the “chastising of insincerity, pomposity, stupidity” (Douglas 363). In that vein, CRA invites us to laugh and chastise wealth as “something mechanical encrusted upon something living” (363).

The second source of comedy is laughter at ourselves through the protagonist, Rachel. As a New Yorker clueless about the etiquette of Singaporean elites, a large portion of CRA’s jokes also center on Rachel and Peik Lin’s inability to conform to the frame of wealth. The first such instance is when Rachel arrives at the Youngs mansion and proceeds to make a series of blunders: drinking the hand-washing water, mistaking the nanny for the matriarch, and joking that the “masseuse just got me pregnant”. Similarly, Peik Lin too endear us as an eccentric character outside the norm. Her language is vulgar, her fashion cheap, and she takes selfies everywhere. Both she and Rachel utilize humor in the Umberto Eco sense: comedy arises from the incongruence between who they are and the social expectations placed upon them, with the characters as blameless as the frame they have to conform to (Eco 8). 

This incongruence can also be called transgression. As Douglas writes, “the joke merely affords opportunity for realising that an accepted pattern has no necessity” (365). In CRA, the various transgressions Rachel and Peik Lin make against etiquettes expose those high society rules as “arbitrary and subjective” (365). Combine this comedy of transgression with the satirizing of the wealthy, and we see a clear politics in CRA. It is a takedown of the status quo of wealth.

Many Chinese viewers, however, do not see satire and transgression of wealth as the film’s source of comedy. With depictions of wealth and Asian representation conflated, they instead see themselves mocked.

On Douban, China’s equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes, one top review protests “I am a bored broke Asian” (Douban 2). In Canada, where anti-Chinese sentiments are rising over the influx of wealthy immigrants and their perceived effect on cost of living, Tony Wong of The Toronto Star fumes:

Crazy Rich is the exception, not the norm. [The film] doesn’t blow away stereotypes. It reinforces [the idea that]....Asians are rich, vulgar and clueless.

What’s important to note from these accusations of stereotyping is the pervasive sense of an other in thinking about CRA. To Chinese viewers, there is a defensiveness triggered by CRA, a cautiousness over being laughed at by someone else. Though director Chu assures “it’s us who’re making fun of ourselves” (Huang), Chinese commentators see the gaze of the West. It is this sense of other that motivates the derision and contention over CRA in China. What we in Hollywood understands as a film of Asian ownership and empowerment, in China takes on the additional judgement of the West.

Not everyone sees the presence of the West as adversarial. One prominent Shanghai-based state paper — which in recent years have taken a hard line on excessive wealth and corruption — commends CRA for offering a Western eye that “through the topic of wealth critiques how many backward Asian traditions and vices disturb family relations and harmony” (Editorial Board, Pengpai News). The national censor board describes CRA as “American humor perfectly combined with Chinese style”, and notes themes of “East-West cultural conflict” between conservative, traditional, family-oriented Eastern values and liberal, individualistic, happiness-oriented Western freedom (Pengpai). 

Thus, though the culturally-specific context of Asian-American empowerment is lost in transit, Chinese viewers managed to create a new constructive framework to process CRA through. This, in some ways, reveal a malleability and multiplicity in comedy’s cultural specificity previous unrealized.

In Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, Kathrina Glitre calls the romantic comedy resolution “personal union serv[ing] to celebrate the integration into community at large, into a social environment where cultural conflicts and contradictions have been magically reconciled” (43). In screwball comedy, for example, “Victorian patriarchy” and “modern companionship” are reconciled to create a “new constitution of marriage” (51).

In CRA, there is a similar reconciliation of Eastern and Western values. The protagonist Rachel Chu is an ABC — American-born Chinese — whose individualistic drive, emphasis on happiness, and arc of personal choice and empowerment, represent to many Chinese viewers a profoundly “Western fairytale” (Douban 2). Her Western status is acknowledged in the film, first by her mother (“you grew up here. Here [pointing at her head], you’re different”), then by Peik Lin (“you’re a banana — yellow on the outside, white on the inside”), and finally by Eleanor, who declares, “you’re not our own kind”.

The Young family of Singapore, on the other hand, represents Eastern ideology. As David Sims of The Atlantic puts it: “Americans are cursed with wanting to pursue their own happiness; to the Youngs, that value ranks a distant second to family tradition”. Indeed, the creators of CRA saw the film as “a great opportunity to show our heritage and traditions” (Ho, Time). Global Times, the official state spokespiece, lauds CRA for “uncovering the complexity of in-law relations and the tolerance and repression of Asian women” (Huang). Pengpai News notes how the film demonstrates that “prejudice arising from value and cultural differences exist not just with whites, but in Asia too”.

Though commentators welcome the chance to stage an East-West ideological debate, they are less happy with the resolution. “Poorly-made Cinderella”, one reviewer calls CRA (Douban 2). Another exasperates, “only by being unperturbed by money does one get the triple reward of money, love, and family! What a cliched American philosophy” (Douban 1). Some commentators see this as an example of yet another cultural difference: “The Chinese prefer to watch more hard-hitting thrillers and tear-jerking dramas” (McGregor). 

But this conclusion misses the point. In analyzing the aforementioned reviews, we see it is not the rom-com happy ending that evoke strong contention, but that Hollywood — as an instrument of the West — has announced the victory of Western values over Eastern tradition without sufficient drama. As Thomas Schatz’s seminal work Film Genre and the Genre Film prescribes:

The sustained success of any genre depends upon at least two factors: the thematic appeal and significance of the conflicts it repeatedly addresses, and its flexibility in adjusting to the audience’s...changing attitudes towards those conflicts (31).

In CRA, we see the success of this romantic comedy in addressing ideological conflicts with “thematic appeal and significance” to both Western and Eastern audiences. But it is unable to come to a resolution that satisfies audience attitudes to those conflicts in both countries. When commentators complain of Hollywood fantasy, they are not attacking the happy ending, but expressing non-acceptance of the ideological solution offered — in this case, that love triumphs over familial and traditional concerns.

To go further, I would argue that the ideological resolution of CRA is even more culturally-specific than just Western. It is a resolution emblematic of the specific identities of the film’s creators. The same way that Jane Austen novels negotiate upper-class institutionality with lower-class sensibility to maintain social cohesion, CRA negotiate the duo-influence on Asian-Americans to legitimize that identity and experience. As peoples of the diaspora, Asian-Americans experience precisely the competing value systems staged in CRA — at once aspiring to the ideals of the American Dream, yet at the same time wanting the approval and membership of heritage and family. The ideological resolution of CRA is a fantasy that offers a way out of this tension. It validates the identity by reframing its wants and insufficiencies in both direction as opportunities for renewal. 

The introduction of Asian-Americans gives us a further point of exploration into the negative reception of CRA in China. We have established by now that the awareness of the other, the West, has skewed the perception of the source of comedic mockery in the film, and evoked strong feelings of cultural defensiveness in its ideological conflict. Asian-Americans add a new dimension. They offer an insecure ownership of the Asian-centric film to Chinese audiences, with the ambiguity and limitation of that ownership responsible for the final rejection of CRA in that market.

Despite reminders by some reviewers that the film “is about Singapore, not you”, Chinese viewers by and large felt justified in judging the extent to which CRA accurately portrayed China (Douban 3). Their consensus? Not at all. In a review titled “Chinatown Aesthetic”, one commentator compares CRA to the diaspora raised in Chinatowns, who have a nostalgia for a distant homeland but no grasp of what it is. The commentator calls CRA the “General Tso’s Chicken” of films — an imagination of China by those grown up abroad.

This move to insert oneself into the film and then judge the authenticity of one’s supposed representation is a condition solely enabled by the Asian-American authorship of the film. Despite commentators calling the characters “a bunch of aliens with Asian faces”, what’s at play is an implicit recognition of self and then an active disavowal (Douban 1). In fact, many comments focused on misrepresentation, not lack-of:

...even the faces selected are Americanized Asian faces, or idealized: Men have square faces, thick brows and big eyes, the complete opposite of the dominant aesthetics popularized by K-Pop. Women have high collar bones, thick lips, all single eye-lid, not like the faces viral on our social media (Ma, Pengpai News).

Some saw this misrepresentation not as misunderstanding, but betrayal. They accuse CRA’s Asian-American creators of exotisizing Asians to appeal to whites. In CRA, they see Asian-Americans performing white and disavowing Asianness in order to gain mainstream, white acceptance:

When Asian-Americans draw a line between them and Asians, pronouncing to the world that they are white inside, what they are really doing is putting themselves in a inferior position. True confidence comes from a richness from within, from the economic and cultural position of a people. Severing one’s own cultural legs, in order to insert oneself to the margins of the Western narrative — is this the equality that we should be looking forward to? (Douban 2)

This positing of Asian-Americans as wavering between the duality of Asia and America gets to the heart of the issue. By a combination of authorship, ownership, and representation, Chinese audiences have perceived both the presence of an other — the West — and an adversarial relationship to it, exemplified by the film as a symbol of Asian-Americans, at once on their side by appearance but also at risk of being lost ideologically. The parallel between the film-text and identity-text is unmistakable: Both on the surface level looks Asian, but ideologically waver towards the West. The anxiety and frustration generated by this adversarial relationship is the main cause of CRA’s demise in the Chinese market.

Power​​​​​​​

What does all of this mean for romantic comedies and their futures in the global market?

On one level, CRA demonstrates that the problem globally, unlike domestically, is not simply one of representation. Though many Chinese commentators derided the film for misunderstanding, we have seen above that portrayal is not the central complaint about CRA. For one, CRA does not represent Asia, only the wealthy. Two, Chinese commentators have recognized many of their own cultural values in the film. It is at their resolution, not their depiction, that commentators are dismayed. Thus, to say comedies need to better represent other cultures, while valid, does not get to the heart of the issue.

On a deeper level, CRA demonstrates that more than language, mannerisms, or references, it is the underlying power structure of comedy that struggles to travel. As both Douglas and Critchley have argued, comedy is inseparable from power because transgression and incongruence requires “an accepted pattern” to “play” upon (Critchley 10). When this power structure is not agreed upon between the film and audience — “no social congruity, no comic congruity” — comedy can be un-understood, or even mis-understood.

In the American context, the “accepted power” which CRA jokes against is clear: mainstream America, the wealthy, and the Asian homeland that often looks down on the diaspora. Transgressions in this context both challenge the status-quo of those powers and “contain self mockery” that is “therapeutic and critical” (17). Through laugher, viewers identifying with the protagonists of CRA are motivated to “change the situation in which [they] find themselves”, leading, in this case, to empowerment from marginalization and the finding of solutions for East-West contradictions.

In the Chinese context, however, this power structure is reversed. In the absence of awareness about identity politics, viewers may instead identify more closely with the characters representing the Eastern values, the Youngs. They, in other words, process as the status quo, rather than against it. CRA as a film then becomes transgressive against them, one that “mock, parody, or deride the ritual practices” of their society” (Critchley 5). The degree of immunity CRA is given to joke depends on its ability to present an alternative to the Eastern status quo: “The joker's own immunity can be derived philosophically from his apparent access to other reality than that mediated by the relevant structure” (Douglas 373). As we have seen in the ideological conflict section, Chinese viewers do not find this “other reality” convincing.

A counter-argument here might be that I am giving the Chinese market too little empathy and humor. In consuming films, we all identify with characters who share values contrary to ours, and we can still entertain the joke without agreeing with the change being proposed. I respond by positing that there is a meta-level of power at work in CRA that explains the relative lack of tolerance from the Chinese side. There is a macro accepted power, namely Hollywood and American global cultural dominance, that bears on Chinese audiences. Hollywood’s relationship to Chinese national cinema is one of inequality. Western culture, Asian-Americans too, have historically looked on Eastern culture with condescension (with significant internalization in China into a national desire to measure up). Thus, CRA is perceived as a comedy about them made by people with more power than them. The act of consuming the film then is an engagement in cultural politics. Significant attention is devoted to whether the “powerful [is] laughing at the powerless” (Critchley 12).

Crazy Rich Asians is a case study into what happens when these considerations are not examined. Because of its unawareness of itself as the power in the global scope, it entered into an adversarial context, skewing its satire of wealth into a satire of Asia and inciting strong contention over Eastern and Western values orchestrated over the Asian-American identity. But I would venture here that despite the box office numbers, such conflict does not indicate regression. There is more value in resolving an ideological conflict badly than not acknowledging it at all. The former fuels further engagement; the latter, nothing at all.

Where to go from here? The specificity of power in comedy would discourage us from engaging with it. We might recall the ideas of the carnivalesque, the slapstick works of Chaplin and Keaton. Universally well-received, they are comedies that brought us together and “reveal the depth of what we share” (Critchley 17). But perhaps comedy doesn’t have to bring us to agreement. In his book Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, David Gillota imagines an “multiethnic humor...which focuses not on collectivity but on the ways that individuals may reexamine their own ethnicity through interactions with other cultural groups” (132). Conversations orchestrated through this humor “doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another ” (131). 

Comedy, as a transgressive form, might not be the greatest for consensus-building. But to the extent that it’s confrontational — that certainly mirrors the world today.