Despite historic Oscar, Grammy wins, Asians still aren't everything everywhere all at once

As we celebrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, it’s tempting to look back at the many remarkable achievements of those of us whose roots lie to the east as evidence that we have always been an inevitable part of America’s long legacy of success stories.

After all, Asians in general are widely perceived, fairly or unfairly, as “model minorities.” Our supposedly natural aptitude in the fields of science, technology and math is by now a commonplace if somewhat misplaced belief. And our successes elsewhere have been notable: I.M. Pei, Isamu Noguchi and Maya Lin have had a deep impact on architecture, sculpture and design. Writers and commentators such as Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michiko Kakutani, Gish Jen, Helen Zia, Jhumpa Lahiri and Lisa Yee have enriched our culture with a wealth of colorful literature, essays and criticism. Classical music has its stars in Chinese American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Japanese American violinist Midori Goto and Hawaiian-born Easter Island pianist Mahani Teave.

But it is in the field of popular culture where the ascent of Asian American and Pacific Islander stars has been especially visible to the broader American public and where it is tempting to conclude that we have finally made it to the mainstream.

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'Everything Everywhere All at Once' makes history

Watching the Academy Awards in March, I was overjoyed that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” walked away with not just one but seven Oscars, including a historic best actress award for an Asian woman and a best director win for an Asian American director.

It also occurred to me that younger viewers might easily be forgiven for thinking that film is just one more field in which Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have always thrived. But, as with all the other fields of human endeavor for our AAPI brothers and sisters, it wasn’t always this way.

For far too long in America’s most popular medium, we were largely relegated to minor or stereotypical roles, with the men playing coolies, cooks and clownish sidekicks, and the women playing exotic sex symbols or dragon ladies.

As time went on, Asians and Pacific Islanders gradually got more and better parts and began to become increasingly familiar and even beloved figures on the big and small screens. Just a few include Sessue Hayakawa, who started in silent films in 1914 and finished his career with an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in “The Bridge Over the River Kwai”; Keye Luke, who played the handsome and affable “Number One Son” in the popular “Charlie Chan” movies (headlined, of course, by white men); George Takei as Hikaru Sulu in “Star Trek”; Ming-Na Wen in “The Joy Luck Club” and more recently "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."; Lucy Liu in “Charlie’s Angels”; Constance Wu and Randall Park together in the TV series “Fresh Off the Boat” and separately in recent movies; and Jason Momoa in “Aquaman” and "Fast X."

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Starring Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson

Even so, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative reported in 2021 that in a study focused on leads and speaking characters in the 1,300 top-grossing films between 2007 and 2019, only 44 films featured an Asian or Pacific Islander lead or co-lead − 14 of which were Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, whose mother is Samoan.

For every AAPI actor who succeeded and achieved acclaim and recognition, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of others who toiled in obscurity or whose opportunities were given to or co-opted by non-Asians.

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Even Anna May Wong, considered the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood – and who's enjoying something of a renaissance thanks to her being chosen recently as the first Asian American featured on U.S. currency – famously lost the role of O-Lan in “The Good Earth” to the German-born Luise Rainer in the 1930s. Knowing the score, others were dissuaded from pursuing or continuing a career, regardless of their talents.

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Despite these challenges, however, the story of AAPIs in film and every other field overall has been one of gradual, if unsteady, progress.

Winning an Academy Award – or a Nobel, Grammy or Pulitzer – doesn’t mean we’ve fully arrived. But it’s clear that it does represent something big somewhere important, even if it’s not quite all at once.

Qin Sun Stubis is a newspaper columnist and author of “Once Our Lives,” a historical memoir about four generations of Chinese women and their struggles to survive war, revolution and discrimination. 

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: AAPI Month: Despite wins, we're not everything everywhere all at once