No More Yellowface
By Noel Alumit
I went to college in the 1980s majoring in acting. Just as I was about to graduate, word of a new Broadway bound musical was making news. It was the latest project from Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, the creators of Les Misérables. The musical was Miss Saigon, inspired by Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Like Madama Butterfly, it continued racist, sexist tropes of Asians and Asia. In particular, Asian women as prostitutes and Asia as an exotic playground for Westerners to sow their wild oats.
Another cause for concern was the casting of white actors in “yellowface” to play Asian men. It was disheartening that they weren’t even casting people of Asian descent to play Asians. We were told it was because there weren’t Asians who could perform roles that required singing and dancing. Only white actors were capable of doing them.
Some Asian American actors decided to audition for Miss Saigon just so that the producers could see the talent out there. Even if we didn’t think of ourselves as singers, we needed to go and audition. Asian American actors weren’t nameless, faceless people. We were humans, artists who wanted jobs. It was the first time I auditioned as a political act. I wasn’t cast and didn’t expect to be, but the whole experience was illuminating.
“The acting world affirms the first noble truth: there is suffering. Of course, according to Buddhist teachings, suffering can also cease.”
In the waiting room, non-Asians were also auditioning. To appear more Asian, they wore oriental clothes, one even wore a conical hat. The clothing wasn’t even culturally accurate. They wore what appeared to be Chinese-themed pajamas for a play set in Vietnam.
A highlight of that experience was seeing an Asian man enter the audition room and hearing him sing a Whitney Houston song. He sang like nobody’s business. Even the guy in the conical hat, said, “This guy can sing!” We could hear the casting team cheering and applauding his performance.
Miss Saigon went onto be a tremendous success, garnering a Tony award for Jonathan Pryce, who originally performed the role in yellowface. One bittersweet triumph was Lea Salonga winning a Tony for Best Actress, the first Asian woman to win in that category. She played a prostitute (of course) who falls in love with a white man (of course) and eventually kills herself (of course, of course).
A lesson was learned over thirty years ago in that institution known as Broadway. All of those Asian actors (and countless allies) who protested sent one clear message: acting in yellowface is bad, really bad. A white actor has not done yellowface in Miss Saigon since. Indeed, in any Broadway production since 1991, only people of Asian descent have played Asians. They did so in revivals of The King and I and Flower Drum Song and in new musicals like Allegiance, inspired by the life of George Takei, and Here Lies Love, inspired by the life of Imelda Marcos. Yellowface is never necessary because Asian Americans can play Asian roles, even ones that involve singing and dancing.
The acting world affirms the first noble truth: there is suffering. Of course, according to Buddhist teachings, suffering can also cease—maybe slowly, but it can cease.
Noel Alumit is an associate editor at Lion’s Roar and an actor. His film and TV credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, The Young and the Restless, and Red Surf.
The Dharma of Michelle Yeoh
By Tanny Jiraprapasuke
Much of the attention I received as a young woman was influenced by the way Asian women were portrayed in the media. I remember, as a young twelve-year-old girl buying a Coke at a Seven Eleven, when an older man stared at me, licking his lips. Fear ran through my body, and I felt a sense of shame, as if maybe I’d done something to invite the man to sexualize me. I did not know how to tell my parents about what happened. Eventually, I stuffed the grotesque feeling down far enough to make me believe it was no longer there.
In 2003, I was working in a biotech lab and was secretly taking acting classes. I wanted to play characters that were complicated and vulnerable. Often, I was the only Asian female in my class, and I was never assigned leading roles. Most of the time I was assigned to play the best friend, the nurse, the doctor, or the house maid.
But in my first scene study class, a white middle-aged male teacher assigned me to play a prostitute. I was shocked. The specific scene included a short dialogue in the middle of a sex act. I did not want to do it. My entire body buckled and froze. My teacher called me to the front of the class and asked another student, who was not my scene partner, to caress my arm in front of everyone. The other student was uncomfortable. The teacher instructed him on how to caress my arm, and he reluctantly did it. The teacher’s actions systematically took my humanity away. I felt overpowered. I felt the same grotesqueness in my stomach, from when I was twelve. Unable to say no, I just stood frozen.
“I cried the night of the 2023 Oscars because I knew that the tides were turning toward our humanity. Yeoh restored my hope as an artist.”
I stuck with acting for another three years. I took classes with different teachers and each one objectified me in different ways. Often, I was infantilized and met by pinches on the cheek or reprimands. One even said that she wanted to put me in a cage on her fireplace mantel. I would try to take the moments as a light-hearted, one-off joke, but over time I felt hatred toward myself. The last straw was when an agent suggested I get my picture taken while dressed as a Native American girl—in a bikini.
I felt frustrated and confused. Acting was supposed to be fun. I was supposed to feel seen and heard. Instead, I was continuously met with comments and actions that diminished my dignity and creative spirit. So, I quit acting. I didn’t believe it would be possible for Hollywood to stop dehumanizing Asians, especially Asian women. Or maybe I lost hope in myself. The fact that community members and the mainstream media remained silent served to normalize the stereotyping of Asian women and to create a collective erasure for all that I experienced and felt.
But Michelle Yeoh’s win changed my internal world. During the 2023 Oscar ceremony I sat at home in excited anticipation, and when Jessica Chastain announced, “And the Oscar goes to Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once,” I burst into tears.
As a Buddhist, I know there is impermanence. Things change, change is constant. That night things changed for me. Decades of trauma were suddenly transformed. That night, a part of me died—the anger, fear, and impossibilities I had stuffed down for so many years no longer pained me. In their place, a new sense of love for myself emerged, both as a creative and as an Asian woman.
I’d never believed that an Asian woman would ever win an Oscar in a leading role in an English language American movie, let alone for a character that was not hypersexualized or docile. This was the first time in the history of the Oscars that an Asian woman had won Best Actress. Change can be slow. There’s no timeline on impermanence. The first Academy Awards ceremony was in 1929. It took over ninety years for this moment to happen.
Moreover, on the night that Michelle Yeoh won the Oscars, there were two other female Asian nominees: Stephanie Hsu for Everything Everywhere All at Once and Hong Chou for The Whale. All three of these actresses were different from each other in age, ethnicity, and sexuality. But most notably, all three women played characters that had agency, conviction, and heart. Far from the days of Full Metal Jacket and The World of Suzie Wong, today’s Asian female actors (and writers and directors) are diminishing the hyper-sexualization of Asian women by creating characters that fully own their voices and actions.
I cried the night of the 2023 Oscars because I knew that the tides were turning toward our humanity. Yeoh restored my hope as an artist and helped me see that no matter how impossible a situation may appear to be, nothing is permanent. Impermanence is a funny thing. We can help it along—change causes and conditions.
Michelle Yeoh’s win made my inner five-year-old self believe that she could one day grow up to play Maria in The Sound of Music. Yeoh won the award for all of us.
I know that this is not the end of our struggle. Impermanence shows us that while things can change in our favor, they can also revert back to what they were. Halle Berry was the first African American woman to win the Best Actress award in 2001. A Black woman hasn’t won Best Actress since.
The nature of impermanence allows space for hope, reminding us that the struggles we experience today can one day be transformed. Whether this is about personal momentum or collective advancement, recognizing that nothing stays the same forever encourages us to build on this moment and strive for even greater representation and equality in the future.
Tanny Jiraprapasuke is a second-generation Thai-American and holds a BA in Religious Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and an MTS in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School. She is a storyteller and development associate for Thai Community Development Center in Los Angeles.
The Search for the Asian American Leading Man
By Roy Vongtama
In his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
Du Bois was talking about the state of the Black man at the turn of the last century, but he could have been easily talking about the immigrant experiences of any non-White person living in America today. Certainly, as Asian Americans, we live in a perpetual state of double-consciousness. We externalize our self-worth to a society that cares little for us, and which we ironically strive to emulate.
As much as I don’t like to admit it, being from an immigrant family, I’m almost living in a triple-consciousness—my own perception of myself, that of society, and that of my parents—so I am constantly measuring, “how am I doing?” and never really measuring up. Fortunately, through years of therapy, meditation, and spiritual study I have learned to practice self-compassion and even to laugh a little, not taking even my own judgment too seriously.
“How big do you have to be to be a success according to the triple consciousness — society, your parents, and most importantly, yourself?”
Mine is a classic immigrant story. As the son of a proud Thai Buddhist immigrant, I looked for a role model in the “people who look like me” on TV. In the 1980s the only characters of Asian heritage that penetrated through to Buffalo, New York, were the infomercial king Tom Vu (with his bikini clad models), Long Duk Dong of Sixteen Candles (portrayed by Gedde Watanabe) and of course, Bruce Lee. Unfortunately, I was mocked on the street by white kids with these three names even before I saw any of them on TV.
When I realized at some point that I wanted to be an actor, it makes sense that I aspired to be a romantic leading man, one that spoke and acted like none of those three. My one ray of hope was the character Johnny from the cult classic The Last Dragon, which played on repeat throughout the eighties. He was the first Asian American male I ever saw who was funny, handsome, spoke without an accent, and hit on a girl. (Okay, Johnny also did karate, but like me, he just was pretending.)
For much of the last thirty years, I’ve struggled to become my own role model. In my two decades of professional acting I have had exactly two auditions for romantic leading parts (both of which I booked). It’s not hard to see why setting a goal such as being a romantic Asian American leading man was probably not a wise choice, yet it has given me much fodder for the spiritual path, with the main lessons being that desire is the cause of my suffering, and detachment is the ideal goal, but at the same time, I can still move forward with purpose. Finding that balance has been the razor’s edge for my happiness.
Fast-forwarding to today, we can’t complain so much anymore as we have so many different examples of Asian faces peppering the screen, with Asian American leading-man actors nominated or winning awards including Steven Yeun and Ke Huy Quan. Still a recent poll found that only 44 percent of people could name a famous Asian American, and most people didn’t name either of these two guys. (Funnily enough once an actor gets so big that he can be easily named by society—think Brad Pitt, Leo DiCaprio, Matt Damon—they try really hard to stay noncontroversial, smiling…almost Asian American!)
The question is, how big do you have to be to be a success according to the triple consciousness—society, your parents, and most importantly, yourself? Knowing that true success lies in the happiness one finds inside one’s own mind rather than in outside circumstances has been key to my perseverance as an actor still looking for that defining leading role.
In the end I think the Asian American leading man is still in development. With more and more young Asian Americans creating stories—after finally seeing examples of Asian American writers, directors, and actors (and being able to hold them up for their parents!)—being a leading man is becoming a more realistic goal. Now, it’s possible for the lead to be Asian American, and hopefully one day soon, it will be normal.
Roy Vongtama has been both a professional actor and physician for over twenty years. Acting wise, he’s had more than a hundred film, TV, and stage roles, working with stars such as Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. He’s directed several projects as well as written a bestselling book called Healing Before You’re Cured, and he produced the award-winning film After the Rain.
