The New, New Racism

By Kevin Y. Kim, In These Times. Posted June 3, 2003.

At last year's Sundance Film Festival, an angry audience member stood up after the third screening of a film charting four Asian-American teen-agers' descent into petty crime, drugs and murder. "Why would you," the man addressed Justin Lin, the film's director, "make a film that is so empty [and] amoral for Asian-Americans?" Bedlam uncharacteristic of indie film's premiere glamfest ensued, out of which a fist-pumping Roger Ebert rose to deliver this riposte: "Nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers, 'How could you do this to your people?' ... Asian-American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be!"

"The Joy Luck Club" for today's MTV-goggling generation "Better Luck Tomorrow" definitely isn't. Parents, whether slick assimilationist or hoary immigrant, are conspicuously absent from Lin's film, with off-screen intergenerational conflict making its presence felt in the occasional aside ("My Dad is gonna kill me!") and the inveterate wanderlust of its lost, lost youth. Think Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" in teen comedic trappings, minus the fears of manic critics over the prospect of race riots sweeping from Bed-Stuy to a hood near you.

No journalists in riot gear this time -- partly because Asians, no doubt, are viewed less threateningly than America's blacks. More importantly, the violence of "Better Luck Tomorrow"'s denouement isn't interracial, but maddeningly, ineradicably internecine. Told through flashbacks deftly interwoven with scenes from a teeny-bopping party, it initiates several mournful sequences capped by an open-ended finale leaving us with no answers, only burning questions: What leads kids like Ben (Parry Shen), the film's protagonist, down the slippery slope of teen violence? Are negligent parents -- even those letting their kids' straight A's serve as "alibis" -- somehow to blame? And what's race, to remix Tina Turner, got to do with it?

"Better Luck Tomorrow," for its part, warns that Americans of all colors can't be whoever the hell they want to be just yet. Racism as cross-burning ideology has waned, but in its place a much subtler, everyday discrimination chips away at the characters in this film. It takes a courtside protest, spurred on by a front-page article about Ben's role as "the token Asian" on the school basketball team, to get our hero some playing time. "Thank God," his clownish friend Virgil (Jason Tobin) exclaims, after learning that Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung), the Asian hottie Ben passive-aggressively chases throughout the film, was dating rich Asian brat Steve (John Cho) and not another "white dude." Later Ben, Virgil, Virgil's roughneck cousin Han (Sung Kang) and Daric (Roger Fan) -- the "mastermind" behind the group's burgeoning trade in cheatsheets, drugs and stolen hardware -- exchange blows with some race-baiting jocks. You can assimilate and run, but you can't always hide from a mainstream that relishes hammering out the margins.

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