Last week, Legendary Pictures released the trailer for The Great Wall, a new film about the Great Wall of China... starring Matt Damon. The plot appears to revolve around Damon's character, a white male protagonist, saving the Chinese people from the mythical doom that lurks beyond the wall.
It shouldn't be shocking that yet another "white man saves foreigners" Hollywood story is pissing people off. We've been through this before (Gran Torino, City of Joy, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), not to mention all the examples of white people starring in films about Asian culture (Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, Emma Stone in Aloha, Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, and on and on). Just scroll through Twitter and you'll find hundreds of people expressing their frustration—including Taiwanese American actress Constance Wu, who wrote: "We have to stop perpetuating the racist myth that only a white man can save the world... When you consistently make movies like this, you ARE saying that."
Can we all at least agree that hero-bias &
— Constance Wu (@ConstanceWu) July 29, 2016
While The Great Wall has secured Chinese director Zhang Yimou and the majority of the actors are Chinese, the six credited writers are all white American men. And in the trailer, even though there are plenty of Asian faces in the background, the only voice we hear is Damon's. It's not just about representation—it's about white people writing, starring in, and claiming stories about Asian culture.
In the wake of The Great Wall, Chinese Singaporean writer J. Y. Yang is hoping to flip the script. Yang is writing an alt-history novel centering on a Chinese Joan of Arc-type heroine saving white people—which she says is directly in response to the whitewashing of Asian culture in films like The Great Wall.I talked with Yang about her novel, representations of Asian culture in popular media, and why it's so important to let Asian people star in their own stories.
VICE: Tell me a little bit about your background.
J. Y. Yang: I'm a Chinese Singaporean currently doing my master's in creative writing. I've been writing fiction professionally since 2014, and I just sold two novellas for the first time earlier this year. I write mostly sci-fi and fantasy.
How did you come up with the idea of writing a book with a storyline that's the opposite of The Great Wall?
I found out about the upcoming Matt Damon film through a friend who's Malaysian Chinese, and I assumed at first that he was a sidekick, which already made me sad. The Great Wall is one of China's great achievements! Then I watched the trailer and it felt like a cloud of anger rolled over me, and I wanted to do something about this. Then it hit me: I should write a historical fiction out of spite.
What about the trailer made you the most upset?
I think a lot of people were really excited about the prospect of a monster film about the Great Wall of China, then they found out about the casting, the screenwriters, and the plot summary. It's such an old story trope: A white person demonstrating superiority over Asians. I've been annoyed by this centering of white narratives for many years, and there's the context of Hollywood being a racist industry with whitewashing as well.
1700 years to build, just for Matt Damon to come save it. How problematic is
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