Is It Harder to Be Famous as an Asian-American?

Not many know that my real name isn’t Mary. Even though my last name, Wang, reveals enough about my ethnicity, my first name was given to me by my English teacher in China, who handed out names to the class as if she were handing out exercise sheets. My parents decided to keep that name when we moved to Europe, understanding that sticking to Wang Meng Di might not be entirely beneficial to my assimilation. They turned out to be right: In the Dutch-speaking Netherlands, even an English name like Mary offered enough material for banter. (No matter how uninspired, “Mary Christmas” was one of the often-heard jokes.)

On Tuesday, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. star Chloe Bennet was pushed to speak out about the difficulties she’s experienced using her Chinese name to break through in Hollywood. After she took to Instagram to praise actor Ed Skrein for declining a role in a Hellboy remake following accusations of whitewashing, she found herself having to defend the fact that she changed her last name from Wang to Bennet (which is her Chinese father’s first name). “Changing my last name doesn’t change the fact that my blood is half Chinese, that I lived in China, speak Mandarin, or that I was culturally raised both American and Chinese,” she explained, later in the post, to a commenter online. “It means I had to pay my rent, and Hollywood is racist and wouldn’t cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable. I’m doing everything I can . . . to make sure no one has to change their name again, just so they can get work.”

While I have now spent most of my years as Mary, Bennet’s decision highlights the dilemma Asians in America face: Is keeping a low racial profile the cost of getting ahead?

Asian-Americans are often seen as the most “successful” minority group in the U.S. Statistically, Asian students are overrepresented in many prestigious schools, including Ivy League institutions (which, according to some, has led schools to set higher entry standards for Asian applicants), while the wage gap from Asian-Americans to whites is the smallest of all minority groups (with Asian men even out-earning white men). Forgotten is the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese immigration until the 1940s, later laws that greatly restricted immigration until 1965, or the forced segregation of Chinese into Chinatowns. Asians worked hard enough to overcome that, right?

According to historian Ellen Wu, Asian-American wage only started to go up after white America’s perceptions of the group changed. In the Cold War era, the U.S. embraced Asian-Americans in a PR campaign to rid itself of accusations of racism as the “leader of the free world” (even though African-American voices were ignored). By the 1960s, the anxieties provoked by the Civil Rights Movement formed another push for white America to continue investing in positively portraying Asian-Americans. In other words, Asian-Americans were only allowed better living standards when they adhered to the positive narrative created in the benefit of the United States.

But this trade-off with the devil has had its consequences. The model minority myth means that racism against Asian-Americans is routinely ignored, while the group remains underrepresented in politics and pop culture. Asian-Americans might get ahead, but many still face a “bamboo ceiling” in reaching leadership positions, and Hollywood still uses white actors to portray Asian stereotypes (see Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, Matt Damon in The Great Wall, and Emma Stone in Aloha). Most telling was last year’s Oscar ceremony, where a lack of actors of color ignited the protest hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. Even then, Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen took the stage using Asian stereotypes in their jokes (they involved math and the term “little yellow people,” respectively).

In 2017, pop culture has the ability to open conversations in ways that politics has proven it cannot—the “Despacito” effect has been hailed all summer as a sign of a changing social landscape. When Chris Rock took the Oscar stage, he spoke candidly about racism against African-Americans, while Beyoncé and Solange Knowles have become pop culture’s most visible icons of black womanhood. So, where is the Asian girl’s Lemonade?

This point becomes more poignant when looking at Asian stars who are already working to reverse stereotypes: Viceland host and Fresh Off the Boat author Eddie Huang penned an incisive New York Times op-ed following Steve Harvey’s racist remarks about the ability of Asian men to attract women, while comedian Ali Wong’s Netflix special combines talk about sexuality, Asian-American identity, and pregnancy in one. These are all examples of Asian stars who have succeeded by not conforming to what white America believes Asians to be, and though the intense pressures faced by actresses in Hollywood are not to be discounted, seeing a Chinese name credited as part of the outrageously popular Marvel universe would be a powerful symbol. In the meantime, call me Meng Di.