Asian Americans have been involved in the entertainment industry since the first half of the 19th century, when Chang and Eng Bunker (the original "Siamese Twins") became naturalized citizens.[1] Acting roles in television, film, and theater were relatively few, and many available roles were for narrow, stereotypical characters. Early Asian American actors such as Sessue Hayakawa, Anna May Wong, and Bruce Lee encountered a movie-making culture that wanted to cast them as caricatures.
Bruce Lee abandoned Hollywood in the early 1970s and achieved worldwide fame in Hong Kong. On another level, frustrated with the limited opportunities given to them, seven Asian American actors formed East West Players (EWP), a Los Angeles-based Asian American theater company in 1965, to produce their own shows, and the company continues today.
More recently, young Asian American comedians and filmmakers have also found an outlet on YouTube and the Internet, allowing them to gain a strong and loyal fanbase. Notable YouTubers include comedians such as Kevin Wu and Christine Gambito; musicians such as Far East Movement, Sam Tsui, David Choi, and Kina Grannis; and the filmmaking group Wong Fu Productions. These entertainers have gained notable followings, mainly with young Asian American students, through solo and collaborative videos, short films and tours.
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They may have been discovered by a British showman and carted around the world, but by the time Chang and Eng Bunker (the original "Siamese Twins") became naturalized citizens, they were managing their own careers.[1]
George Takei and Pat Morita became famous from mere supporting roles in Star Trek and Happy Days, two of the best-known series of the 1960s and 1970s, respectively. Other Asian Americans who appeared on the small-screen during this time include Jack Soo of Barney Miller, and Bruce Lee on the Green Hornet. In 1976, Morita starred in the first American sitcom centered on a person of Asian descent, Mr. T and Tina and would go on to become widely known as the mentor to the main character, Mr. Miyagi, in The Karate Kid movies of the '80s.
Comedian Johnny Yune made many appearances on the Tonight Show in the late '70s.
Margaret Cho, stand-up comedian and actress, had a leading role in her own TV comedy series All American Girl in the '90s. Her character was a Korean-American (as is Cho), who struggled with her family and cultural issues in San Francisco. The show included other Asian-American actors such as Amy Hill, who played Cho's grandmother, who has starred in numerous TV and movie roles throughout her life, including in episodes of Six Feet Under and Desperate Housewives. Despite being a breakthrough in prime-time television, All American Girl show was cancelled after two seasons due to low ratings. After its run, due to the way it was handled and the pressures that were forced on her to conform to vague mainstream expectations to try to make the show a success, Cho suffered a huge psychotic break and self-disappointment that led to her drug and alcohol addiction. (Later it would be revealed that female stars of even successful sitcoms go through similar trials as related by Roseanne Barr in her story for New York Magazine in 2011.[2]) Cho has since regained popularity and success from her 2000 one-woman show I'm the One That I Want through her current involvement in Drop Dead Diva on Lifetime.
Lucy Liu had a major part in the Ally McBeal TV show from 1998 to 2002 before going on to lead roles in feature films. Daniel Dae Kim and Sendhil Ramamurthy have achieved some recognition as sex symbols for their respective roles on Lost and Heroes as has Jon Gosselin from the reality show Jon and Kate Plus 8; B. D. Wong, who starred in the Broadway production of M. Butterfly and is the only actor to have won a Tony, a Drama Desk award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, among others currently stars on Law & Order: SVU after being featured in the critically acclaimed series Oz.
After landing a role on As the World Turns, Ming-Na starred as Dr. Deb Chen in the medical drama television series ER from 1995 to 2004 and played a lead in Joy Luck Club. She went on to star in other successful TV shows such as Stargate Universe and lent her voice to the main character in Mulan.
Masi Oka and James Kyson Lee are two lead Asian actors that are on the popular TV series Heroes. Oka, a math major when he attended Brown University, is also the only lead actor on the show to be nominated for either an Emmy or Golden Globe Award. Sonja Sohn was a series regular on the entire run of the critically acclaimed television series The Wire. Tila Tequila was the star of the two-season MTV show A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila.
Olivia Munn, from Oklahoma of Chinese descent on her mother's side, is an actress, model, and television personality is best known as a correspondent on The Jon Stewart Show. She co-hosted G4's Attack of the Show!, and enjoyed roles in movies such as Iron Man 2. South Korea-born SuChin Pak was a news correspondent frequently seen on MTV News and now the host of G Word for Planet Green. Reiko Aylesworth was part of the cast of the critically acclaimed hit TV series 24. Kirk Acevedo was a lead actor on various TV shows and was known for his regular roles on popular television shows such as OZ, Law & Order: Trial by Jury, and Fringe.
Both Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Jennie Kwan in the past were both popularly known to the teen and children audiences for their roles on television series Saved by the Bell and California Dreams respectively both aimed at youth in the 1990s. The late Thuy Trang is probably a familiar face to many children and young adults for her role as Trini Kwan, the original yellow ranger, in the hit youth television show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Brenda Song is a Thai-Hmong American actress known to younger audiences for starring in several Disney Channel productions including The Suite Life Of Zack and Cody, Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior 1 and 2, Stuck in the Suburbs, The Suite Life on Deck, and, most recently, The Social Network.
Recently the hit U.S. TV series Survivor created teams along racial lines during Survivor: Cook Islands. People of East and Southeast Asian ancestry composed the Asian American tribe.[3] Asian American Yul Kwon won the season.
Korean American actresses Yun Jin Kim and Sandra Oh of the ABC TV series "Lost" and "Grey's Anatomy," respectively, were during their series' runs the main two Asian American actors in lead roles on network television (the latter is still on air). Jenna Ushkowitz and Harry Shum, Jr. of "Glee" are also prominent Asian American actors currently on network television, although all four of them are/were part of large, ensemble casts, where it is more likely to find minority characters.
Curt Apduhan is a NATAS News/Documentary Cinematography Emmy awarded cinematographer for the Sundance Channel feature documentary Amargosa about a dnacer who performs regularly in an opera house in a California ghost town.
Miyoshi Umeki won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1957 for Sayonara. Haing Ngor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1985 for The Killing Fields. Lou Diamond Phillips had leading roles in several motion pictures including Young Guns, Stand by Me, and Extreme Prejudice. Lucy Liu was one of the lead actresses in the popular Charlie's Angels movie series and continued to hold her own in Quentin Tarentino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 for which she was paid $5.5 million. She also was the first Asian-American woman to host Saturday Night Live[4] in 2000.
Shin Koyamada became best known to audience after his co-starring role "Nobutada" in Warner Bros. Pictures Action epic The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise and also starred in Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior with Brenda Song.
John Cho, a Korea-born American actor, famously portrayed Hikaru Sulu in the Star Trek reboot, as well as appearing in the primary American Pie series and the Harold & Kumar series along with popular Indian American actor Kal Penn, who in addition to playing one of Dr. House's four fellows in the medical drama House from 2007 to 2009, also starred in The Namesake, one of his favorite books, taught a course and seminar on images of Asian Americans in the media at the University of Pennsylvania as well as appearing as a terrorist on 24.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa frequently fills film roles that require an Asian American star and has an extensive film and television appearance history. While often portraying a villain, such as the soul-stealing sorcerer Shang Tsung in the film adaptation of the video game Mortal Kombat, he was interviewed in the documentary The Slanted Screen (2006), directed by Jeff Adachi, about the representation of Asian and Asian-American men in Hollywood. Darren Criss is a half-Filipino actor who recently gained fame through the viral hit A Very Potter Musical and the popular TV show Glee.
The international star Joan Chen (Chong Chen) was featured in numerous films from China, the US, Australia, and some other countries. She won quite a number of awards for her acting and has also directed a film.
M. Night Shyamalan has directed a number of movies, including Signs, The Village, Unbreakable, and the Academy Award-nominated The Sixth Sense. Mira Nair has acclaimed movies like Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake to her credit. Ang Lee is the much sought-after director of the critically acclaimed Brokeback Mountain, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Director Justin Lin brought attention to the experiences of Asian Americans through his movie Better Luck Tomorrow, which included an almost exclusively Asian-American cast. He has since directed The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, its prequel Fast & Furious and Fast Five.
Major films have been based on Asian American novels, such as Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2007) and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Others have been created on stories about Asian American communities.
Wah Chang was the designer for many of the props on the Star Trek series as well as The Time Machine, which received an Academy Award for special effects.
Flower Drum Song is based on the 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, by Chinese-American author C. Y. Lee. which in turn is based on the San Francisco nightclub Forbidden City that was popular for military men in transit during World War II. Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted it into a musical that was produced on Broadway in 1958 and on film in 1961. Largely remembered for the hit song "I Enjoy Being A Girl", it would not be produced with an all-Asian-American cast until a 2002 Broadway revival.
In 1965, frustrated with the limited opportunities given to them, actors Mako, James Hong, Beulah Quo, Pat Li, and June Kim, together with Guy Lee and Yet Lock, formed East West Players (EWP), a Los Angeles-based Asian American theater company – the first of its kind. They produced their own shows to allow Asian American actors the opportunity to perform a wide range of leading roles. As the need still exists, EWP continues today. Dozens of other Asian American theater companies have since formed in major cities throughout the US, providing similar outlets elsewhere.
In 1988, playwright David Henry Hwang's Broadway hit M. Butterfly won a Tony Award for Best Play, among other awards. Singer and actress Lea Salonga, who broke out in the lead role in the musical Miss Saigon, was also the first Asian to play the roles of Éponine and Fantine in the musical Les Misérables on Broadway, and is still active on Broadway.
Margaret Cho won the American Comedy Award for Best Female Comedian in 1994. Comedian Byron Yee's show Paper Son was awarded "Outstanding Solo Show" at the New York International Fringe Festival.[5]
Notable works of world architecture have been designed by Asian Americans, such as the Louvre Pyramid (I.M. Pei), the World Trade Center (Minoru Yamasaki), and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Maya Lin). In commercial architecture, Gyo Obata is a founding partner of HOK (formerly Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum), which designed the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. and the Taipei World Trade Center. Fazlur Rahman Khan designed the John Hancock Center and the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower), both in Chicago.
Many Asian Americans have made their mark in the fashion world. Vera Wang, friend to Anna Wintour, and Anna Sui have been working as highly accomplished and awarded fashion designers for years. Philippines-born Monique Lhuillier's dresses are on the Hollywood red carpet and Vietnamese-American Chloe Dao won Project Runway in spring 2006. Other designers include Phillip Lim, 2006 CFDA Emerging Talent Award Winner Doo-Ri Chung, and 2005 Winner Derek Lam; all three have been featured in Vogue magazine several times. At the Fashion Institute of Technology, 23 percent of the nearly 1,200 students now enrolled are either Asian or Asian-American.[6]
With the advent of YouTube, young Asian Americans have become more prominent, gaining large followings through filmmaking, comedy, or music. This includes video bloggers/comedians like Kevin Wu (kevjumba) and the filmmaking group Wong Fu Productions. The latter's growing influence is evident especially in Wong Fu Productions' annual concert series, International Secret Agents (ISA), which often sell out, and in which many popular Asian American guest performers appear, like Far East Movement or Poreotics. Kevin Wu's recent appearance on the 17th season of The Amazing Race marked another significant venture into mainstream media.[7] These along with other rising Asian American talents have shared and documented their journey among Asian American blogs including TheOtherAsians, and more recently Hyphen magazine.
Asian American writers have received numerous top awards in fiction and nonfiction writing. Women writers have been particularly prominent for their work of telling a wide range of stories of immigrant experience, changing cultures and aspects of Asian American imagination, spanning continents, eras and points of view. Maxine Hong Kingston won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1976 for her memoir The Woman Warrior. Bharati Mukherjee won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 for her short story collection The Middleman and Other Stories. Jessica Hagedorn won a 1990 American Book Award for her novel Dogeaters. Chang-Rae Lee received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for his novel Native Speaker (1995). Amy Tan has received popular acclaim for her work and had a novel produced as a film. Jhumpa Lahiri received a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies. Kiran Desai won the British Man Booker Prize (2006) and National Book Critics Circle Award (2006) for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss. Her mother Anita Desai has also been nominated for major awards for her novels. Naomi Hirahara won a 2007 Edgar Award for her novel Snakeskin Shamisen.
Jim Lee is considered to be one of the most popular comic book artists and is one of the founders of Image Comics. Adrian Tomine's cartoons are featured in The New Yorker.
Asian-Americans are increasingly enjoying success in mainstream hip hop and R&B. A few notable examples are multi-racial Amerie, Cassie, Ne-Yo, who is one-quarter Chinese, Filipino-American Apl.de.ap of The Black Eyed Peas, and Jin. There are many more Asian-Americans represented in local hip-hop scenes, including rising acts like the Blue Scholars. In 2010 and 2011, half-Filipino singer-songwriter Bruno Mars broke into the Top 10 with his singles "Just the Way You Are" and "Grenade".[8][9] In October 2010, Far East Movement became the first Asian-American band to break into the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 with their single "Like a G6", which eventually reached No. 1.[10]
In popular music, Asian-Americans are a sizable influence, including pop divas such as part-Filipino Vanessa Hudgens, Utada Hikaru, Lea Salonga and Nicole Scherzinger. Folk singer-songwriter and Christian Dawn Xiana Moon was the first to blend traditional Chinese music with Americana, pop, and jazz, and Vienna Teng is notable for a folk/pop sound without the Eastern influences.
Asian-Americans play in a handful of "all-American" bands, including quarter-Indonesian Eddie Van Halen, James Iha of The Smashing Pumpkins, Keralan Indian Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, part-Filipino Kirk Hammett of Metallica, Indian-English Tony Kanal of No Doubt, Richard On of O.A.R., Joey Santiago of Pixies, Kenny Choi of Daphne Loves Derby Hoobastank's Doug Robb and former member Derek Kwan, and Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda and Joseph Hahn, a Korean-American. The famous surf rock guitarist and pioneer of the electric guitar Dick Dale is also Asian American, he is of Lebanese descent. Mike Park is prominent in the independent music sphere as a member of Skankin' Pickle, The Bruce Lee Band, and The Chinkees, as well as being the founder of Asian Man Records.
Don Ho was a Grammy Award-winning Hawaiian pop singer and entertainer. Tia Carrere is a Hawaiian singer, actress, and former model best known as Cassandra Wong in the Wayne's World movies with a recurring role on Curb Your Enthusiasm; her album Hawaiiana was nominated for an Grammy.[11] Singer-songwriter Norah Jones is also very successful. Nadia Ali, singer-songwriter and the former front-woman of iiO is prominent in the electronic dance music genre, with her work having attained both critical and commercial success.
Internationally, US-born Leehom Wang is a well-known musician in mainland China and Taiwan, and also played a part in Ang Lee's 2007 film Lust, Caution. In the heavy metal genre, Aja Kim, has achieved notoriety as lead vocalist in the role of Bruce 'Lee' Chickinson for the tribute band, The Iron Maidens.
In classical music, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and conductor Zubin Mehta are examples of significant Asian American figures. The classical violinists Sarah Chang and Midori Gotō have each been awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, as has Ma. The composer Bright Chang has received extensive recognition for his work, including being invited to be composer-in-residence at the New York City Ballet. Hunan, China-born New York City resident Tan Dun is a contemporary classical composer, well known for his Grammy and Oscar-award winning scores for the movies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.
Asian American jazz is a musical movement in the United States begun in the 20th century by Asian American jazz musicians that has produced a number of very prominent musicians.
Indian-American Faris McReynolds is a Los Angeles-based artist and musician. Sueo Serisawa helped establish the California Impressionist style of painting. Los Angeles-based artists James Jean and David Choe have received domestic and international recognition within the Lowbrow art scene.