When my white friend told me that I should go see , because it was positive for the representation of people with my ethnic heritage, I was cynical.
The film is the latest Disney blockbuster and follows Raya, a warrior princess from the Heart tribe in Kumandra. Kumandra was a bountiful land inhabited by people and dragons, until it was ravaged by Druun, a “plague” that was born from “human discord” and turns humans and dragons into stone upon its touch. Sisu, the last remaining dragon saves humanity from the Druun and mysteriously goes into hibernation. While she is gone, “humans being humans” fight and split Kumandra into separate nations. The film is widely marketed as being based on South East Asian culture. Being Vietnamese-Australian this billing made me think of it as the South East Asian , a film my Tongan friend described as, “It tried to represent all Polynesian people so it ended up representing no one.”
I recounted then that when I was 15, a Chinese-Australian classmate told me that I wasn’t really Asian because I was not from China, Korea or Japan
Growing up, my background often required the following explanations. “It’s a long, thin country near Thailand, Cambodia and Laos,” or “There was a war there and it lasted twenty years.” I once laughed with a Filipino-Australian friend that we were “forgotten Asians”. I recounted then that when I was 15, a Chinese-Australian classmate told me that I wasn’t really Asian because I was not from China, Korea or Japan. Nowadays when I tell people my family are from Vietnam, I get comments about how delicious pho is and occasionally, what my opinion is of the Vietnam War.
Yet, I cried when Raya calls her father, “Ba”, the word for “dad” in my language (with the correct intonation). I gasped when making an offering to bring back Sisu, Raya lays down a banh tet, a glutinous rice cake that my mum would buy from Chinatown in Sydney on days when we had to visit our ancestors. Longan and dragonfruit, tropical fruits easily found in the markets of Vietnam when my family had gone back to visit, but exorbitantly priced in the markets of Australian capital cities. These elements of Raya and the Last Dragon gave me a sense of familiarity that I do not often see in audiovisual media. Certainly, I do not ever remember seeing animated characters who looked like me, my family and my friends from South East Asian backgrounds. And as the credit scrolled, I was excited to see that Raya’s voice actor, Kelly Marie Tran and Qui Nguyen, one of the two screenwriters, are of Vietnamese descent.
However, Raya’s type of representation is far from perfect. The plot is not a story I would recognise growing up although elements such as strong women figures, parental sacrifice and dragons that are long and snake-like, rather than squat and muscular, were common. This is somewhat offset by the setting being a fantasy world and there is often dilution of specifics with major movies in a bid to make it more palatable for a larger audience.
Lumping elements of vastly different countries such as Indonesia, through Raya’s blade, a keris and Thailand, through tom yum soup being eaten at the feast and Muay Thai moves being incorporated into fight scenes, is still reductive
Qui Nguyen himself states, . The issue with this is that culture is specific. Even if Raya provides differentiation of South East Asia from East Asian cultures, lumping elements of vastly different countries such as Indonesia, through Raya’s blade, a keris and Thailand, through tom yum soup being eaten at the feast and Muay Thai moves being incorporated into fight scenes, is still reductive. Furthermore, , demonstrating that Disney chose the safety of more established actors at the expense of authentic representation.
Perhaps it is a reflection of the world we live in where it is progressive to differentiate South East Asia from the mass of being “Asian”.
amidst in particular, anti-Chinese sentiment perpetuated for example, by calling coronavirus the . Similarly, to how my Asian-Australian friends and I still get strangers greeting us with “ni hao” regardless of where we are from and Asian women remain too commonly fetishised, racism does not care which type of Asian we are. In this landscape, a film with strong, if problematic Asian representation that purports a message of trust and unity, may be what we need.
