The industry-realigning success of Crazy Rich Asians was an eye-opener for Hollywood — and apparently something of a Rorschach test, too. Some saw the record-breaking box office of the film, directed and co-written by Asian-American creatives, as proof that there’s a market for authentic Asian-American storytelling (a shift that’s benefited awards contenders like The Farewell and Minari). Others have interpreted it as a cue to finally start normalizing Asian (American) faces and/or experiences, whether they embody a scamming stripper (Hustlers), a gig-working stoner (Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens) or the ghost of an organ donor romancing his donee (Last Christmas). Still others took Crazy Rich Asians’ crashing through the industry’s bamboo ceiling rather literally: Give the people more crazy rich Asians!
That seems to be the guiding ethos behind a spate of recent reality shows cashing in on the CRA craze: Netflix’s barely-a-blip Singapore Social, HBO Max’s mostly forgotten House of Ho and now, Netflix’s Bling Empire, which perhaps proved the literal-minded right by entering the streamer’s top 10 upon release last month. (Also in the Asian/Asian-American reality canon — though probably not in CRA’s debt — are Bravo’s highly recommendable Family Karma and Netflix’s Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives.)
Reality TV has always been an underrated source of representation on screen. The often justly maligned genre is, of course, prone to trafficking in stereotypes and mockery as often as it is depicting real-life dilemmas and details. But if you’re living in a media world where Asian Americans have been mostly erased, the occasional appearances by people who look like you — programming I call “representational trash” — tend to have an outsized impact. Eleven years after her first appearance on Survivor, I still remember Brenda Lowe on the reality competition’s 21st season, mostly because I’d never seen an Asian-American woman like her on TV before: tan, athletic, carefree in a bikini. An Indian-American friend of mine can instantly recall, more than a decade later, a My Super Sweet 16 episode in which two Desi sisters rented elephants for their lavish party.
To this day, the only TV show I’ve seen resembling anything like the milieu in which I grew up is the 2012 webseries K-Town, L.A.’s attempted answer to Jersey Shore (too bad no network took a chance on it). I was fascinated and horrified at K-Town‘s stereotype-eschewing club kids, reveling in Koreatown’s legendary night life. Naturally, I couldn’t look away.
But the reality shows riding Crazy Rich Asians’ coattails have fizzled, partly because of execution, partly because — with the exception of House of Ho — they’ve been more interested in finding new ways to exoticize Asia than in telling stories about Asians and Asian Americans. Singapore Social, which came out in late 2019, collapsed under the weight of its own vapidity, its beautiful, jet-setting 20-somethings staged in tourist areas and caught in humdrum romantic storylines and predictable generational tensions that failed to justify their run time.
Netflix fares at least a little better with Bling Empire, which centers on a pan-Asian cast of wealthy Asian Americans and seemingly transnational Asians in Los Angeles. Heavy on the transplants, the show hardly acknowledges the larger Asian-American communities in L.A. — a tenth of the city’s population. The series uses model Kevin Kreider, a Korean adoptee from Philadelphia, as its entry-point character to its circle of tediously designer-obsessed one-percenters. (If the point of Bling Empire is that Asians can be as vacuous as any of the Real Housewives, well, mission accomplished.)
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Bling Empire is an objectively bad reality show; you can barely make out the “characters” through the smudges of the producers’ countless fingerprints. The latter half of the season is particularly a mess, with the absence of organic storylines ineptly papered over by visits to a slew of quacks: a shaman, a medium, a hypnotherapist.
That said, the show isn’t without representational value. Kevin’s conversation with his adoptive mother about his decision to find his birth parents and the guilt he feels about how she might react are moving despite that storyline’s unsatisfying resolution. Socialite Christine’s back story illuminates the deplorable lengths to which self-important parents-in-law who pride themselves on their ancient dynastic roots might go to shame a daughter-in-law for her difficulties conceiving. There’s also a refreshing lack of tiger parents, at least on screen.
But Bling Empire ultimately exists for the white gaze. Kreider, the character we’re supposed to anchor ourselves to, is coded as culturally white, with his frequent assertions that he didn’t grow up around any other Asians, despite the fact that his hometown is certainly not lacking in them. (Philly is 7% Asian and home to a booming and well-known Koreatown.) But more importantly, the series tends to conflate its supposedly fun spectacles of opulence with dispiriting spectacles of an exoticized Asianness. When a trio of cast members visit an herb store, for example, the “weirdness” of the shop’s existence is un-tangleable from the thousands of dollars Asians are supposedly willing to pay for its wares. The message of that segment seems to be: Asians are weird for desiring herbs, and doubly weird for desiring them so much they’ll cough up eye-popping amounts of money for them.
Meanwhile, common religious beliefs, like reincarnation, are treated as cut from the same woo-woo cloth as palm-reading. Distractingly, the characters constantly refer to a monolithic “Asian culture” despite the cast members representing at least four ethnicities and a couple more countries among them. (In my experience, at least, groups of friends from various Asian origins often spend time parsing out which cultural traits are shared and which aren’t among different Asian ethnicities, as opposed to always deferring to a common Asianness.)
If Crazy Rich Asians affirmed an Asian-American identity as apart from but just as meaningful as ones from the Old World, Bling Empire uses its characters’ wealth to re-exoticize its Asian and Asian-American characters as bizarre curiosities or, in the case of the long-suffering Christine, martyrs to tradition. It’s a fate the series might have escaped had it been more successful in endowing any dimension to its cast members, who, after eight episodes, never even quite come into their own as archetypes.
Perhaps the way forward lies in House of Ho, a portrait of an affluent Vietnamese-American family in Houston slowly being corroded from the inside out by familial sexism. Released in late 2020, the early episodes hew too closely to the dull shopping-montage side of Crazy Rich Asians, as when the female members of the Ho family take a private plane to visit high-end stores in Dallas and scoff at the daughter-in-law with the modest background who bothers with the sales section.
But the seven-part series deepens wonderfully halfway through its run, giving way to divorced daughter Judy’s efforts to finally assert her independence from her controlling parents as a 40-year-old. The show also examines the catastrophic fissures (including a succession crisis for the family business) that arise among the Hos as it becomes clear that the elderly parents’ lifelong favoritism toward spoiled firstborn Washington has frozen him in arrested development and created problems that threaten to engulf his marriage.
House of Ho might have turned some viewers off with its initial chapters’ repetitive dialogue, sluggish pacing and low production values, the latter of which made all the peacocking about the Hos’ luxury goods seem pretty ironic. But its chronicling of an Asian-American woman going through a divorce against her immigrant parents’ rigid opposition still feels like a noteworthy milestone, as does the show’s depiction of traditional gender roles suffocating not only the women in the family, but stunting and constraining the men, too.
Perhaps most daringly for an American series — let alone an Asian-American one — House of Ho questions whether the glitzy materialism that the refugee-rags-to-riches Hos take such pride in is ultimately a cheap substitute for genuine respect and affection. Rarely has representational trash been so full of treasures.
