Crazy Rich Asians may have been named after (a tiny minority of) Asians in Asia, but it likely became so widely embraced by Asian Americans because it acknowledged us as a group distinct from our ethnic counterparts on the other side of the Pacific.
Director Jon M. Chu certainly made a winsome romantic comedy, but the film's most powerful moment undoubtedly belonged to the mahjong-parlor scene, in which the protagonist's (Constance Wu) would-be mother-in-law (Michelle Yeoh) finally saw value in the younger woman's Asian Americanness.
It feels like something of a natural, if accidental, progression, then, that two subsequent Asian American films have complicated that celebratory mode.
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