Depicted as perfect boyfriends, they model an ideal set of standards for a desirable heterosexual male romantic partner while using those standards not to pursue their own self-interests but rather to submit themselves to downtrodden white women for their emotional rebuilding so that they can resocialize into everyday American work life. In doing so, these leading men are effectively turned into props for white women’s healing journeys.
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The tides of love are turning for Asian American men – or, at least, that is what romantic comedies today would have us believe. In a 2024 New York Times article, “Asian Men Are Finally Starting to Get the Girl (or Guy),” reporter Matt Stevens observes that “after decades of degrading, often emasculating portrayals, Asian and Asian American men” are now “at the center” of romantic comedy films “playing the sort of hunky hero parts that Hollywood long kept out of reach.” Henry Golding’s early career trajectory in the past decade enabled the kinds of progress that diasporic Asian men are starting to experience. His appearances as Nicholas Young in the blockbuster hit Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and as Tom in the holiday film Last Christmas (2019) helped to shape the contemporary landscape of the romantic comedy genre. Historically, romantic comedies featured white male leads. If diasporic Asian men were included at all, they appeared either as minor side characters or stereotyped objects of ridicule (or both). As a genre, romantic comedies affirm the racial hierarchies that have long determined cultural belonging in the U.S. The changes taking shape in the film industry are significant, then, because they offer the potential to redefine what Asian American masculinity means in everyday life. If Asian American men can be seen as desirable on-screen, they might become desirable off-screen. These developments come on the heels of what the AV Club declared in 2023 to be “a romantic-comedy renaissance” emerging in the film industry (Sanchez). Tempting as it might be to dismiss romantic comedies as thoughtless money grabs, they identify crucial stages where contemporary battles over cultural belonging are playing out in Asian America.
But is progress really being made in these portrayals? And who are they actually serving? On the one hand, this new generation of leading men embodies the traits that Asian American audiences would seem to desire and appreciate. Not only are they physically attractive, but they are emotionally vulnerable, communicative, and present for their female counterparts. In other words, they are presented as perfect partners. In The Greatest Hits (2024), Korean American David Park (Justin H. Min) supports Harriet Gibbons (Lucy Boynton) as she repairs her life in the wake of her boyfriend’s tragic death. In A Tourist’s Guide to Love (2023), Vietnamese American tour guide Sinh Thach (Scott Ly) escorts Amanda Riley (Rachael Leigh Cook) around Vietnam during her work trip where he introduces her to traditional Vietnamese customs that teach her how to find fulfillment in life amid her demanding corporate job and recent breakup with her long-term boyfriend.
A Tourist’s Guide to Love
Each of these films, including Last Christmas, features a diasporic Asian man coupling with a white woman. These narratives thus challenge the stereotype that diasporic Asian men are sexually undesirable. Such stereotypes date back to the mid-nineteenth century when the rapid influx of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. during the California Gold Rush threatened the white social order, leading to marriage laws that prohibited racial mixing between Chinese men and white women. Films like Last Christmas, The Greatest Hits, and A Tourist’s Guide to Love, among others, would therefore seem to promote equity around Asian American masculinity.
On the other hand, we must be cautious of immediately buying into the idea that Asian Americans today are indeed experiencing representational progress, because, even as these leading men might look appealing in their physicality and emotional presence, they are not all that different from a familiar figure: the model minority. Depicted as perfect boyfriends, they model an ideal set of standards for a desirable heterosexual male romantic partner while using those standards not to pursue their own self-interests but rather to submit themselves to downtrodden white women for their emotional rebuilding so that they can resocialize into everyday American work life. In doing so, these leading men are effectively turned into props for white women’s healing journeys. They are objectified at the very moment that they would otherwise come into their own as whole individuals. Their function is to uplift these white women so that the women can return to their careers stronger than before. What gets revealed by this mixed-race romantic dynamic is that, in spite of being hunky and emotionally present, these perfect boyfriends embody the stereotype of the model minority because they uphold a racial hierarchy that privileges whiteness and endorses the ills of our capitalist workplace culture by placing faith in the false promise that their physical and emotional labors will provide them access to the good life under the American Dream. Their perfection represents a fantasy that serves as a metaphor for the fantasy of upward mobility under American capitalism, an economic system rooted in oppression and subjugation.
I call this new character trope the Perfect Asian Dream Boy. The Perfect Asian Dream Boy demonstrates how the cultural expectations surrounding perfection – a hallmark of the model minority stereotype – continue to define Asian American belonging because, to be included, the diasporic Asian male lead must perform perfectly for white women in order to be desired. Certainly, the performance of perfection is inherent to the romantic comedy genre. But what distinguishes these diasporic Asian performances is that even when he is desired, the male lead’s desirability hinges on his own objectification and submission to whiteness. The Perfect Asian Dream Boy is the model minority masquerading as the well-assimilated heartthrob.
A Tourist’s Guide to Love
The Perfect Asian Dream Boy operates in the tradition of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the quirky, exuberate nontraditional female lead whose narrative function is to breathe life and give vitality to the disaffected white male lead (Rabin). Exemplified by characters like Clementine (Kate Winslet) in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Sam (Natalie Portman) in Garden State (2004), Claire (Kirsten Dunst) in Elizabethtown (2005), and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) in 500 Days of Summer (2009), the Manic Pixie Dream Girl traffics in misogynistic stereotypes that reduce women to fantastical objects for men’s self-fulfillment. At the same time, they are presented as progressive, desirable, and even empowered. Likewise, while the Perfect Asian Dream Boy appears to promote progress for Asian American masculinity, it maintains the status quo by appealing to audiences who want to experience the feeling of racial progress without having to participate in the active work necessary to bring such a material reality into being. This narrative sleight of hand is reminiscent of what media scholar Melissa Phruksachart elsewhere describes as “boba liberalism,” or “the unequivocally positive attitudes” that liberal audiences uphold toward films that portray Asian American characters who affirm “racialized and traditionally gendered heteronormativity” in ways that reproduce the violences of the American Dream under capitalism (60). The widespread public celebration of films like Crazy Rich Asians, she contends, is illustrative of boba liberalism. What the Perfect Asian Dream Boy reveals, in other words, is how white power gets disguised as progressive racial inclusiveness.
To be clear, the idea that Asian American men are being represented more fully as well-rounded characters is not the issue. Rather, the point is to recognize the power dynamics at play in their presentation. In The Greatest Hits, David struggles to care for his younger sister while keeping his family’s independent furniture business afloat after the passing of his parents. These obligations get pushed aside, however, when he dedicates himself to helping his love interest, Harriet, overcome her debilitating grief following the loss of her boyfriend so that she can reestablish her career in the music industry. In A Tourist’s Guide to Love, Sinh not only serves as Amanda’s cultural tour guide, turning Vietnam into a playground for her journey of self-healing a la Liz (Julia Roberts) in Eat, Pray, Love (2010); but, unbeknownst to him, she is visiting Vietnam on behalf of her corporate Condé Nast-esque travel company to buy out his family’s small independent tourism business. Their coupling at the end of the film then comes to justify U.S. imperial power in the global economy. The Asian American leads in these narratives submit to whiteness in ways that render them side characters in their own love stories.
The notion that white women exert power over the Perfect Asian Dream Boy – indeed, to the point of extracting their livelihood – is literalized in Last Christmas. The holiday film follows the budding relationship between Katarina (Emilia Clarke), a retail store worker, and a local passerby, Tom (Henry Golding). In the film’s climactic twist ending, the audience learns that Tom was never a real person; rather, he was the ghostly projection of his own heart, which was donated to Katarina years prior for her life-saving heart transplant operation. Sentimental as it might sound for Katarina to bear Tom’s heart with her always, Last Christmas illustrates the extremes to which the Perfect Asian Dream Boy becomes objectified in service of the white female body. Tom’s ghost exposes the hidden costs of diasporic Asian male labor that haunt the romantic comedy genre.
Last Christmas
Last Christmas
The Perfect Asian Dream Boy emerges at a unique time in contemporary American popular culture. According to the Pew Research Center, Asian Americans now have the highest levels of income disparity among all racial demographics, including whites (Kochhar and Cilluffo). At the same time, dating apps have shown that Asian American men are the least romantically desirable partners (Nguyen; Rudder). The Perfect Asian Dream Boy maintains the belief that the good life under the American Dream is still attainable, even if reality suggests otherwise. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek once argued that in Titanic (1997), the iceberg was the true hero of the film because its destruction of Jack and Rose’s relationship allowed for their love to be forever suspended, disallowing audiences to see how their irreconcilable class differences would inevitably destroy their relationship in their post-voyage lives back in the U.S. (“Slavoj Žižek on Titanic”). Like the iceberg, the Perfect Asian Dream Boy preserves the American fantasy of racial harmony and social mobility while obscuring the extractive power of the privileged over the oppressed.
Works Cited
Kochhar, Rakesh, and Anthony Cilluffo. Income Inequality in the U.S. Is Rising Most Rapidly Among Asians. Pew Research Center, 12 July 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/07/12/income-inequality-in-the-u-s-is-rising-most-rapidly-among-asians/.
Nguyen, Tân Hoàng. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Duke University Press, 2014.
Phruksachart, Melissa. “The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism.” Film Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, 2020, pp. 59–65. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.73.3.59.
Rabin, Nathan. “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown.” AV Club, 25 Jan. 2007, https://www.avclub.com/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-elizabet-1798210595.
Rudder, Christian. “Race and Attraction, 2009 – 2014.” OkTrends!, 10 Sept. 2014, https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/raceandattraction20092014.html.
Sanchez, Gabrielle. “Why 2023 Is Shaping Up as the Year of the Rom-Com.” AV Club, 15 Feb. 2023, https://www.avclub.com/2023-year-of-the-rom-com-movies-1850089511.
Stevens, Matt. “Asian Men Are Finally Starting to Get the Girl (or Guy).” The New York Times, 29 Aug. 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/arts/asian-men-actors-romantic-leads.html.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Slavoj Žižek on Titanic in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology | Film4 Clip.” YouTube, uploaded by Film4, 27 Sept. 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DocwBZyESU.
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.
