The victory for Bong Joon Ho’s film at the Oscars has nothing to do with representation of people like me.
The New York Times
Date: Feb. 10, 2020
By: Walter Chaw
Bong Joon Ho, the director of “Parasite,” accepting one of the four Oscars the film won on Sunday at the Academy Awards.Credit…Noel West for The New York Times
As children during China’s 1949 revolution, my parents, like so many Chinese of their generation, fled the Communist takeover of the mainland. Many of them planned to return when the Communist leadership collapsed. It doesn’t appear that any of them will live to see it. Both sides of my family landed for a while on Taiwan and then, in the early 1970s, my parents came to the United States, where I was born not long after.
I grew up in Colorado as the only person of Asian descent in most of the environments I lived in, and so learned to assimilate into American culture while rejecting, sometimes violently, my parents and their culture. And so I looked on with anxiety — and some measure of fear — as the South Korean film “Parasite” won four Academy Awards on Sunday evening, including the biggest prize of all, best picture.
The victory of “Parasite” is a stunning moment that may not also be a watershed moment. It’s certainly cause for celebration that an organization with notoriously questionable taste seems to have gotten it right this year, and it’s unquestionably huge for the South Korean film industry. But despite the initial euphoric reaction from many Asian-Americans, the “Parasite” victory has nothing to do with Asian-American representation. [FULL STORY]
