Netflix and the Creation of the Onscreen Hapa

Hapa Mag - MAY 11, 2020

By Nathan Liu

On the last week of April 2020, Netflix released two new shows, Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever, and Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood. The former is a comedy about an Indian American teenager navigating school, boys, and her hyphenated identity, while the latter is a period piece about a group of queer, female, and POC filmmakers struggling to make a movie in post-World War II tinsel town. Both are fun and well-made in their own rights. But their quality isn’t what makes them unique. What sets them apart from other, similarly structured shows is their prominent inclusion of Hapa characters, played by actual Hapa actors, and their frank discussions of Hapa identity.

This is special for Hapa people because, while we’ve been in Hollywood for years, we’ve rarely gotten to be Hapa. Either we play totally white characters, like Keanu Reeves often does, or totally Asian ones, like Henry Golding tends to do. And there are very few, if any, films discussing the uniquely grey racial areas Hapa people exist in. That’s not the case with either of these Netflix shows, though. Darren Barnet, who is part-Japanese, plays the main love interest on Never Have I Ever, while Darren Criss, who is half-Filipino, plays the primary filmmaker on Hollywood. Both series directly acknowledge these men’s mixed identities—Barnet’s character is named Paxton Hall-Yoshida, and even speaks Japanese in one episode, while Criss’s character on Hollywood openly describes himself as half-Filipino. Both series delve into the unique position that Hapa people find themselves in when it comes to race and representation in this country.

In Hollywood, Criss’s character wants to create better, more nuanced roles for Asian performers. The second episode shows him visiting Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, and asking her to be in his film. He believes that he can revive her career, and win her the Oscar she’d been denied because of her race. Unfortunately, Miss Wong isn’t convinced that his script, with its more interesting, sympathetic Asian characters, will ever get made because, to quote her, “This town will never give that to someone like me. Someone who can’t pass.” And in the same episode, while Criss’s character is talking to Archie, a black screenwriter played by Jeremy Pope, he describes how, as a mixed person, he feels like he’s living in a “really convincing costume.” Archie points out how that isn’t the same thing as being black. Both of these statements encapsulate certain anxieties that I, and many other mixed people, possess. We want to help, and are sympathetic, given our backgrounds. But at the same time, we do possess a certain degree of privilege that our fully Asian friends and family lack. I never thought I’d see a mainstream TV show tackle this very complex subject in such a meaningful way. Likewise, I never thought I’d see an exact scene from my own life get dramatized on screen.

In the fifth episode of Never Have I Ever, Paxton tells Eleanor, played by Ramona Young, that he thinks he saw her absentee mother at a restaurant. Eleanor gets upset and accuses Paxton of thinking all Asian women look alike. Paxton points out that he’s part-Japanese, which blows his friend’s mind. He rolls his eyes and asks, “What do you think Yoshida is, Bro?” and even points out how the kid has met his father several times. The friend grins sheepishly and admits, “I thought that was your neighbor.” This exact scenario, revealing that I’m part-Asian, only to have people be totally surprised, and even somewhat skeptical, has happened to me so many times throughout my life that it’s become annoying. One time, for instance, I was interning at the company my father used to work for, and introduced myself to one of his colleagues as Nathan Liu. They shook my hand and asked if I was Doug (my dad’s) nephew. In theory I understand their assumption, I don’t look anything like my dad, but it still bothered me, just as Paxton’s friend’s behavior bothered him. That sense of frustration, of existing in two worlds, but belonging in neither, is one that virtually all mixed people share, and one that’s rarely explored with any degree of nuance in film. And yet, these two big-budget shows included it, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

I think it says something about where the entertainment industry is in terms of representation that not only are we seeing Hapa characters, played by Hapa actors, but those characters are being allowed to discuss and explore their own unique experiences. I wrote a piece a while ago about how, in film and TV, looking the part is almost more important than being it. That’s how you get Maori actor Cliff Curtis playing Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. He looks like what a white studio executive thinks a Colombian person is, and that’s more important than anything else. But what about people who are mixed, who don’t fit neatly in one box? Well, until these shows, those kinds of people didn’t really exist onscreen. Sure, there were characters that were written as mixed, like Lara Jean Covey from To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, but they were almost always played by fully Asian, or white, actors. And they never really got to say how it felt to not belong in either space. Well that’s not the case anymore. Hollywood and Never Have I Ever feature mixed characters, played by mixed actors, who are fully aware of the strange position that they exist in. And let me tell you, when you grow up unsure of where you belong, seeing other people who go through the same thing makes the strange circus that is life just a little bit easier to sit through.