Sooner or later, if you’re Asian American, someone will attempt to compliment you. “Your English is so good!”

And then you pause, taken aback, before replying, “But I was born here.”

The comment is well intentioned, but reveals a deep-seated belief that anyone of Asian descent is a perpetual foreigner, never American enough, no matter how deep your roots are in this country. The commenters are assuming a narrow narrative of immigration patterns, and I’d argue that it’s the flip side of the vitriol “Go back to your own country!”

But this is our country, we protest, whether or not we have an accent, whether or not our families arrived yesterday or almost a century and a half ago to work on the transcontinental railroad.

According to portrayals in pop culture, an Asian face must mean an Asian accent — and often, the accent is for comedic effect in movies and television shows, the shtick of a farcical minor character or maybe the villain, but never, ever the hero, never the one the audience is supposed to identify with and get behind.

The 1984 teen movie “Sixteen Candles” scarred a generation of us who cringed whenever the buffoonish, barely intelligible character Long Duk Dong appeared onscreen. It was alienating. We didn’t want to be associated with him, and yet there was so little representation of Asians otherwise in the media.

David Henry Hwang’s brilliant “Soft Power” — which just opened at the Curran theater in San Francisco — subverts that paradigm. In the musical portion of the show, the Chinese hero, a film producer, speaks in unaccented English, while the Asian American ensemble wears “whiteface” — blond wigs and the accents of Mafia gangsters or country hicks. The film producer takes charge of his fate, romances presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and saves the day, playing a leading man instead of serving in a bit part.

Qui Nguyen’s poignant and hilarious “Vietgone” — which had a run this spring at ACT’s Strand — used a similar technique, to great success. The actors, in their roles as Vietnamese refugees, spoke perfect English, while the U.S. soldiers spouted a word jumble of American stereotypes. “Yee-haw! Get ’er done! Cheeseburger, waffle fries, cholesterol!”

I attended the play with a group of Asian American friends, and we were howling with laughter at this reversal. It was the equivalent of when people yell, “Ching chong, ching chong” or say “flied lice” to mock how Asian accents sound to them. Jokes aside, the show was tender and deeply moving, its plot inspired by how the playwright’s parents’ fell in love.

Contrast these well-developed Asian characters to ones in Wes Anderson’s most recent movie, “Isle of Dogs,” which is set in his version of Japan. The stop-motion puppet dogs speak clear, unaccented English. Meanwhile, the humans of the beleaguered Megasaki City speak in Japanese, but without subtitles. Viewers who don’t understand Japanese are supposed to guess what’s happening based on context, the facial expressions and an occasional interpreter.

“You can understand why a writer as distinctive as Anderson wouldn’t want his droll way with the English language to get lost in translation,” writes movie critic Justin Chang. “But all these coy linguistic layers amount to their own form of marginalization, effectively reducing the hapless, unsuspecting people of Megasaki to foreigners in their own city.”

Some might dismiss these concerns — aren’t movies all made up, anyway?

But if it’s just make-believe, if there are no real-world consequences, then why was there such vehemence against the Vietnamese American actress Kelly Marie Tran, who played a hero, Rose Tico, in “The Last Jedi”?

In the movie, she spoke English without an accent. When it came out last winter, I felt inspired and hopeful, because it seemed like another step toward broadening the range of roles available to Asian Americans. Now, racial and sexual harassment have driven Tran off Instagram. The haters can’t imagine anything but white male heroes (even if they were fine with non-humanoids Chewbacca, Yoda and R2D2).

That’s why I’m excited for the movie “Crazy Rich Asians,” which is coming out in August, with its star-studded international cast of Asian and Asian American actors, some who speak English with an accent and others who do not. No community is a monolith, even if you share the same ancestral culture and ethnicity. If the movie is anything like Kevin Kwan’s novel on which it’s based, it will be a frothy, glitzy rom-com — one of many stories out there that deserve to be told.

Vanessa Hua is a Bay Area author. Her columns appear Fridays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com