As a youngster growing up in Montego Bay, Jamaica, I was a thin, spindly child with an overly large head. But I was feared by the bullies in my school.

Mainly because the most popular show on JBC, the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, was Kung Fu starring David Carradine.

Carradine spoke softly, mostly in garbled fortune cookie dialogue, and then would proceed to beat the crap out of anyone who threatened him.

So basically, a white guy playing a Chinese martial arts expert saved my life.

Lack of diversity in Hollywood isn’t a new thing. A University of Southern California study of film and television last year showed that all minorities were grossly underrepresented. But Asians fell well behind other people of colour, including Blacks and Latinos.

Still, I was grateful for all that whitewashing by Warner Bros., even though the role was allegedly stolen from Bruce Lee who first pitched the idea for himself. (And how awesome would that show have been?) But it saved my nerdy bookworm self from a thrashing. It was perhaps the first time I realized the power of Hollywood to shape narrative. My narrative.

So decades later, along comes Crazy Rich Asians. The movie, which opened Wednesday, is being hailed as a watershed mark in cinema. Finally, the first big movie in decades to have an all-Asian cast and director who are breaking barriers and shaping our own stories. It has a stellar 92 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Could this be our Black Panther moment? If only.

Crazy Rich Asians doesn’t blow away stereotypes. It reinforces them. There is little room for subtlety here — the title underlines the mission statement. Asians are rich, vulgar and clueless.

Read more:

Review: Crazy Rich Asians is worth the splurge

Groundbreaking Crazy Rich Asians instils hope among Asian-Americans

The wild ascent of Crazy Rich Asians star Henry Golding

The movie is adapted from the book of the same name, the first instalment of Singapore author Kevin Kwan’s trilogy, and like the movie, it’s a Holt Renfrew catalog thinly disguised as a rom-com. It slavishly name drops every designer brand imaginable. It is the literary equivalent of the guy who shows up to your barbecue with a Gucci-logo shirt and gold Prada pants.

Rachel Chu (played onscreen by Constance Wu from Fresh off the Boat) is an economics professor who travels to Singapore as a wedding date. Only then does the naïve Chu, straight out of a Jane Austen novel, realize her long-term boyfriend is “crazy rich.”

Director Jon M. Chu tries to humanize the characters, including having them eat at a hawker stall upon arrival in Singapore — though it’s a Michelin-starred hawker stall. But the movie misses a chance for more pointed satire, and is far more earnest and ultimately less self-aware than the book, which celebrated as much as skewered the ultra-rich.

There has already been racist pushback, including a movie poster in Vancouver being defaced with “stupid chinx” on Wu’s face.

Director Chu responded on Twitter to the image by saying, “Nothing will shake us. Sorry. We still here.”

Vancouver, and to a lesser extent Toronto, has seen anti-Chinese sentiment grow over skyrocketing real estate prices. Recent reports have shown that foreign buyers overall account for less than 5 per cent of the market in either city, but that hasn’t shaken off the belief that one group is largely responsible.

The reality is that while China is expected to eclipse the U.S. in its number of billionaires, Asian immigrants living in Canada from China, South Korea and Taiwan have among the lowest incomes here, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. “Crazy rich” is the exception, not the norm.

The stereotype of Asians stealing jobs or resources isn’t new. It led to turn-of-the-last-century laws prohibiting Chinese from immigrating to Canada and an unprecedented head tax.

What’s telling, though, is how Asians are so starved for representation that we are beyond verklempt for a movie called Crazy Rich Asians. Would the Jewish community, I wonder, run to theatres for a film that supposedly “broke stereotype” and “jumpstarted a new narrative” called Crazy Rich Jews? There would be protests. Studio heads would roll. Parking privileges would be revoked.

Still, being typecast as “rich” is preferable to other clichés. The outsized response is in part to the legacy of characters such as Sixteen Candles caricature Long Duk Dong, which loom large over the way Asians have been represented in film.

There is the loveless “nerd” Asian. The “inscrutable” bad guy Asian. The kung-fu Asian. And the science-loving, number-crunching Asian. Then there are the countless delivery-boy Asians and other bit parts that never quite make a whole in the canon of Hollywood.

There is also, of course, the prevailing leitmotif of the Asian as model minority, perhaps exemplified by Yale law professor Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, stressing the need for hard work and sacrifice for success. Get straight As, play the violin and go to Harvard. Unless, of course, you have to sue Harvard for discrimination because too many Asians are getting in.

And that’s why many are excited to see the movie — the fact that we’re getting any semi-positive representation at all is cause to celebrate. Rich, materialistic Asians? We’ll take it.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

A new generation will have the opportunity to see themselves in leading man Henry Golding (who plays Nick Young) and heroine Wu. It’s a lot to expect, though, that a broad-based rom-com, which traditionally trades in archetypes (the goofy best friend, the straight laced heroine, the handsome leading man, the wicked ex-girlfriend) should provide a deeply contextualized storyline.

To their credit, producers have also tinkered with the book, on the advice of Wu to take out the line where Rachel proudly proclaims she doesn’t date Asian men — a self-hating barb that would have reinforced another sad cliché.

As entertainment, Crazy Rich Asians is a passable time waster. But apart from the historical significance of its all-Asian cast, it is, at heart, a mediocre romantic comedy.

Unfortunately for the creators, it isn’t being judged by the standards of your everyday rom-com. There is a weight of cultural expectation that is entirely unfair.

Why can’t you have a brainless Asian comedy with all the wonderful shallowness and plain bad acting of a Katherine Heigl movie? The mind reels at the thought that in a post-racial world Asians may one day have their own version of Dynasty or Real Housewives and not experience backlash.

Or, as actor Nico Santos told CNN: “We should be allowed to fail. How many chances do white people get? How many crappy movies do they get to make over and over again?”

It’s the burden that PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi or former Avon CEO Andrea Jung must have felt representing visible minorities and women in a mainstream world. Don’t screw up.

The Joy Luck Club, the last major Hollywood film with an Asian cast, will be a quarter century old this September. Wayne Wang’s film about generations of Chinese women was a melodramatic mess. But I loved it because it was the first time that I saw pieces of my family onscreen. This is the movie a generation ago that was supposed to break the diversity problem. It’s a cryptic lesson in how rare it is to get a second chance in Hollywood. It’s also a reminder that we have been here before and it didn’t bode well.

So I ask Nora Lum, also known as the rapper Awkwafina, whether she thinks things will really be different this time. Lum is the unquestionable breakout star of Crazy Rich Asians, playing Wu’s colourful best friend Peik Lin.

“I think this is for real,” says Lum over the phone from her home in New York city. “One thing that’s different is social media and the internet. We have seen so much inadequate casting that the internet is demanding that authentic voices be heard. There is a real demand for these shows. And I think a rising tide will lift all boats. I don’t think Crazy Rich Asians will be the last. I hope there won’t be another 25-year gap. But I really think this time Hollywood is listening.”

She might be right. Along with Crazy Rich Asians, this is already something of a banner year in the industry with Jon Cho finally getting a leading-man role in the upcoming psychological thriller Searching, while Netflix has new teen comedy To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before starring Lana Condor.

In the U.S. there is ABC’s Fresh off the Boat. In Canada, we have a bright new wave of generational talent featured in CBC’s Kim’s Convenience and Omni’s Second Jen starring Amanda Joy and Samantha Wan. And before Crazy Rich Asians, Canadians had the in-your-face Vancouver vulgarity contest Ultra Rich Asian Girls, a YouTube phenomenon that commands a global audience.

Still, Crazy Rich Asians remains an important milestone because its success, as Lum hopes, means that it could lead to other work, showing nuanced, vital portraits of Asians, warts and all, that blow past stereotype.

The movie is already doing some of that. For one thing Asia is not a monolithic culture. It represents the majority of the world’s population. When you say “Asia,” that could include South Asia, which covers India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka. There is Central Asia which includes Kazakhstan. And there is Southeast Asia that could include Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

Crazy Rich Asians, meanwhile, centres specifically on Southeast Asia’s Hokkien-speaking Chinese, which have a distinct culture. Because Chinese society is in itself abundantly diverse. The irony in this exercise is that the ultra-rich Singapore Chinese are, in reality, among the most discreet and down-to-earth. For truly conspicuous consumption you’d have to go to Hong Kong or Mainland China. But that’s a different book.

Still, the crack is opening in Hollywood. And that’s why this frothy film is a mainstream cinema milestone. Get set for a sequel based on Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend. At the very least, the real breakthrough is that an Asian and a male to boot, is the one who ended up writing the best chick-lit movie of the year.

In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for ABC to cast an Asian in a reboot of Kung Fu.

Correction — Aug. 20, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated Kevin Kwan’s age.