American pop culture has no language to deal with Chinese American identity issues

Vox's review of Shang-Chi is so awkward. Racial issues have been defined by White-v-Black for so long, pop culture just continues to fumble when faced with the awkward Not-White-Not-Black but definitely racial issues.

This sentence really encapsulates everything wrong with non-Chinese American understanding of the Chinese American culture:

Cretton’s movie also embraces Chinese American culture in its meticulous fight scenes.

Right. Where do I begin?

One of the stereotypes of Chinese Americans is "I know kungfu". And yet here, the Vox writer is desperately trying portray this as a positive. It's basically the equivalent of saying someone has embraced Mexican culture because they made an authentic taco or embraced Brazilian culture because they learned Samba. It's such a shallow understanding I'm kind of...baffled that this sentence even got past the cultural sensitivity check.

I mean, I get it, even something as shallow as getting the martial arts stuff right is nonexistent in American movies and it is one of China's biggest cultural exports, thanks to the likes of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, but...uh, Chinese Americans are descendant from all parts of China, not just the Guangdong (aka Canton) Province. Much like Hollywood doesn't represent the USA, neither does Hong Kong wuxia movies represent all of China. Equating respect for the wuxia genre as respect for the Chinese American culture is just plain...well, offensive.

Not to mention the Chinese American experience is not a monolith: there's the first generation immigrants, second generation immigrants, immigrants who came before the Chinese Exclusion Act and those who came after, those who came before '49 (PRC established) and those who came after, those who came before 6/4 (aka Tiananmen) Incident (another huge ideological shift in potential sources of Chinese immigrants) and those who came after, and all of these experiences are very different due to their differing social, political, and economical strata. So a movie that tries to explore the Chinese American experience would at the very least acknowledge these differences. Descendants of immigrants who left China to flee the CCP are different from those who left China under Manchu Qing rule which is still different from those who left China due to human trafficking. These encapsulate very different political ideologies and cultural identities. And yet American pop culture keeps lumping them into the same category.

(Aside: I imagine the Latinx community suffers the same kind of frustration, as an immigrant from Mexico and one from El Salvador and a native of Puerto Rico will have very different feelings about what constitutes as their culture. Or maybe I'm projecting.)

Anyway, where was I?

Oh. Right. Trying to make Shang-Chi sound not problematic. Ugh.

Look, when MCU decided to make Black Panther, they wisely decided the cast, crew, and especially writers and directors should probably, maybe, be of African descent. Both Ryan Coolger and Joe Robert Cole are black. I'm not saying they encompass all of African American experience, but they at least have a more nuanced view and a lived experience that helps them avoid fucking the story up.

Meanwhile, Shang-Chi has Dave Callaham, Destin Daniel Cretton, Andrew Lanham as screenwriters. Ah, yes, now that's a wide sampling of the Chinese American voices. 🙄 I'm sure all these non-Chinese Americans can truly capture the Chinese American experience.

I'm not against White people trying to understand a non-White culture. But Shang-Chi? This ain't it.