All stereotypes reduce.

Yellow Peril

In other words: It is only when we are hidden that we are allowed to succeed. Which leads to a more troubling but inevitable conclusion: that there is something about the very physiognomy of the Asian face that American audiences still cannot or will not accept.

A recent study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism showed Asian-Americans representing only 1 percent of all leading roles in Hollywood (the 2017 United States Census Bureau reported that there are 18 million Americans of Asian descent, or roughly 6 percent of the population). Only one actor of Asian heritage has ever won an Academy Award for best actor: Ben Kingsley, whose father was Indian, in 1983 for playing Gandhi (Kingsley has been nominated in three other instances). Twelve actors of Asian descent have ever received nominations from the academy — all largely for supporting roles, with the exception of Merle Oberon, who was half British and half Sri Lankan, in 1936. The others include the Japanese-American actor Pat Morita; the Cambodian actor Haing S. Ngor; the Japanese actors Mako Iwamatsu, Ken Watanabe, Rinko Kikuchi and Sessue Hayakawa; the Chinese-American actresses and sisters Jennifer and Meg Tilly; the Filipino-American actress Hailee Steinfeld; and the British-Indian actor Dev Patel. This year, Sandra Oh made history as the first woman of Asian descent to be nominated for an Emmy for the lead in a dramatic series, as Eve Polastri in “Killing Eve.” And earlier this year, the Indian-American actor Aziz Ansari was awarded best actor for a TV comedy by the Golden Globes, the first actor of Asian descent to do so. When “Saturday Night Live” announced that the actor Awkwafina would host the show this past October, it was noted that the last woman of Asian descent to host was Lucy Liu in 2000, 18 years ago. The New York Times recently reported that in the search for the male lead in “Crazy Rich Asians,” one of the movie’s producers was told by several prominent American theater schools that they hadn’t had a male Asian graduate in years. A study by multiple universities reported that, over a one-year period, of the 242 scripted shows on broadcast, cable and streaming TV, just one-third had a series regular who was Asian-American or Pacific Islander. These are shows, mind you, set in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, which all have significant Asian-American and Pacific Islander populations (33 percent, 12 percent and 24 percent, respectively). And another report by the U.S.C. Annenberg Inclusion Initiative stated that of the top 100 films of last year, 37 didn’t include a single Asian character with a speaking role

A recent study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism showed Asian-Americans representing only 1 percent of all leading roles in Hollywood (the 2017 United States Census Bureau reported that there are 18 million Americans of Asian descent, or roughly 6 percent of the population). O

tokenism

Maybe in Keanu Reeves or Olivia Munn,

Then there was Sandra Oh, a Korean-Canadian, as the enraged Stephanie in 2004’s “Sideways,”

The first was George Takei, a Japanese-American, as the steadfast and levelheaded “Star Trek” officer Hikaru Sulu.

I, too, am half Chinese