In late 2014, a group called Students for Fair Admissions representing several anonymous Asian American student plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, arguing that its admission policy discriminated against Asian American applicants. At first glance, this was a worthy cause: the lawsuit revealed, for example, that Asian students routinely received lower “personal scores” in the Harvard admissions process, a fact that many argued reflected racial bias.

But underneath the surface, the lawsuit harboured much more nefarious intentions. Students for Fair Admissions, though it represented Asian Americans, was founded by a white conservative lawyer named Edward Blum, whose work has focused monomanically on reversing civil rights-era policies - one of his cases led to the repeal of part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Harvard lawsuit didn’t just advocate for Asians: it specifically argued against the use of race-based affirmative action, effectively pitting Asians against the Black and Latine applicants who have seen student numbers improve because of such policies.

The lawsuit against Harvard revealed an ugly underbelly to a comforting mainstream narrative of Asian American upward mobility. The eagerness of some Asian Americans to align themselves with a perverse right-wing agenda alarmed those who might have, whether rightly or wrongly, assumed that Asians would naturally align themselves with a broader left-liberal anti-racist consensus.

Indeed, the biggest political fracture revealed by the case was between left and right-wing factions within “Asian America” itself, that vaguest of identity labels which cobbles together people across a gapingly vast geographic and socioeconomic range. What, if anything, do these people have in common? At the same time, it was hard for many Asian Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, to reconcile the promise of immigrant optimism with the sting of rejection from one of the country’s most prestigious institutions. Even if you publicly hoped Harvard would win, you might privately be thinking: “why don’t they want us?”

I thought often of the Harvard lawsuit as I rewatched Better Luck Tomorrow, perhaps the definitive portrait of pre-university Asian American angst, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Set largely in an Orange County state school, the first few minutes of the film show its teenage protagonists debating whether or not to try for early admission, obsessively memorising answers to SAT questions, and building a vast library of extracurriculars to help with their application.

The toxic twin impulses of ambition and resentment swirl in these characters’ minds. They are smart enough to be Ivy League contenders, yet they know they still might not get in. They have enough savvy and awareness to try and be cool, yet they know they’re not. And even if they wanted to forget that they were Asian, the world won’t let them. Ben, a wannabe basketball jock, has made it into the school team but is largely consigned to warming the bench during matches. Yet he’s happy with the modicum of social status this affords him, until he’s made the subject of an activist cause celebre within the school, which claims his exclusion from games is racially-motivated. The campaign gets him minutes on the floor, but it also leads the white kids in school to mock him as the “Chinese Jordan”. He quits the team.

This is not a film of immigrant optimism, then, but of immigrant ambivalence. Ben and his friends are not interested in being the poster child for diversity or solidarity. In fact, their dialogue is brazenly offensive and puerile, littered with racist and homophobic slurs. They objectify and leer at female classmates. They consider the activist kids buffoons. They are out for themselves and only themselves.

Yet despite their success in and out of the classroom, they are deeply unsatisfied. Their academic achievements have become rote, monotonous. It’s not enough to be the smartest kids in school. They want power. They want to be feared. This sordid hunger launches a spiral of petty criminality that begins with a cheat sheet ring, and leads to robbery, drug dealing and - eventually - a murder.

This portrait of Asian American youth culture is troubled, even repulsive. Yet its endurance is because of this unease, not in spite of it. It’s almost impossible to recount the production of Better Luck Tomorrow without relating an anecdote about its infamous Sundance screening, where an incensed audience member stood up during the Q&A and asked why they would “make a film so empty and amoral for Asian Americans?”

Roger Ebert, the film’s unlikely champion, retorted that no-one would make such a comment about a white filmmaker, and that Asian American characters should not have to “represent ‘their people’”. In other words, Better Luck Tomorrow resonated because it bucked the feel-good logic of representation politics. It might be reassuring to see your community celebrated on-screen, but it’s much more visceral and haunting to have a mirror held up to your community’s darker side.

That willingness to sit with discomfort - to not have to see yourselves as the good guys - seems all the more unique in a time when Asian American media has become mainstream, yet unlikeable or morally ambiguous Asian American characters are vanishingly rare. It’s largely been taken as a sign of positive progress to see Asians as superheroes, as romantic leads, as awards-winning, tearjerking dramatic performers, in the face of a long, ignoble history of stereotypes and yellowface in Hollywood. The recent rise of Asians in American film, music and literature might be best encapsulated in Sandra Oh’s Emmys mantra that “it’s an honour just to be Asian.”

Perhaps ironically, nowhere is this rise to respectability more evident than the careers of John Cho and Justin Lin, who starred and directed in Better Luck Tomorrow respectively. Lin has cemented himself as a box office staple, with his role at the helm of the Fast & Furious franchise making him one of the world’s highest-grossing filmmakers. And his success as a director might only be matched by Cho’s success as an actor, achieving an almost totemic status as the promised ideal of the Asian American leading man. In protest to whitewashing of Asian roles in American film, the hashtag #StarringJohnCho went viral in 2016, with the actor Photoshopped into blockbuster roles like James Bond typically played by white actors.

Yet there’s a contradiction here, as the scholar Jun Okada points out: “What does an Asian American James Bond or Captain America accomplish, other than recruit Asian Americans into a toxic heterosexual masculinity in order to make up for their historical emasculation?” In ingratiating themselves into the hegemonic apparatus of mainstream Hollywood cinema, Asian Americans - though they might achieve commercial recognition - also sacrifice a part of that rebellious, in-your-face spirit which made a film like Better Luck Tomorrow so thrilling.

Away from the glamour of the red carpet, what does Asian American life actually look like on the ground? The concerns of Asians in Hollywood couldn’t be further from the concerns of the majority of Asian Americans, many of whom are undocumented or struggling with immigration authorities, many of whom are dealing with basic, day-to-day issues of healthcare or cost-of-living which a superhero film will do nothing to fix. Asians have seen the largest widening of income inequality of any racial demographic in America. These stories rarely make it to the screen.

On this theme, Better Luck Tomorrow’s candour is again refreshing. Lin makes no equivocations about the fact that his characters are entitled Orange County brats. The very first shot is of a gated community, a bleak symbol of wealth and segregation. Their malaise is not that of the struggling, striving first-generation immigrants. It is the kind of solipsistic boredom that sets in when you’ve been handed a silver platter and it’s still not enough. As John Cho’s character says, “when you’ve got everything you want, what’s left?”

Lin’s sardonic acknowledgement of the emptiness of middle-class alienation might seem on the nose, but it offers a necessary rebuke to a simplistic narrative of Asian American unity which has proliferated alongside the aforementioned Hollywood success stories. The plaintiffs in the Harvard lawsuit claimed to advocate on behalf of all Asian Americans, yet a large proportion of the Asians who actually make it into elite universities come from wealthy backgrounds or private school educations. Who speaks for the rest of us?

One answer to that question might lie in the kind of cinema that existed before Better Luck Tomorrow bridged the gap between the underground and mainstream worlds of Asian American filmmaking. The story of Better Luck Tomorrow’s production - with its tales of young rising stars, sneering Hollywood executives and a surprise favour from MC Hammer - has enough scrappy underdog drama that you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a first feature. But though Justin Lin was just 30 years old when the film premiered at Sundance, he began his career with a less well-remembered film, Shopping for Fangs, which he made five years prior with co-director Quentin Lee.

Shopping for Fangs has many early glimmers of the irreverent, renegade spirit that energises Better Luck Tomorrow. Both films feature almost entirely Asian American casts playing a range of disarming and unconventional roles. Both films present an initial surface of all-American humdrum suburbia that belies an undercurrent of violence and frenetic sexuality. And both feature early performances by John Cho - Shopping for Fangs was actually his first film role.

But Shopping for Fangs also belonged to an older tradition of Asian American cinema, often led by queer and female filmmakers who took inspiration from the transgressive work of directors like John Waters. The bombastic satire of Jon Moritsugu’s punk rock opus Terminal USA, for example, makes Better Luck Tomorrow’s gentle skewering of middle class Asians look like a drop in the ocean. Over the course of a short hour, the life of a seemingly idyllic Japanese American nuclear family descends into a hedonistic grotesquerie replete with scenes of drug-taking, eye-gouging and alien abduction. Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill, meanwhile, offers a plotless cyberscape of techno-capitalist paranoia, where a series of menacing TV adverts featuring domineering businessmen seems to be connected to a polluted water supply which poisons a local fishery.

Such films never had mainstream appeal. But their anarchic, experimental style captured a way of envisioning Asian American life on screen that allowed for its many contradictions to be examined and understood, rather than brushed under the carpet. In one sense they capture the scholar Susette Min’s concept of the “unnameable” in Asian American art, where - by resisting definition or regulation within a singular identity - the artwork is able to enact a “refusal of neoliberal multiculturalism” and instead instigate real political change.

Perhaps Better Luck Tomorrow’s endurance as a critical portrait of Asian America is partly due to its ability to modulate between these registers of confrontational underground experimentalism and mainstream genre filmmaking. When I first saw Better Luck Tomorrow a number of years ago, I found it disarmingly simple. How had a teen coming-of-age film, with its materialistic motifs and myopic worldview, achieved its status as a culturally representative classic?

But as I’ve revisited the film, I’ve increasingly felt that its sleek, gangster film-inspired style is precisely part of the queasy bait-and-switch it plays with its audience. Especially if you are part of the Asian diaspora, part of you does want to relate to their academic neuroses. Part of you does start to be convinced by the veneer of cool. But then the film complicates this identification, it shows you the depths these characters are willing to stoop to. It might be an honour to be Asian, but Better Luck Tomorrow reminds us to look the dishonour in the face too, and asks in what ways we might all be complicit.

The Endurance of Better Luck Tomorrow's

Legacy of Asian Representation

by Ian Wang

Illustration by Ellen Li

As part of celebrating Better Luck Tomorrow, MilkTea commissioned film journalist, Ian Wang to meditate on what Better Luck Tomorrow means to today’s audiences. We also commissioned artist, Ellen Li to create a new illustration to commemorate it’s 20th anniversary.

Ian Wang is a writer and critic living in London. His work has been published in the Baffler, the New York Times, Sight & Sound, Tribune, Dazed, the Quietus, Little White Lies, Huck, Jacobin, Hyperallergic, It’s Nice That, Bright Wall/Dark Room and others.

https://ianwang.co.uk/