Accented Performance
As transnational actors, bodies, and people, Cho and Yeun face certain challenges when actually performing their roles, challenges that gestures towards issues of authenticity. In this discussion, I want to focus on one specific way authenticity issues arise: with the performance of accents when the actor does not have an accent.
Steven Yeun and John Cho have made a name, and a rebellious spirit, for themselves by never having taken on an accented role. Whereas many actors say that accepting roles that require a fake accent are a necessary evil on their way to becoming a successful actor and better Asian American ally, Yeun and Cho have been steadfast from even before they were famous.
Speaking with the Washington Post, Cho singles out his experience with Big Fat Liar (dir. Shawn Levy, 2002), which premiered two years before his breakout role in Harold & Kumar, when he was requested to perform an accent. Cho's role was a Hong Kong movie director, who originally had a Chinese accent (pictured in the banner). With the Washington Post, Cho said:
“I don’t want to do this role in a kid’s comedy, with an accent, because I don’t want young people laughing at an accent inadvertently. But the director was willing to work with me to develop the character, a Hong Kong movie director. I bumped into [director Shawn Levy] recently, and for him he says it was his first feature, and it was really awesome from HIS perspective that it was a good reminder that actors need to feel invested and the importance of collaboration, but for ME it was important that someone understood where I was coming from politically as far as representation of Asian-Americans.”
Yeun also has a similar story, being requested to audition for a project called “Awesome 80s Prom” with an accent. This audition also happened before his breakthrough in The Walking Dead. In a podcast interview with Variety, he recalls:
“I knew that I didn’t want to do [the accent]. The [casting] system had no clue that’s not what I wanted. We were just in a different time. And so I remember I did a shitty accent and phoned it, and they still wanted me anyway because that’s how far and few between Asian actors were. So they call, and they said, “We’d like to hire you.” And I said, “No.” And they got really mad. And I was like, “Oh, that’s not a good first step in this business. I pissed somebody off.”
Yeun and Cho established early on in their careers that they will either outright reject roles that require them to inhabit a space of accented performance for no character-based reason and perhaps also, especially in Cho’s case, work with the director or producers to create a character that feels more authentic to both the film itself and the actor. Yeun's commitment to accent-less performance has become more complicated now, after his role as the Korean-speaking father in Minari. Despite performing an accent, the overwhelming majority of Yeun's dialogue is in Korean, where his character is still able to express depth and complexity and not shown as stupid or infantile by performing broken English.
One Counter-Argument: Paul Sun-hyung Lee in Kim's Convenience
Scholar Nancy Wang Yuen finds that “[actors of color can] disrupt age-old stereotypes by inventing new and unexpected accents and altering grammar or content. By altering stereotyped speech, actors of color challenge Hollywood’s racist portrayals” (113). But then, can a performance be challenging Hollywood if it's performed within Hollywood or otherwise mainstream outlet? Paul Sun-hyung Lee, who plays Appa on CBC's Kim's Convenience, is a potential case study. In fact, his performance is what led me to seriously question the role of accents in Asian American performance. Until seeing the actor in an interview, I assumed the accent was true to the actor as well. However, upon learning he has a standard Canadian English accent, I felt betrayed. But I further felt confused by this feeling of betrayal, since if it is truly just acting, why would I expect any claim of authenticity from the actor?
Lee spoke with MacLean Online about criticisms of his accent. He does say that his Appa voice and accent is based on his own father’s. “I use my dad’s accent - that’s my dad’s voice that I use on stage.” However he then notes that due to the nature of being in a comedy, narrative scenarios will arise that mine humor out of mistranslation and misinterpretation. But he also finds that these humorous scenarios are not what define the Appa character:
“The accent isn’t the joke… Appa is not just a voice. He’s not a stereotype. A stereotype is the end of a character. Appa is an archetype—they take his mould, they use that as a basis, and they build that up into a three-dimensional character. You have his hopes, his fears, his foibles and his strengths, and that’s what I love about him. He’s a character… The accent isn’t about a joke, it’s part of who that character is, but it doesn’t make it intrinsically racist. If you’re uncomfortable with that baggage, then you need to examine it yourself and see where it comes from.”
I find Lee’s assessment very revealing in that he completely views Appa as a full character that is expanded not beyond his accent, but with his accent. When he asks viewers to ‘examine the baggage,’ Lee effectively moves the area of criticism from textual representation to audience reception. To me, I find this defense reductive, essentially boiling down to a simple "Well, if you don't like it, don't watch it."
Disidentification and Misrecognition
While much of the prior discussion - including Yeun and Cho's refusals to do accents and Lee's acceptance and enthusiasm about his exaggerated accent - comes from either authenticity to the actor or authenticity to their community, I believe we can start to think about accents within the same frameworks as disidentification/intentional misrecognition. If we can temporarily disregard issues of authenticity and use performance to make our audience interrogate the social constructions that influence the performance instead of just the actor-character, accented performance (and even cross-ethnic performance) can become a powerful tool used by Asian American actors.
José Esteban Muñoz discussed the strategy of disidentification in his piece on Vaginal Davis a drag artist who performs in whiteface and disguises her Black, liberal ideology with white supremacist values in performance. Muñoz describes disidentification as a "performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpolating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social, a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification" (83). Disidentification very consciously crosses the boundaries of authentic, or even acceptable, performance. Disidentification also reveals the inherent construction of social bodies and psychologies that are both mythified and often contradictory.
Although Muñoz describes Davis' disidenticatory practices within the realms of Black, queer radical activism, I believe we can use similar strategies to interrogate non-Asian American audiences' acceptance and even preference (or ignorance of) cross-ethnic performance and accented performance. Clearly, the first step to this strategy being in more widespread use is the power to control one's expression within clearly delimited racial lines. For example, Cho rejects an accent when asked by Shawn Levy (a white man), but Yeun accepts a non-characterized accent when being directed by Lee Isaac-chung (a Korean man). Minari is a serious film, and not necessarily the perfect material to hold disidentification, but Asian American Cinema (if it still even exists) can start to become more consciously comedic and political in order to employ these practices. The vast majority of actors who refuse accents want to normalize the American accent embodied in an Asian American subject. While this is a valiant way to resist xenophobic rhetoric and Perpetual Foreigner stereotyping, it still refuses to actively challenge white audiences' default assumption that Asian American will have a thick accent.
Discussion
Now, I want to throw it all back to you. What do you readers think of these issues? Do you care whether or not an actor performs their authentic accent or their specific, percentage-based ethnicity? Please tweet and use the #AsAmFilmThoughts.
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