John Cho Battles the Model Minority: Better Luck Tomorrow and How I Met Your Mother
Introduction
John Cho. Born 1972 in Seoul, grew up in California and Texas, and now is a Hollywood mainstay and - perhaps - Asian America's most famous actor. His nearly three-decade duration in Hollywood has granted him multiple franchise roles. Audiences may know him best as Harold from the three Harold and Kumar films, Sulu in the 2009-2016 Star Trek films, on television in his starring roles in Selfie (ABC, 2014) or FlashForward (ABC, 2009-2010), or his new dramatic fare like Searching (2018) or Columbus (2017).
Cho's first film was Shopping for Fangs (1997), directed by Justin Lin. With an all-Asian American cast and crew, this film made an impact in Asian American film circles, providing indie exposure to Asian Americans, and provided both Cho and Lin with an impressive debut. Cho later went on to portray MILF Guy in the first American Pie film, where his use of the term MILF popularized the phrase in America.
The Coolest Asian You've Ever Seen: Better Luck Tomorrow & How I Met Your Mother
2002's Better Luck Tomorrow (dir. Justin Lin) found Cho in his breakout role as Steve, the main rival to the main character, Ben. Steve is cool. And he's rich. Very rich. Steve has a girlfriend (who Ben wants to date). He rides a motorcycle, smokes like it’s his job, has prestige internship hookups, and easily schmoozes his way into the Ivy League. Steve goes from Ben's rival to customer, buying Ben's cocaine. Sharing a similar fate to Steven Yeun's character on The Walking Dead, Steve ultimately gets his head bashed in with a hammer by Ben.
Cho also starred in a guest role capacity in an episode of How I Met Your Mother, Season 3 Episode 6: "I'm Not That Guy." Cho portrays Jefferson Coatsworth, a shrewd and immoral lawyer trying to persuade Marshall, an ethical and humble attorney, to work for his firm. Cho was so many things at once I had never seen before in an Asian American character: smart, witty, charismatic, handsome. He had taste, he knew how to schmooze. A far cry away from the martial arts Asian figures and sleazy Asian businessmen that dominated the action films I watched as a kid. Coatsworth and Steve (Cho's character from Better Luck Tomorrow) share many characteristics but Cho's appearance in How I Met Your Mother adds the total douchebaggery and swagger that can only come after a few years on the red carpet.
Battling the Model Minority
- Reference the STEREOTYPES page for more information on the Model Minority
Coatsworth tackles the Model Minority by not only being a shrewd and incalculably cruel businessman, but also in being depicted as nearly hypersexualized. In the episode, Coatsworth 'wines-and-dines' Marshall in order to invite him to his firm. By simulating the heterosexual format of the one-night stand in a homosocial context, Coatsworth eschews traditional white heterosexuality for a non-romantic, but still implicitly sexual, relationship with Marshall. Yen Ling Shek summarizes this paradox neatly: “Racist images collapsed gender and sexuality so that Asian American men appeared to be both hypermasculine and effeminate” (380). But in any case, Cho and his How I Met Your Mother performance should not be classified as precisely good or bad, but part of a series of images that create patterns, expectations, and points-of-departure for past and future Asian American representations.
Similarly, Better Luck Tomorrow provided a blueprint and foundation for Asian American films in the new millennium, with regard to intersections of masculinity and transnationality. Jun Okada summarizes both in a single point: "Better Luck Tomorrow’s appeal lies precisely in the mimicry of a hypermasculine Hong Kong action cinema, which blurs the lines between Asian genre cinema and the identity politics of Asian American media" (118). She expands, describing that director Justin Lin apes the aesthetic of Hong Kong action films (popular in the early 2000s) in order to ride the wave of a rising global cinephelia. This action aesthetic prioritizes hypermasculinity as expressed through heterosexual desire and cartoonish violence. Margaret Hillebrand expands on this masculinist identity, noting that the film refuses to create a distinctly Asian American masculinity - preferring to mimic or parody Hong Kong action heroes or Italian American gangster films - precisely because these are the dominant notions of masculinity that are already accessible to Asians in America. She notes that "by slotting Asian American men into these well-worn cinematic models of masculinity, the film gestures powerfully to the absence of any established paradigms that they can call their own. Asian American men have to beg, borrow, and steal a presence on screen because the cultural hegemony continues to deny them more legitimate access" (64). Lin's film, and Cho's character specifically, challenges the Model Minority stereotype, perhaps the most obtrusive and pervasive mode of masculinity and exposure at all for Asian American men. Better Luck Tomorrow's retrospective response seems to be one of ambivalence, popularizing Asian American Cinema in the mainstream but also sacrificing and simply mimicking White Hollywood or the transnational aesthetic, rather than curating an identity of its own.
Either way, the film truly propelled John Cho to fame. In his words, he says "people responded to the visual of look at all these Asian faces. It felt powerful... My lasting impression of the film is that it mattered. In some ways, it’s harder to make a film that matters than it is to make a good film. Better Luck Tomorrow mattered." And it's this essence of mattering in some ways. The leading questions that drive the rest of my analysis of Cho as a star - and the surrounding interviews and paratexts - is seeing how much of an active participant he becomes, in terms of representing Asian American politics and furthering the community's interests and how he must balance acting as a career and artistic choice as well as a political message.
Cho was one of the only contemporary Asian American masculine figures that reappeared with any regularity in media. He traversed genres, from stoner comedy to sitcom to scifi, a challenge that other popular Korean American actors, such as Sung Kang or Daniel Henney, were never able to overcome in Hollywood. Unlike Steven Yeun, John Cho has not been an emphatic part of my Korean American consciousness - which is why it is so important to understand his career. Cho in many ways seems passive, almost colorblind about the industry and his own role choices. And it is in these limitations that we can see how the media chooses to use him as a racialized figure anyways.
This page has paths:
- Envisioning Korean American Identity: Redux Jackson Wright
- Portals, Pathways, and Project Proposal Jackson Wright
