Cho Change: After Columbus
After Columbus, Cho continued to embark on projects by and for Asian Americans, seeming more hungry than ever to get Asian faces and stories on-screen. Searching premiered in 2018 with director Aneesh Chaganty to rave reviews, a noticeable haul at the box office, and a title as the first Hollywood thriller starring an Asian American. Speaking at the Asian American International Film Festival, Cho stated that he knows and sees the film and his achievement as a 'big deal', specifically noting how rare it is loving Asian American family onscreen.
Aside from acting in Searching, Cho produced Tigertail (dir. Alan Yang, 2020). Cho was a high-profile name attached to the project since its first reporting by The Hollywood Reporter in 2018. Director Yang explains Cho’s presence with Alex E. Jung of Vulture:
"He’s an executive producer in the movie. The movie would not have been the same without his energy and force behind it, so I’m incredibly grateful to everything John gave to the movie."
Yang touches upon a couple key features of Cho's involvement. First, an acknowledgement of his continuing star power and industrial presence. Yang clearly recognizes that Cho's 'energy and force' helped bring the project to fruition. Yang sees his executive producing role as a way to connect to the larger Asian American community, perhaps a sign that Cho engages with Asian American media creators more often, and in more meaningful ways, than he is willing to let on.
Through this partial star study, we may be able to identify Cho as a symbol of ultimate ambivalence within Asian American film and politics. Continually recognizing the contradiction between his mainstream popularity and lack of career choices, he fights for Asian American rights and visibility insofar as his career dictates. His most popular roles largely defer politics in favor of spectacle, in either stoner comedy, sci-fi action films, or thrillers. As witnessed through his NPR interviews, Cho acknowledges that people see him as a leader in the community, a role he largely feels reluctant to take on or actively dismisses, in favor of searching for artistic expression. However, he continually creates contradictions between these messages: finding importance in representation (especially with regards to Searching and Better Luck Tomorrow), yet these representations largely work on visibility alone, with a distinct gap in explicit political measures, efforts, or identities. For example, could we say Columbus has a politics beyond its aesthetic? It's hard to say. In the NPR interviews, is Cho ever allowed to wade beyond the affairs of Asian American media - even speaking about real-life Asian American politics?
Epilogue: COVID-19 Essay and interview on Asian Enough
As an epilogue of sorts, Cho published an article with the Los Angeles Times in April 2020, shortly after the widespread exposure and politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. As a result, xenophobic - specifically sinophobic, anti-Chinese - sentiment, Asian Americans across the country were being harassed, attacked, and viewed as a threat to public health and safety. Unfortunately, at the time of writing (March 2021), these attacks have only become more vicious and more frequent.
Cho's essay denounces racism and these attacks but goes a step further to identify how anti-Asian rhetoric originates in America. In summation, he provides personal anecdotes to illustrate how fine the line is between Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner, and that both of these stereotypes originate from an existence in America that is predicated on contribution and capital value and an understanding that citizenship is conditional, as long as Asians 'stay good'.
Tellingly, Cho writes the following sentence, after describing his early successes in acting: "In some ways, I began to lead a life devoid of race. But I’ve learned that a moment always comes along to remind you that your race defines you above all else." Not even a month earlier, Cho describes in the LA Times podcast "Asian Enough" that "I don't consider myself Asian first... First, male. Then husband, father, son. Artist. Seventh or eighth is Asian, probably." These contradictions surround Cho in his star persona and in his interviews, but are not meant as hypocrisies, but rather, as an illustration of how complicated and nefarious the waters are for an Asian American star.
Importantly, Cho's comment in "Asian Enough" centers his masculinity, while the rest of the interview is largely focused on his relationship with his father (his mother not having any mention at all in the hour-long podcast). Cho and his father are not estranged, but clearly distanced based off of their lives as immigrants and for Cho being raised in America. These challenges further conflate masculinity, ethnicization, and transnationality into vectors of difference not only in society, but also intra-family.
