Pacific Overtures

By RICHARD CORLISS

The Asians are coming! The Asians have landed! Suddenly China is chic. So are the more familiar Asian totems of American envy and remorse, Japan and Vietnam. The U.S. may dominate pop culture around the world, but at home there is a brisk new breeze -- a wind from the East. In films, fiction and fashion, from Madonna's video to Fendi's new perfume (Asja), the future looms in the rising sun. Go, for a start, to the movies. Or stay away, as Asian-American activists urged audiences to do when Rising Sun hit the screens. The Sean Connery thriller, which opened to yowls of bad publicity about its caustic view of Japan's business intentions in the U.S., has been a decent-size ($55 million) hit anyway. Get thee to an art house, where Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou and other sumptuous dramas directed by Zhang Yimou and starring glorious Gong Li have helped make China a new force in world cinema. Check out Hard Target, as millions of teenage boys already have. The director of this martial-arts pummeler is Hong Kong's John Woo -- the first director from Chinese-language cinema to make a Hollywood picture. With its deft skullcrackery and its breathless chase scenes, Hard Target is The Kung- Fugitive.

Now there are two, three, many Asian-style films. Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet -- an ingratiating comedy-drama about a gay Taiwanese man in New York City who gets married to please his parents -- has grossed $1 million in its first month of specialized release. This week the Toronto Film Festival opens with M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's film of the David Henry Hwang play about a tryst between a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) and a Chinese man (John Lone) whom he believes to be a woman; it opens commercially Oct. 1. This Wednesday, Wayne Wang's lovely The Joy Luck Club, a fourfold Terms of Endearment based on Amy Tan's best-selling novel about a quartet of Chinese-American families, premieres in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. "Maybe Asian is the flavor of the month," Wang says. "That taste keeps changing, but now it has coincided with the maturity of talent." Lee has a simpler explanation for the burgeoning: "Natural law. It looks like a coincidence, but nothing is a coincidence in this world."

And the hits just keep on coming. Farewell My Concubine, which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, brings its gorgeous panorama of Chinese history and sexual hysterics to U.S. screens in early October. Oliver Stone has returned to Southeast Asia to film Heaven and Earth through a Vietnamese and feminine perspective, basing his movie on the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip. And if you can't wait for the December opening of Heaven and Earth for a Vietnamese take on the ravages of war, scout around now for From Hollywood to Hanoi, a singeing documentary journey on film by Tiana Thi Tranh Nga.

The Asian accent may be profound or subtle. In pop music it may stare you in the face (like the tunes and videos of the Asian trio Shonen Knife, who bop around like '60s teens -- Japanese Beatles) or caress the back of your mind. This summer the two queens of pop have imported the style. Janet Jackson's music video If is set in a Chinese nightclub studded with Buddha statues and paper lanterns; Madonna's Rain, which last week won an MTV Music Video Award for its sleek art direction, has the star posing for a Japanese film crew led by singer-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. "I wanted Rain to have a clean, Zenned- out minimalism," says director Mark Romanek. "And I love Japanese fashion, especially Rei Kawakubo, who designs Comme des Garcons' clothes."

In Rain Madonna wears the Maoists' stark variation on Chanel's little black dress. She could be in the style vanguard again: last week Women's Wear Daily announced that "designers are pulling out the fine China this season." Couture connoisseurs agree. "The Orient-inspired look might be the important silhouette for the '90s," says Kal Ruttenstein, senior vice president for fashion direction at Bloomingdale's. "We expect to see it in full force in the spring collections: Oriental shapes like Mao jackets and mandarin-collared dresses luxurious fabrics like Jacquard silks and lightweight brocades."

In bookstores the fiction shelves are bursting with works by Asians and Asian Americans. Tan, with The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, has been joined by Cynthia Kadohata (The Floating World), Fae Myenne Ng (Bone), David Wong Louie (Pangs of Love), Gus Lee (China Boy) and Gish Jen (Typical American). Tan sees home-and-office reasons for the popularity of these artists and fashions. "People now more than ever are likely to know a person or a co-worker who is Asian American," she says. "They've had experiences beyond eating chop suey -- which isn't even a Chinese dish -- and probably know the differences in Szechuan, Hunan and Cantonese food. People have an interest in Asian culture but also in their own immigrant past. We're at a time when family has become more important to people." Tan wants all this newfound interest to spread beyond exotic chinoiserie: to show, on the screen, "Asian Americans who are not emperors, not martial artists, not servants in rich houses."

Can Western views of East Asia be dragged out of the mythic and into the everyday? That is a daunting challenge, because China and Japan still represent fear and fascination to Americans. They are both our wizened ancestors, being among the oldest civilizations, and our presumed successors. If the East now has the power, it has long emitted potent metaphorical odors: the spiritual mystery, the sexual kink. In Rising Sun a Japanese gangster makes an American call girl dip her nipple in sake -- baptism by force in the waters of the future. But one needn't go to Hollywood to find directors investigating bizarro sex. Many Japanese filmmakers do; porno is a popular genre there. One example is director Ryu Murakami's Tokyo Decadence (now in U.S. release), which lovingly details the sexual subjugation of Japanese prostitutes by Japanese businessmen.

The problem for Asians in Hollywood is not that they feel injured but that they are invisible. Asian Americans represent about 3% of the U.S. population and get 3% of the movie and television roles -- but usually minor ones. "Since the beginning of films," says Sumi Sevilla Haru, president of the Association of Asian-Pacific American Artists, "African Americans have tried to improve their image. Now Asian Americans are trying to get a piece of the action. The only Asian in prime-time television is David Carradine playing one on the syndicated Kung Fu. That kind of sucks, doesn't it?"

Still, in the casting offices, there is a dawning of hope. Jason Scott Lee, the Hawaiian-born Asian who played Bruce Lee in the spring hit Dragon ($35 million in the U.S., plenty more abroad), could be the first major Asian hunk in Hollywood since Sessue Hayakawa 75 years ago. "In this town Jason instantly became somebody who could star in a movie," says Chris Lee, senior vice president at TriStar Pictures and one of several Asian Americans (Teddy Zee at Columbia, Bonni Lee at Geffen, Richard Sakai at Jim Brooks' Gracie Productions) inching their way up Mogul Mountain. "We've entered the system and there's more of us to come, and that's changing the face of Hollywood."

! What has changed is the suspicion that Asian Americans don't know American culture. Wang, who was named after John Wayne and has been in the U.S. since 1967, recalls when he would "go up for a film job and the producer would ask me what made me think I could direct a movie about teenagers in Minnesota. So I'd say to them, 'Would you ask Ridley Scott or Tony Scott ((two British directors working in America)) that same question?' Because I've been here much longer than they have." And what hasn't changed is that studio owners, whether American or Japanese, are not interested in promoting any cultural agenda. "I'm going to put my foot in my mouth here," says Wang, "but the Japanese probably go out of their way to say they don't want Asian films. They have absolutely no interest in promoting Asian-American culture in this country."

If one person could symbolize Asian Americans, it might be Tiana Thi Tranh Nga. She was born in Vietnam in the '50s. Her uncle was a defense minister in the Thieu government; her father served as press minister and left for California in 1966. Teenage Tiana became an American: "In school, when kids said they hated the gooks, I did too. They were killing our guys." She became an actress and fitness teacher (Karatecize with Tiana). Then she decided to visit Vietnam. From Hollywood to Hanoi, a record of her trip, offers an engrossing take on the images and memories that Americans have of Asia.

In Ho Chi Minh City an aunt, living in devastating poverty, is hopeful that her relatives in America will help her. "I wanted to write letters," she says between tears, "but I couldn't afford the stamp." Tiana hears gruesome testimony from Amerasian orphans and My Lai survivors. In Hanoi she dances with Oliver Stone at the Metropole hotel and converses with Le Duc Tho, Pham Van Dong, General Giap -- old warriors from an old nightmare.

By exposing this wound, Tiana means to see it heal; she has established the Indochina Film Arts Commission as a friendship bridge between Vietnam and the U.S. Her film goes beyond Asian chic to Asian soul. It joins Joy Luck Club, The Wedding Banquet and Farewell My Concubine in offering a lesson that applies to all families, Asian and American: Never forget, only forgive.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles