Pitch Perfect And Its Far-From-Perfect Portrayal of Asian-American Women

In a time where Asian Americans are slowly making their way into pop culture with roles that don’t pigeonhole them–Lucy Liu in Elementary, Mindy Kaling in The Mindy Project, John Cho in Go On–the role of Lilly takes Asian Americans a step back. All we see is a rehashed, played-out representation of the meek and submissive Asian woman. Asians as a whole are a feminized race, and yet Asian women bear the double burden of simultaneously existing to two groups that are both supposed to be submissive. We see the product of this double burden in Lilly, expected to be so docile as both an Asian and a woman that she can barely even speak.

There’s also the issue of Lilly just being plain weird; this is not the cutesy, “aren’t I adorable”-weird that Zooey Deschanel gets to play week after week in New Girl but just flat-out weird. The first time I managed to catch one of Lilly’s whispered lines is when she reveals that she ate her twin in the womb. Earlier in the film, she makes a snow angel in a puddle of vomit. This type of strange behavior, though I’m sure comical to some, only serves to portray her as even more of an oddity. She becomes wholly unrelatable to movie-going audiences due to the combination of her eccentricity and lack of audible speech. This portrayal of Lilly as someone unrelatable only feeds into the Otherization of Asians as a foreign, strange race, one very different from the white women in the movie.

(L-R) Lilly (Hana Mae Lee), Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), Becca (Anna Kendrick), Cynthia-Rose (Ester Dean) via craveonline.com.

That said, the white female characters are also problematic in their own way. Fat Amy’s (Rebel Wilson, and that’s how the character is identified) humor came almost exclusively from her weight, while Stacie’s (Alexis Knapp) defining feature was her hypersexuality. And yet Lilly still rubbed me the wrong way the most, as her character’s humor was the only one that was strongly linked to her race.

An Asian actress could have played any of those other roles, but somehow the “quiet” trait–one of the biggest stereotypes about Asians–was the one assigned to Lee. In the same way that we hear jokes about Asian homelessness being a myth, a “Fat Lilly” or a hypersexualized Lilly would not have been seen as believable characters because these are traits not typically associated with Asians. But passivity? That’s something that Asians can always do. This was a conscious choice to make the character as easily understandable to the audience as possible, and drawing on racial stereotypes is one of the most efficient ways to do this.

The saddest part of all of this is that Lilly could have been a really badass character. Lee took beatboxing and scratching lessons with a DJ in preparation for her role, and yet we’re only given a two-second glimpse of her scratching in the ICCA finals (thought it was a pretty cool two seconds). But these possibilities are left behind in favor of boring, humorless “quiet Asian” jokes.

Jinhee Joung, who plays Kimmy in “Pitch Perfect.” Via imdb.com.

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