With ‘Harold & Kumar,’ Asian Americans break stereotypes

“A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas” is pretty much what audiences have come to expect from the H&K franchise. The third film in the series, which opens Friday and features the adventures of Harold Lee (John Cho) and Kumar Patel (Kal Penn), is a stoner comedy filled with R-rated language, semi-naked women, scatological humor and lots of drug usage. Lots.

But in its own raunchy way, the series also marks an interesting direction in the ways Asian Americans are depicted on-screen. Harold and Kumar are just regular middle-class Americans, with non-Asian girlfriends (in this film, Harold is married to a Latina), and are not in any way related to the Asian male stereotypes that have proliferated on-screen for years: the sexless nerd, martial artist or Chinese delivery guy.

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Part of the reason “Harold & Kumar” was successful, says Joz Wang of 8Asians.com, an Asian American group blog, was that the original, 2004’s “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” wasn’t really about Asians. “We were seeing Asian Americans in lead roles that were funny and breaking stereotypes,” Wang says.

The films “made such a difference — to see us where it’s our point of view,” adds Guy Aoki of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans. “We’re not the comic relief, we’re not someone’s guest, the audience sees it through our eyes. Anything that gets away from the martial-arts thing, the accent, that’s good. We don’t have to be perfect, we just want to be relatable. These are just regular guys.”

There’s little doubt that the representation of Asians in the H&K films is a long way from the insensitive and often bizarre portrayals of the past, such as casting Caucasian actor Warner Oland to play the “inscrutable” detective Charlie Chan, or Mickey Rooney as Holly Golightly’s bucktoothed Japanese neighbor in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

And these images, which painted Asians as ultimate outsiders, or foreigners, certainly didn’t jibe with the world Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, creators of the H&K series (and co-screenwriters of the current film), grew up in. Two Jewish guys from Randolph, N.J., their environment included, Hurwitz has said, “Asian guys, Indian guys, black guys, and they were all very much like ourselves. But whenever we watched movies, we never saw our world portrayed on-screen. And eventually we decided, wouldn’t it be different if we wrote a movie where the Asian guys weren’t the ‘best friend,’ and they were front and center.”

Yet despite the positive representations and cult success of the H&K films, the big screen is still practically a wasteland when it comes to Asian American characters. Name an Asian American film superstar. Most people can’t. (Remember: Jackie Chan and Jet Li are Chinese, not Chinese American.) The fact is that overall, the film colony has simply not embraced Asian actors in the same way TV has. And although there is only one Asian TV series lead — part-Vietnamese actress Maggie Q in “Nikita” — several shows have Asian series regulars, including “Hawaii Five-O,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Parks and Recreation,” “The Good Wife,” “The Walking Dead” and “Royal Pains.”