After seeing an ad for the movie Joy Ride on the tube at the beginning of Summer I just knew I had to see it, so between my trips this Summer, during my short pause in London, that's what I decided to do. It was definitely worth it, funny, emotional and captivating it was a great movie! It could have fallen into the theme of so many Asian-American Hollywood films, a protagonist's over-idealised return to Asia, luckily it didn't.
Warning: Spoilers ahead
From the moment Audrey (played by Ashley Park) lands in China and exclaims everyone looks like her I knew this movie would be different. The feeling of empowerment from being in a place where you’re not, upon first glance, as conspicuous a minority is a fairly typical observation in movies about diaspora homecomings. But before Audrey can get too excited, her best friend and travel companion, Lolo (Sherry Cola), points out the airport has people from Taiwan and mainland China as well as K-pop stars who are so glamorous, they bypass customs and... they’re all legibly different. Audrey might be tempted to see these Asian faces as interchangeable so that she can feel like she belongs, Lolo implies that’s a fantasy, not reality.
To trigger the story’s wild adventure to find Audrey’s birth mother, Lolo tells a lie to help Audrey finalise a business deal which results in the friends taking off across Beijing, rural China, and South Korea.
Joy Ride (buy and watch online here) offers viewers an opportunity to reflect upon how different communities in the Asian diaspora can exist, inclusively, together. This film shows us how Asian representation can exist while undermining marginalised groups within our diaspora. Joy Ride is not inherently wrong for doing so but it is an opportunity to continue to improve how we tell our stories to each other.
At the beginning of the film, when Lolo comes across the photo with baby Audrey and her birth mother, Audrey quickly dismisses the picture and tries to suppress her internal conflicts. Despite Lolo’s good intention to help Audrey finalise her work deal and find her birth mother, the story inadvertently forced Audrey into a birth search with very little time to process her self-identity internally.
For Asian adoptees in USA (or anywhere in the West), grappling with being adopted by families that do not look like them or being transplanted to a place where preconceived racial notions often judge them is not as simple to unpack as a photo from an old photo album.
Adoptees amongst the Asian diaspora in USA are often an unseen and underrepresented community of people who may process their identity as part of a greater diaspora differently from the mainstream community. Every adoptee’s experience and journey is different and very personal.
Living in a large diaspora often resembles sharing similar cultural experiences growing up that are not bound by location. For Asian adoptees in the diaspora, although they look similar to many of us, they may not share similar experiences with the greater community. Where this film falls down is in it's failure to highlight how characters in the Asian diaspora can be vastly different and coexist with a greater community at the same time. It’s a missed opportunity to showcase the acceptable fluidity of living in a Western society while displaying non-Western traits.
While there has been significant progress in Hollywood films featuring Asians and telling stories about the Asian diaspora, we should remember that marginalised groups within communities may still not have their reality represented accurately.
The film’s biggest twist is that Audrey finds out she is not actually ethnically Chinese. Instead, she was born to a Korean mother who was sent to China from South Korea to conceal her pregnancy. The scene where Lolo’s family immediately turns against Audrey (after warmly welcoming her the evening prior), was a little distasteful. This surprising twist inadvertently neglects the history and trauma many mothers, families, and communities faced that resulted in leaving a child for adoption. If this plot twist was taken more seriously, it could have been a much more powerful moment than portraying Audrey as an unidentified object that’s running around to find her identity for comedic effect.
Hollywood and mass media need examples of all different narratives so we can have conversations with a broader community beyond the Asian diaspora. Joy Ride sets an example of diversifying Asian characters in American media. It goes to show we can have different personalities, experiences, and conflicts because the Asian diaspora runs on a spectrum, it is not a singular reality.
By Ahana Ogle
About the Writer: Ahana Ogle is a Nutrition and Food Management second year student that enjoys trying different cuisines, hanging with friends and visiting museums and art galleries.