With all due respect

Hollywood films featuring Asian actors (clockwise from top left): Charlie Chan, Bruce Lee, Chow Yun-fat, Yun Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, B. D. Wong, Fu Manchu and Jack Yang. File photos

When American network NBC revamped hit 1970s TV series The Bionic Woman in 2007, they chose Korean-American actor Will Yun Lee to play Jae Kim, the operations leader who teaches the lead character, Jaime Sommers, how to use her powers. It was a meaty role and in one episode, Lee even had a love scene with American actress Katee Sackhoff.

In Cashmere Mafia, Lucy Liu dates Korean actor Jack Yang, who has impressive social manners, masculinity and a highly prestigious job as a brain surgeon.

These might sound like trivial anecdotes but casting such Asian characters in high-profile American shows would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, when Chow Yun-fat never got to kiss Mira Sorvino in Replacement Killers and Jet Li's kiss with Aaliyah was edited out of Romeo Must Die.

"The rise of the Asian economies, including China's, is making American people more interested in the region and compelling TV and film makers to do wider and deeper research," says Yan Luo, the Shanghai-born actress who went to the United States in the 1980s and directed/produced the 2001 movie Pavilion of Women, which focused on cross-cultural relationships.

She has a keen interest in how Asian people were all too easily stereotyped for many years. "The decades-long lack of effective communication and the indifference of a powerful culture to weaker ones should be taken into consideration when we talk about the depiction of Asians in the US mass media," she says.

For a long time after their debut in the 1919 silent film Broken Blossom, Asian males were confined to limited roles in American films and TV. One was the learned ancient scholar powered by a mysterious oriental philosophy, like the detective Charlie Chan, who quotes supposed ancient Chinese wisdom at the end of each story, saying things like: "The Emperor Shi Hwang-ti (Qinshihuang), who built the Great Wall of China, once said that 'he who squanders today talking of yesterday's triumphs will have nothing to boast of tomorrow.' "

Others were the studious nerd, like B.D. Wong's researcher in Jurassic Park, or the violent villain, of which the best known was Dr Fu Manchu, the incarnation of "yellow peril" with a face like Satan.