From Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu to Chloé Zhao and Steven Yeun, Asian-Americans’ progress in Hollywood

Chloé Zhao’s Oscar win for best director marks a high point for Asian-Americans in Hollywood after decades of being ignored, caricatured or ridiculed

Things began changing with Sandra Oh in Grey’s Anatomy and Steven Yeun in The Walking Dead, then came TV series Fresh Off the Boat and movie Crazy Rich Asians

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Asian-Americans are finally having their moment in Hollywood. Steven Yeun in a scene from Minari. Photo: David Bornfriend/A24 via AP

Published: 6:15am, 8 May 2021Updated: 5:20pm, 8 May 2021

For decades in Hollywood, Asian-Americans were largely absent from TV and film. Lucy Liu was the only Asian-American female who got any attention for years.

In 2021, Asian-Americans are having a moment. Beijing-born, US-based Chloé Zhao became the first Asian woman to win an Oscar for directing; her Nomadland was also named best picture at the Academy Awards ceremony last month.

The CW’s Kung Fu , a reboot of the David Carradine 1970s show, debuted to strong ratings in April with an Asian-American female lead. Ken Jeong is zany comic relief on Fox’s hit reality competition show The Masked Singer. There are not one but two reality shows about rich Asian-Americans: Netflix’s Bling Empire and HBO Max’s House of Ho.

Steven Yeun, whose career began on The Walking Dead playing the likeable Glenn Rhee, was nominated for an Oscar for best male actor in a feature film for his role as a Korean immigrant starting a farm in Arkansas in the well-received film Minari .

Ken Jeong is a panellist on reality TV show The Masked Singer. Photo: Fox via Getty Images

“We’ve come a long way,” says Jeff Yang, a Wall Street Journal contributor and the co-author of an upcoming book Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now. “Over the past 30 years, we’ve risen from invisibility to some level of relevance.”

Yang, 53, says the term Asian-American didn’t even exist until the late 1960s. He says he is part of the first generation of Asian-Americans “carrying this burden of trying to fill in the gaps of what it meant”.