Masculinity First, Asian After: Justin Lin’s Strategies to “Mainstream” a New Generation of Asian American Men

A Justin Lin’s debut film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), dubbed as the first real mainstream Asian American cinema, features overachieving Asian American teens in upper-middle class suburban areas who dabbled in series of petty criminal activities and ended up becoming murderers. Despite controversies over the negative portray of Asian Americans commonly perceived as a “model minority,” its success with mainstream audiences is attributed to its adoption of Hollywood mainstream generic conventions and its stylish actors in roles usually reserved white leads. This paper examines Lin’s strategies to slot a new generation of Asian American male characters into the familiar Hollywood cliché deeply associated with white-centered hegemonic masculinity constituted through youth violence and crime. As a result, what Lin is really doing for this young Asian Americans, is to enable them to shrug off ‘Asian’ tag and makes them reverse the order of identity; masculine first and model minority Asian kids after.