Episode 9
Season 6, Ep. 9: Love Is A Broadway Hit
For the second week in a row, Brian and I take you back to Dec 2019, when we recorded this and then didn't edit it for months cause that's the kind of responsible Saturday School hosts we are. It's a bittersweet episode and last minute addition to our syllabus after Godfrey Gao passed away last November, and we try to honor him through revisiting the 2017 Chinese romcom, "Love is a Broadway Hit."
This season, we're exploring Asian films about Asian America, and this is a film produced in China but set in New York, where two Chinese American aspiring actors are trying to make it on Broadway. In this warped-mirror version of China's imagined New York, race (and lack of English-language skills, in the cast of leading lady Claudia Wang) is 100% not an issue when it comes to Hollywood and theater casting. This America is colorblind, gender-blind and super into Chinese culture, whether it be its food, opera or melodramas.
It's not the best movie, but it's worth watching to understand the appeal of Godfrey Gao, who became a global icon when he was dubbed the first Asian male supermodel after signing with Louis Vuitton in 2011. Others knew him from Taiwanese dramas and briefly Hollywood (Magnus Bane in "Mortal Instruments: City of Bones"), and he eventually ended up working in China, which is where his heart suddenly stopped while participating in a physically strenuous challenge for a reality show. He was only 35.
It's impossible to talk about his appeal without (unabashedly, repeatedly) fawning over his looks, but it's also hard not to see him as an underdog, as a Taiwanese-Malaysian Canadian trying to carve out a career in both Asia and America. Onscreen, he also had a genuine sweetness and innocent goofiness that made it easy to root for him.
For us watchers of Asian American entertainment, which is often about how we don't fit in anywhere, he represented a fantasy of an Asian American man who could fit in anywhere, his hotness blinding and undercutting any potential prejudices. We knew that wasn't how things worked in real life, but sometimes that's how it worked in film, and it made us hopeful and happy. RIP Godfrey Gao.
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