Jon M Chu is on a mission: He’s combing the world for Asian talent to be in Crazy Rich Asians, an adaptation of Singaporean author Kevin Kwan’s bestselling novel of the same name.

The novel follows Chinese-American economics professor Rachel Chu, who travels with her boyfriend Nicholas Young back to his home in Singapore to attend his best friend’s wedding. There, she discovers that Nick comes from an obscenely rich family, and is plunged into a world of ridiculous extravagance and lavish parties, complete with Thai handmaidens.

“You may or may not know that it’s the first all-Asian cast from an American Hollywood studio in a long, long time. So it’s a huge step in representation and a great opportunity to showcase all the most talented Asian actors out there,” he said in his casting call posted on YouTube.

The call pushes all the right buttons: At a time when Scarlett Johansson adorns Ghost In The Shell posters and Matt Damon is front and center in The Great Wall, the announcement of a major all-Asian film feels like an antidote to the white-washing that Hollywood is notorious for. Constance Wu — who has been brave and unflinching in speaking out about race and representation in the industry — has already signed on to play the female lead.

But it’s hard to feel the hype from where I’m sitting, here in Singapore, where most of the Crazy Rich Asians story unfolds. While it’s definitely significant that Hollywood’s finally producing an all-Asian film, the anticipation for this film demonstrates that representation can mean different things to different groups of people, and that there is divergence between the needs and priorities of Asian Americans and Asians.

Major Western productions tend to see Asia in very particular ways. We could be the “rising Asia,” all glittering skyscrapers and futuristic urban design, or the rustic, impoverished-yet-inspiring backdrop for slumdog millionaires. We are dumplings and kungfu, curry and tech support, wise gurus who talk in riddles for all your “eat, pray, love” needs.

But this is not what we are. A continent as massive as Asia can never be as simple as the stereotypes imposed upon us. Asians — a population of over 4.4billion people — are not a monolith, and our need for representation and empathy can’t be addressed by non-white casting.

I did not grow up as a “person of color.” As of 2016, 76.1% of Singapore’s citizens claim Chinese ancestry; at no point in my life here have I felt under- or un-represented because of my race. While Singapore has its fair share of colonial hang-ups — allowing white people in Singapore to enjoy a significant amount of privilege — Chinese Singaporeans can be confident that their interests will not only be served, but usually be dominant, in national affairs. (In fact, the matter of whether Singapore is “ready” for a non-Chinese prime minister is apparently still up for debate, quite like it was in the United States back in 2008, pre-Obama.)

The promise of an all-(East) Asian cast in a film, therefore, doesn’t excite me very much, beyond the novelty value of it being an American-made film, as opposed to the many offerings from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China that we have access to here. As an Asian in Asia, what I need in terms of representation needs to go far beyond the casting process.

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Singapore is a tiny Southeast Asian country that many might have heard of, but not many know about. We don’t exist in the minds of people living overseas as a fully-fledged, complex society, but as a caricature. As a freelance journalist covering Singapore for foreign publications, I’ve heard all the tropes: We’re obsessed with order, we ban chewing gum, we’re so uptight with our laws that we whipped an American teenager in the ’90s. There are people who think we’re in China, and many don’t realize we speak English as our first language.

In recent Western productions, we were the shiny city backdrop for action sequences, or the bizarre smoky, steamy pirate hangout on stilts. A British television show digitally altered scenes actually shot in Singapore to make it look, according to them, “more like Singapore” — by which they meant doing things like changing the street signs from English to Chinese. None of this contributes to deeper understanding or appreciation of our lived experiences in Singapore; it only exoticizes.

When it comes to representation, what I would like to see as a Singaporean is something that reflects my country and society in all our diversity and complexity, and helps audiences make connections between our experiences and theirs.

Crazy Rich Asians does nothing to improve the situation. It’s touted as a win for representation in the U.S. because of its stated goal to have an all-Asian cast, but the focus is specifically on characters and faces of East Asian descent (as dictated by the book). This is already a misrepresentation of Singapore at the most basic level, obscuring the Malay, Indian, and Eurasian (and more) populations who make the country the culturally rich and unique place that it is. Ironically, in Singapore, Chu’s all-Asian boast is nothing more than a perpetuation of the existing Chinese dominance in mainstream media and pop culture.

The racialization of ‘crazy rich’ behavior— as if batshit insane extravagance doesn’t happen elsewhere — does little to combat the Othering of Singapore and Asia.
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The story of Crazy Rich Asians — and the racialization of “crazy rich” behavior, as if batshit insane extravagance doesn’t happen elsewhere — also does little to combat the Othering of Singapore and Asia. Reading the book was a strange experience; while I knew it was about my home, there was very little in it that I found recognizable, which is why I have little hope that the film will help anyone see Singapore as anything more than “kooky Asia,” stuffed with materialistic, flamboyant billionaires with bedazzled lifestyles.

Kwan, the author, is free to write whatever he likes. The director Chu, too, should be free to make any film he wants. It would be unrealistic — and undesirable — to expect Singaporean writers to write only one way, because Singapore can mean so many things to so many people. But touting Crazy Rich Asians as some sort of progressive win is false, especially in a context when there are already so few nuanced representations of Singapore and Asia in Western media. And when someone as lovely and woke as Constance Wu is saying that this is “a very important story to tell,” we see a divergence in the priorities of Asian-American people of color and Asians in Asia.

Our motivations when demanding representation stem from the same place — a desire to be portrayed in all our complex, nuanced, contradictory glory. To recognize ourselves on screen, and for others to recognize us as the fully-formed people and community that we are. This is important because it affects the way people perceive us, and by extension the way in which they connect or stand in solidarity with our struggles and challenges. Crazy Rich Asians doesn’t meet this need, no matter how nice it might be to see Asian faces in a Hollywood film.

Around the world, it’s been alarming and frightening to read about the rise in hate crimes and the boost that Donald Trump’s presidential victory has given to white nationalists. Unfortunately, some aspects of Trump’s impending presidency have also triggered a sense of déjà vu.

As a journalist in Singapore, America’s skew toward authoritarianism, particularly Trump’s dismissal of and threat toward press freedom, is starting to hit close to home.

Singapore is often portrayed as a global success story. It’s known as an expat safe haven with a high GDP where the streets are safe, things are efficient, and it’s easy to do business. These outward signs of development and modernity often lead to the impression of a well-functioning, democratic state, but the reality is somewhat different: Under the impressive sheen of the city-state’s achievements, Singapore’s social and political sphere continues to be run with a patriarchal authoritarian streak under the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) — a party that has held on to power for over five decades.

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Under the sheen of achievements, Singapore continues to be run with an authoritarian streak.
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Authoritarianism often conjures up images of societies where people live like automatons within a police state, accompanied by the overt brainwashing and top-down dominion displayed in George Orwell’s 1984. This mental picture makes claims of Trump turning the U.S. into an authoritarian state seem melodramatic and over-exaggerated.

But authoritarianism isn’t just about show trials or disappearing dissidents. It’s about the gradual consolidation of power through the erosion of democratic institutions and processes, the reduction of transparency, and the increase of conflicts of interest. In Singapore, a long list of offenses, including non-violent ones, are deemed “arrestable.” This means that the police can search your home and seize your property without a warrant. You are only required to have access to legal counsel within a “reasonable” time, which means that people, even 15-year-old teenagers, are questioned by the police without being able to have their lawyers with them. With a single party dominating Parliament, bills are passed at a stunning pace, leaving little opportunity and space for contestation.

These cutbacks often don’t have an immediate day-to-day impact on people’s lives, which means that most people don’t see it as a big deal or an urgent problem, but the effects are more insidious than you might think. As power gets more centralized and checks and balances recede, people start to feel like everything is out of their hands.

“What can you do? It’s just like this,” is something you hear a lot from Singaporeans. Your country feels less and less like it belongs to you, and more like a place in which you are allowed to live only as long as you play nice and stay obedient. It’s disempowering, discouraging people from taking action and perpetuating the vicious cycle.

The loss of control creeps up on you on many fronts. One of the most profound and irreversible ways is through assaults, subtle or overt, on press freedom. For all its faults — and journalists will be the first to tell you that there are many — a free press is crucial to a functioning democracy, because it’s how citizens and voters get informed, and how the powerful are scrutinized and held to account.

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As power gets more centralized, people start to feel like everything is out of their hands.
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But that’s not the way Trump sees it. After the off-the-record roasting TV networks received, one source observed to The New Yorker that Trump “truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment . . . He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.”

This is how Singapore’s PAP government sees it too. The idea of the press as the Fourth Estate holds little sway here. Instead, the media is seen as part of the country’s “nation-building” exercise, and expected to perform an “educational role” to help Singaporeans understand the government’s policies. This means that principles like freedom of the press and freedom of information have been made subordinate to the interests of the state, as demonstrated by the country’s consistently dismal press freedom rankings.

The environment that Trump and his supporters have threatened to create for the press? We’re living it in Singapore.

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When Trump declared that he would “open up” U.S. libel laws (a position that he may have reversed, because he doesn’t want to risk being sued himself), Singapore was already way ahead of him. PAP politicians have a long history of favoring defamation suits when countering both political opponents and media outlets: Local opposition politicians J.B. Jeyaretnam and Chee Soon Juan, as well as international news publications the International Herald Tribune and the Far Eastern Economic Review, have all been on the receiving end of the PAP leadership’s litigious bent. Most recently, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong took out a civil defamation suit against local Singaporean blogger Roy Ngerng, winning S$150,000 in aggravated damages that Ngerng will only finish paying off in 2033.

In a further assault on press freedom, prominent Trump supporters like Sean Hannity have suggested that press outlets that have been critical should be denied access to the Trump administration, something Trump has enforced before and after the presidential campaign. This, too, is common in Singapore and other authoritarian states, where the powerful seize the prerogative to offer information only to those who might be easier to control. They are able to restrict access to particular events like press conferences — even to those who have media accreditation — and foreign journalists have reported being denied visas to work in the country.

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When Trump declared that he would ‘open up’ U.S. libel laws, Singapore was way ahead of him.
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Off-the-record meetings also appear in the Singapore government’s playbook; confidential meetings with select groups, organizations, and individuals — from civil society, business, academia, and the press — are par for the course, resulting in the government’s ability to claim “public consultation” without having to actually be accountable or public about what the consultation entailed. As Margaret Sullivan observed in The Washington Post, such meetings result in skewed power dynamics where one side is able to control the narrative while the other is bound to silence.

Since November 8, the U.S. has been caught in a messy, confusing transition. Every day that the president-elect makes any move (including a tweet), it comes off as one step forward and two steps back; what will, or won’t, he do after his inauguration? How is he denouncing white supremacists and installing them in his team at the same time? Is he going to expand libel laws or not? What is his position on the “One China” policy? Does he or does he not intend to deport immigrants and implement a registry for Muslims?

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There is an argument among journalists to “wait and see,” to report on Trump like they would anything else. Michael Wolff recently argued that the press shouldn’t see Trump as a threat, but as “a story that needs to be told in rather conventional ways.”

“Yes, you do want to be stenographers,” he said. “You’re there to literally convey what someone in power says, and you bring it to people who want to know.”

That’s basically what the Singaporean mainstream media has been doing for years. And we are not better off for it. Instead, what we have is a culture where the government is assured of dominance, not just in the political sphere, but in controlling the narratives and frames that we use to understand the society we live in.

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What we have is a culture where the government is assured of dominance.
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For example, when migrant bus drivers from China staged a strike in 2012, the mainstream media was reluctant to use the word “strike” in their coverage, until the Minister for Manpower denounced the collective action as an “illegal strike,” thus delegitimizing the workers’ action and setting the frame for all subsequent discussion of the issue. The question of whether outlawing strikes is a breach of freedom of assembly and labor rights fell by the wayside — an opportunity to have an honest conversation in the media woefully turned into a series of pronouncements directly from government sources.

Without the media’s necessary role as watchdog, we’ve seen sustained normalization and justification of policies that further erode fundamental rights and freedoms. Earlier this year the Singapore government introduced, and eventually passed, a bill on contempt of court, criminalizing comments about ongoing court cases that might “prejudge” proceedings. The mainstream media, faithfully conveying the information dished out by the law minister, reported it as a good thing for Singapore, a simple consolidation of points of law. It wasn’t until later that civil society groups and actors — myself included — pointed out the implications on free speech and media freedom, but by then it was too late and the bill was passed a mere month after its introduction.

Fair, balanced reporting is important. But that has nothing to do with journalists becoming stenographers, or treating Trump like any other story. We’ve already seen how this strategy has led to the normalization and mainstreaming of extremist, racist rhetoric; just look at the absurdity of CNN hosting a debate on whether Trump should denounce supporters who question whether Jews are people.

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If journalists keep acting as if things are normal, they’ll eventually end up creating a new normal.
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This is how it begins. If journalists keep acting as if things are normal, they’ll eventually end up creating a new normal, in which the erosion of democratic freedoms are obscured.

It’s fair to see Trump as a threat, because he is. He is not a “conventional” president-elect; he is a man who has indicated a fundamental disregard for the First Amendment, for transparency and accountability, and many other democratic values that the rest of the world has long seen America as the embodiment of. This is not a time for stenography; it is a time for scrutiny and tough questions. Journalists — and everyone who cares about democracy — must keep an eye on the processes and institutions on which a democratic society is built.

Take it from someone who operates in an environment where the First Amendment is a faraway aspiration. It’s really going to hurt when it’s gone, and everyone loses.