Spoilers abound below, so if you haven’t yet watched the deliriously warm and funny movie, crawl out from under that rock and see it before reading further. So here’s a quick primer on the game of mahjong itself, as well as its significance to the film in that pivotal scene.
This scene provides her with critical impetus toward her eventual redemption.īut it’s also true for people who don’t understand the complex rules of the game, which aren’t intuitive and are often different depending on the region of the world. It was inserted in part because Michelle Yeoh, who delivers an amazing steel-and-silk performance as the movie’s main antagonist, refused to play the stock villainous tiger mom from the book. That’s especially true for fans of the book, who won’t recognize it it’s original to the movie. But there’s one scene in particular that has been resiliently enigmatic to audiences of many backgrounds, both Asian and non-Asian … and it’s a pivotal one: the mahjong scene. The movie’s Singapore-specific local color and broadly Asian cultural nuances are indeed fairly Google-able, and can readily be contextualized through polite discussions with actual Asian people. Chu told me, “We didn’t want to give people an excuse to think of this world as some kind of obscure, exotic fantasyland - this is a real place, with real culture, history and tradition, and instead of just giving them answers to their questions, we want them to have conversations.” That lack of training wheels is intentional: As director Jon M.
It was an incredible image of attraction and aspiration that made me rethink my own self-image.” The band replied within an hour (of course they did, come on!) and gave Chu the go-ahead, and so cinema history was made.One of the most beautiful things about Crazy Rich Asians is how it refuses to explain many of its most intrinsically Asian elements. “The color of the stars, her skin, the love. “For the first time in my life, it described the color in the most beautiful, magical ways,” he recalls writing. So Chu decided to lay out his feelings about the song in a letter to the band. Coldplay rejected the director’s “Yellow” request. As Quartzy points out, the band has in the past been accused of appropriation for 2012’s “Princess of China” with Rihanna, the video for which featured martial arts and a mishmash of other Asian imagery, and 2016’s “Hymn for the Weekend” with Beyoncé, in which the band visited India for the Hindu festival of Holi. eventually got onboard, Coldplay was reportedly a harder sell. “They were like, ‘Whoa, we can’t do that, what do you think people will say?’ And I told them, ‘Well, a white director couldn’t do it,’” he explains.Īnd while Warner Bros. and Coldplay to get onboard with, well, the term “yellow.”Īccording to the director, the studio initially balked at using the song, which Chu wanted specifically because of the negative racist connotations the color evokes as a slur against Asian and Asian-American people. To get a Chinese version of “Yellow,” however, Chu had to convince both Warner Bros. It felt to me like a critical part of what we were trying to do,” he says in an interview with Quartzy. “That crazy blend of identities and cultures that makes up who we are. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians, you’re probably already familiar with the final song on the movie’s soundtrack, a Mandarin cover of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Sung by Chinese-American singer Katherine Ho, a former contestant on The Voice, Chu knew it would be the perfect track to close the film. If you found yourself sobbing at the end of director Jon M.