Created by Brandon Yu and Produced by Alice Fang, This New York Times interactive article will walk you through the Asian languages appearing onscreen in cinema and television.
American audiences used to balk at subtitles. But recent hits like “Shogun” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” show how much that has changed.
In Hollywood today, not only are Asian and Asian American narratives more prominent than ever, but they are also being told in increasingly dynamic ways through the artful use of Asian languages.
Take, for instance, the following scene from the recent HBO mini-series “The Sympathizer,” which airs its final episode on May 26. In the series, Robert Downey Jr. plays an auteur director making a movie called “The Hamlet,” set during the Vietnam War.
In this scene, American soldiers confront a Vietnamese villager. Except something isn’t quite right: She is speaking Cantonese.
In the lineage of the Hollywood Vietnam War movie, where Vietnamese characters rarely had lines beyond screaming in agony, authenticity wasn’t exactly a top priority.
A crew member sheepishly explains to the director that they didn’t bother casting a Vietnamese speaker since “there’s no line in the script.” Eventually, another actress who does speak Vietnamese is brought in, and they reshoot the scene.
Instead of the line the director suggests — “Don’t shoot me, I’m only a peasant” — the actress shouts one fed to her by the Captain, the on-set cultural consultant who is actually a Communist spy: “Our hands will close around the throat of American imperialism!”
The swap goes over the director’s head, but for the viewer, who can read the subtitles (and for anyone who speaks Vietnamese), the layers of language become a narrative tool for political satire.
The sequence is emblematic of a significant shift in how Asian languages are featured in American film and TV.
Just a few years ago, when his Korean dark comedy “Parasite” won the 2020 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, the writer and director Bong Joon Ho ribbed Americans for their aversion to “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.”
Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal Media, via Getty Images
But in 2024, “The Sympathizer” is among a growing number of American works — including the recent prestige films “Minari” (2020), “Past Lives” (2023) and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022); the television epics “Pachinko” (2022) and “Shogun” (2024); and the family-friendly series “Ms. Marvel” (2022) and “American Born Chinese” (2023) — that use Asian languages to bring additional depth and nuance to their stories.
“I don’t think it is just a temporary blip,” said Minjeong Kim, the director of the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at San Diego State University. “The trend has shifted.”
It’s a startling evolution from how Asian languages have typically appeared on American screens. Don McKellar, the co-creator of “The Sympathizer,” said that after the show’s multilingual writing staff watched the 1978 Vietnam War film “The Deer Hunter,” there was confusion about what language that film’s Vietnamese characters were even speaking.
“No one could understand them,” he said. “They were either Thai speakers who had been given a word or two of Vietnamese or they were just speaking Thai with a ‘Vietnamese’ accent.”
McKellar has seen a shift, though. When he wrote the 1998 film “The Red Violin,” which has dialogue in several languages including German, French and Mandarin, he had to tally up the percentage of English dialogue to reassure studio executives who were nervous about an American audience’s tolerance for subtitles.
“It was one of those understood things,” he recalled. But with “The Sympathizer,” which has long stretches in Vietnamese, “I never had to count.”
Nowadays, some 50 percent of Americans would prefer to watch videos with subtitles regardless of the language they’re hearing. Videos on social media are increasingly closed-captioned and, as sound mixing becomes more complicated across devices, the near universal accessibility of subtitles — a rarity before the rise of streaming — has made them more of a boon than a barrier.
The internet’s broad entertainment ecosystem has also diversified the American media palate. “YouTube, social media, TikTok, those things that are really open — people can actually access and be exposed to content in different languages,” Kim said. That means “they might be less reluctant to watch movies or TV shows that have different languages.”
Many experts point to Netflix’s 2021 hit series “Squid Game,” a Korean import, as an early catalyst. The monumental success of the dystopian thriller, which is the platform’s most-watched show, took even the streamer by surprise. “You have a non-English show, a Korean show, that ends up being the biggest show in the world ever,” said Bela Bajaria, the chief content officer for Netflix, whose overall subscriber base is largely outside of the U.S. “We did not see that coming.”
“Squid Game” topped a growing wave of non-English worldwide hits, such as the Spanish “Money Heist” and the French “Lupin.” The success of these projects helped shift the industrywide perception of non-English dialogue: Where it was once seen as a liability, it became an asset — a change that coincided with a rising number of Asian and Asian American filmmakers helming major Hollywood projects.
“Amazon is all over the world and they are trying to tap into international audiences,” said the filmmaker Lulu Wang, whose recent Prime series, “Expats,” takes place in Hong Kong and has portions in Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Punjabi and English. “So the word they kept using was: ‘We see this as a global show for us.’”
“Expats” Prime Video
The show’s fifth episode in particular showcases the nuance and texture that incorporating non-English languages can bring to storytelling onscreen. After primarily following the lives of a group of wealthy, English-speaking expats in Hong Kong, the show shifts to Tagalog and Cantonese for an episode focusing on the mostly Filipino domestic workers who maintain the homes of the elite, and the ordinary citizens whose political fates have become increasingly grim amid China’s encroaching rule.
“I always saw it as a tapestry, a way to break out of the bubble that is the expat world and give some context to the stories that we’re watching,” Wang said. “Who do we empathize with? Who are we not really thinking about as much?”
The sudden prominence of Tagalog in the episode becomes a way into the inner lives of characters who are often cut out of the frame — such as Essie, the domestic worker who is seen on a video call with her son. But it also serves as a kind of joyful enclosure. When another worker, Puri, gathers with her fellow Filipino “helpers” to play bingo, we hear them daydream, trade salacious gossip and poke fun at one another.
For those who understand Tagalog, it’s a moment to relish. For those who don’t, it’s a space we can peek into but only partly inhabit and understand. We get to watch and read, but this day off is theirs.
The making of “Expats” was a stark contrast to Wang’s experience pitching her acclaimed 2018 film “The Farewell,” she said. Back then, skeptical executives asked her to relocate the story, which is set primarily in China, to New York and translate a majority of the dialogue from Mandarin into English. Wang refused.
“There was just this constant awareness that we were doing something that was on the periphery and that was in the margins,” she said. “And in order to make it successful, we had to find a way to take it out of the shadows and bring it into the light.”
The market, it seems, has changed. This year’s FX/Hulu adaptation of the James Clavell novel “Shogun,” a heavily subtitled series that includes Japanese and English dialogue, notched one of Disney’s most watched debuts. While much of the show’s political and emotional intrigue is managed through the act of translation between characters, its predecessor, a 1980 series adaptation, was mostly in English and didn’t even bother subtitling its sparse Japanese lines.
Across many films and series about Asians and Asian Americans, language is increasingly used as a world-building tool. On “The Sympathizer,” McKellar said, there was a committee of people across all levels of production that was meticulously tweaking the Vietnamese dialogue.
“The Northern accent and then the Southern accent, they’re vastly, vastly different,” said the show’s star, Hoa Xuande, who plays a spy for the North who is planted in the South. Then, he added, there were prewar and postwar accents that had to be accounted for.
These finer details of language are, in other words, positive markers of stories told with “authenticity,” that vaguely praiseworthy term that nevertheless is viscerally felt when, for instance, you hear the “Chinglish” patter, a mélange of Mandarin and English, between Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan in an early scene in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Their back-and-forth, dancing seamlessly in and out of English midsentence, is a mode familiar to most Asian Americans — 66 percent of whom speak a language other than English at home.
Still, authenticity can be an abstract badge of honor. Multiplicity of language is most interesting when it’s used to progress these stories — to ratchet up tension, to encase or reveal secrets, to create emotional resonance, to reflect or deflect identity.
One of the most affecting uses of foreign language can be found in the 2023 film “Past Lives,” an Oscar nominee that its star Greta Lee, who plays Nora, said was a story about how to “capture identity through language.”
Nora’s Korean slowly shifts and loosens from the start of the film to the end, Lee said, as she reconnects with her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung. On their first call, “she’s been living in New York for X amount of years, she doesn’t really speak Korean anymore,” Lee explained. But as their connection rekindles and her Korean becomes more fluent, it’s as if Nora is slowly unearthing her past self.
Lee worked with Sharon Choi, who gained recognition as Bong Joon Ho’s interpreter during the international press run for “Parasite.” Rather than being a traditional dialect coach, Choi explored speech patterns with Lee that were crucial to communicating her character’s journey.
“My priority wasn’t getting a particular accent,” Choi said. Instead of focusing on technical proficiency, “I was approaching this language from a storytelling perspective.”
The evolution of Nora’s Korean helps define a progression of playfulness, curiosity and eventually heartbreak as she revisits an old language, an old friend and an old life. These layers of storytelling do not register with English-speaking audiences, but for those who do speak Korean, they add depth to the film.
“You dream in a language I don’t understand,” Arthur, Nora’s American husband, wistfully tells her at one point about her sleep talking. “It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.”
“Past Lives” A24
The climax of “Past Lives” powerfully embodies this idea in a scene in a bar, as Nora sits between Arthur and Hae Sung. Initially, the camera frames the trio in one shot. Then, the camera cuts to Hae Sung and Nora, excising Arthur from the frame, as if the scene is an intimate moment just between the two of them.
Which it is: After translating for Arthur, Nora begins to talk exclusively in Korean to Hae Sung.
When the scene cuts back to Arthur, an offscreen Hae Sung asks “What if …”
Arthur stirs. He can’t understand. For a moment, Nora is dreaming in another language.
This story is part of a series on how Asian Americans are shaping American popular culture. The series is funded through a grant from The Asian American Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection and focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of this series.
Video credits: A24 (“Past Lives”), HBO (“The Sympathizer”), Prime Video (“Expats”)
Image credits: Allyson Riggs/A24 (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Andrew Cooper/Netflix (“Beef”), AppleTV+ (“Pachinko”), A24 (“The Farewell”), Carlos Lopez-Calleja/Disney (“American Born Chinese”), David Bornfriend/A24 (“Minari”), Disney+ (“Ms. Marvel”), Katie Yu/FX (“Shogun”), Netflix (“Squid Game”), Netflix (“The Brothers Sun”), Prime Video (“Expats”)
Edited by Miya Lee, Jennifer Harlan, Jason Chiu, Veronica Chambers, Marcelle Hopkins and Antonio De Luca. Photo Editing by Eve Lyons. Additional Editing by Hannah Wulkan, Dan Saltzstein, Vera Titunik and Brian Gallagher. Transcription by Douglas So and Richard Quan (Cantonese); Ran Lee and Yeong-Ung Yang (Korean); Luke Gene Cabading and Rosemary Diwa (Tagalog); and Vivian Giang, Minh Uong and Julie Ho (Vietnamese). Research by Sheelagh McNeill.
