Updated on 6 min read
Warning: spoilers aheadJoy Ride starring Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, and Sherry Cola, is the latest Hollywood film to hit theaters with a star-studded cast of Asian Americans. This laugh-out-loud buddy film explores themes of friendship and identity through cultural nuances throughout the group’s adventure.While Joy Ride is
Warning: spoilers ahead
Joy Ride starring Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, and Sherry Cola, is the latest Hollywood film to hit theaters with a star-studded cast of Asian Americans. This laugh-out-loud buddy film explores themes of friendship and identity through cultural nuances throughout the group’s adventure.
While Joy Ride is an easy and, at times, emotional watch for casual moviegoers, Audrey’s (played by Ashley Park) close friends constantly challenge her identity throughout the film. The film’s story centers around Audrey being an Asian adoptee, disconnected from her birth origins. To trigger the story’s wild adventure to find Audrey’s birth mother, Lolo (played by Sherry Cola) tells a lie to help Audrey finalize a business deal which results in the friends taking off across Beijing, rural China, and South Korea.
Joy Ride offers viewers an opportunity to reflect upon how different communities in the Asian diaspora can exist—inclusively—together. This film shows us how Asian representation can exist while undermining marginalized groups within our diaspora. Joy Ride is not inherently wrong for doing so, but it is an opportunity to continue to improve how we tell our stories to each other.
The adoptee reality isn’t simple or funny
At the beginning of the film, when Lolo comes across the photo with baby Audrey and her birth mother, Audrey quickly dismisses the picture and tries to suppress her internal conflicts. Despite Lolo’s good intention to help Audrey finalize her work deal and find her birth mother, the story inadvertently forced Audrey into a birth search with very little time to process her self-identity internally.
For Asian adoptees in North America, grappling with being adopted by families that do not look like them or being transplanted to a place where preconceived racial notions often judge them is not as simple to unpack as a photo from an old photo album.
Adoptees amongst the Asian diaspora in North America are often an unseen and underrepresented community of folks who may process their identity as part of a greater diaspora differently from the mainstream community. Every adoptee’s experience is very personal and should go at their own pace.
See also: Shedding light on the Asian adoptee experience
Actress and adoptee activist Kira Omans spoke out about how the film’s comedic take on the adoptee experience can harm the community rather than uplift it. She says “The premise of Joy Ride simultaneously subverts stereotypes about Asian women (with raunchy humor and multifaceted characters) while depicting stereotypes of adoptees (proximity to whiteness, romanticization of homeland journeys, simplification of birth searches).”
While this film does have many funny moments and comedic bits, Omans suggests that viewers critically reflect on the film and how comedy and self-deprecation can harm the Asian adoptee community. Often, jokes about Asian stereotypes reinforce whiteness and the model minority myth, undermining our agency to exist between cultures and spaces.
Throughout the film, Audrey’s friends poke fun at her whiteness and Asian stereotypes, but is self-deprecating humor the way to go when it comes to media about adoption stories – specifically stories shared by non-adoptees?
Understandably, comedy is a powerful storytelling tool that relies on self-awareness to make jokes, yet, Joy Ride did not have enough representation from the adoptee community.
Joy Ride’s Lack of representation from the adoptee community
When we look deeper into the credits of Joy Ride’s story, it appears that the film did not cast adoptees, nor was there sufficient consultation and research to understand the transracial adoptee experience. The fictionalized journey Audrey goes through in about a week is oversimplified and does not necessarily reflect the lived experiences of Asian adoptees in America. And to some extent, the film may send the wrong message that the adoptee experience is not a serious topic.
“We definitely have friends who are adopted… We based a lot of the movie on aspects of our own lives. So being able to talk to them and hear their stories, we definitely did our research. We read books; we made sure that we were definitely going to treat the subject in a sensitive way,” shared film producer Cherry Chevapravatdumrong in an interview with Cold Tea Collective.
Similarly, Blue Bayou, a film released in 2021, faced backlash as the story did adequately consult the adoptee community and fell short of telling the story of an impacted community.
Our communities and storytellers must do more to honor these stories.
See also: The Korean adoptee community’s response to Blue Bayou
Coexisting as a diaspora together
Living in a large diaspora often resembles sharing similar cultural experiences growing up that are not bound by location. For Asian adoptees in the diaspora, although they look similar to many of us, they may not share similar experiences with the greater community. This film fails to highlight how characters in the Asian diaspora can be vastly different and coexist with a greater community at the same time. It’s a missed opportunity to showcase the acceptable fluidity of living in a Western society while displaying non-Western traits, albeit sometimes stereotypical.
While there have been significant leaps and bounds in Hollywood films featuring Asians and telling stories about the Asian diaspora, we should remember that marginalized groups within communities still may not have their reality represented accurately.
The film’s biggest twist is that Audrey finds out she is not actually ethnically Chinese. Instead, she was born to a Korean mother who was sent to China from South Korea to conceal her pregnancy. The scene where Lolo’s family immediately turns against Audrey (after warmly welcoming her the evening prior), was unnecessary and distasteful. This surprising twist inadvertently neglects the history and trauma many mothers, families, and communities faced that resulted in leaving a child for adoption.
This scene further isolates Asian adoptee and pins Asians against each other. There are many personal, familial, and even political reasons for families to make adoption plans for their children across Asia. If this plot twist was taken more seriously, it could have been a much more powerful moment than portraying Audrey as an unidentified object that’s running around to find her identity for comedic effect.
Giving space to our peers
In the podcast series “Conversation Piece with Patrick Armstrong,” he says, “It’s a privilege for anybody to tell you anything about their lives, and we take that for granted a lot. We expect or feel entitled to someone’s story, and a lot of times, we might not be thinking about the trauma or discomfort it might be causing someone… pushing without really thinking about the consequences.”
Being an ally doesn’t just mean asking how to do something; it’s more than that. It’s about working to include those with lived experiences to share their perspectives meaningfully throughout the process.
Nonetheless, Hollywood and mass media need examples of all different narratives so we can have conversations with a broader community beyond the Asian diaspora. Joy Ride sets an example of diversifying Asian characters in American media. It goes to show that we can have different personalities, experiences, and conflicts because the Asian diaspora runs on a spectrum, it is not a singular reality.
Joy Ride is an important film for our community as it teaches us about how we can exist together, inclusively, as a diaspora. With this film and other upcoming productions, we have the opportunity and obligation to forge better, genuine relationships with the adoptee community (or, truthfully, any marginalized community) by listening to their stories and giving folks space to share their unique stories.
See also: Korean American adoptee Patrick Armstrong takes control of his own narrative in Conversation Piece
