Raya and the last dragon is so much more than just the latest Disney movie, at least for me. Admittedly, I’m not even a big Disney fan. But somehow due to Raya, there’s a little girl in me who’s finally seen.
When I grew up in America, I hardly saw Asians in movies or television. And when I did, they were rarely brown and like me in Southeast Asia. Eventually that changes.
Raya is voiced by Kelly Marie Tran, who is a Vietnamese American. The film was inspired by different Southeast Asian cultures. The screenplay was written by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim, who both have their origins in Southeast Asia. This is one of the reasons why there are so many cool cultural Easter eggs in the movie. Raya’s name means ‘celebration’ in Malay. She drives around on top of her animal button called ‘Tuk Tuk’, which shares its name with Cambodia’s iconic motorhomes (you’ll find similar sets of wheels in much of Southeast Asia).
In a teaser that almost made me cry (and I’m not a crybaby), Raya uses what looks like bamboo Arnis sticks – weapons used in Philippine martial arts. Her sword is reminiscent of the Indonesian crisis. The epic battle scenes in the film also draw from fighting styles from Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
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If many of them are not known to you, I do not blame you. I was born in the Philippines and first learned about Arnis until I was in college in the USA. If you do not reflect yourself in the world around you, you will lose a lot. That’s why it means so much to see Raya, brown and badass, use the same weapons as my ancestors to fight.
As a whole, Asian Americans are already under-represented in the media – but Southeast Asians are often even more overlooked. ‘Asian American’ is a huge umbrella that encompasses many people, cultures and languages. Uniting everyone in one group can obscure that diversity. Worse, it can make some communities and the inequalities they face invisible.
This is an issue about which the umbrella group Asian Americans and the Pacific Islanders often lack ‘diverse data’. There is often not enough data collected to explain how experiences differ from group to group. Many Southeast Asians, for example, came to the United States after the Vietnam War or the Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge – and this may make their migration stories and the resources they have access to in America different from others who immigrated.
Poverty among Hmong Americans, many of whom came to the U.S. as refugees during cooperation with the U.S. during its ‘Secret War’ in Laos, is twice as high – 26 percent – as it is among the Asian American community as a whole . This kind of data is needed to dispel the Asian model minority myth, a stereotype that harms all Asian Americans because it mistakenly assumes that our communities already have access to all the resources we need.
If you have seen Raya or even just its trailers, then you know the movie is about how to bring communities together. Disaggregating data is not about sharing someone. To bring people together, you must first see each other.
In Raya and the last dragon, we see how his characters find adversity that fits into the modern history of Southeast Asia: there is war, loss, famine, and a long search for healing. The main characters form a kind of mixed family refugees who together build a new world after each has lost almost everything.
I’m not saying the film and its depictions are perfect. After all, it’s a Disney-fixed version of real life. The film still mixes all the different cultures of Southeast Asia into a single fantasy world, and Disney has been criticized in the past for creating a monolithic culture in films like Moana and Mulan that in turn ‘sums up’ aspects of different people. Raya is likely to undergo considerable investigations, in part because of the pressure to represent a large group of people in a reasonable way whose stories have largely not yet been told in the mainstream media. I feel all the pressure of writing this post because I know there are things I will not see.
But in this case, I’ll make an argument about how a story should not be told at all. Hopefully this makes room for more stories.