Lifestyle
From ‘The Sympathizer’ to ‘Past Lives,’ American Audiences Warm to Subtitles
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.”
Bong Joon Ho and his interpreter, Sharon Choi, at the Golden Globe Awards in 2020.
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 a Western 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.”
“The Sympathizer”
Hopper Stone/HBO
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.’”
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.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Allyson Riggs/A24
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.”
Maureen Corrigan picks four crime and suspense novels for the summer.
NPR
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NPR
There’s something about the shadowy moral recesses of crime and suspense fiction that makes those genres especially appealing as temperatures soar.
Ash Dark As Night
Penguin Random House
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Penguin Random House
Ash Dark as Night, by Gary Phillips
I’m beginning my recommendations with two distinctive novels that appeared this spring. Gary Phillips introduced the character of LA crime photographer and occasional private eye Harry Ingram in the 2022 novel, One-Shot Harry. The second novel of this evocative historical series is called Ash Dark as Night and it opens in August 1965 during the Watts riots. Harry, who’s one of two African American freelancers covering the riots, has looped his trademark Speed Graphic camera around his neck and headed into the streets.
We’re told that Harry’s situation is, of course, riskier than that of his white counterparts: “[M]aybe one of these fellas might well get a brick upside their head from a participant, but were less likely to be jacked-up by the law. Ingram realized either side might turn on him.” Indeed, when Harry captures the death of an unarmed Black activist at the hands of the LAPD, the photo makes him famous, as well as a target.
This novel is steeped in period details like snap-brim hats and ragtop Chevy Bel Air convertibles, along with walk-ons by real life figures like pioneering African American TV journalist Louis E. Lomax. But it’s Harry’s clear-eyed take on the fallen world around him that makes this series so powerful.
Blessed Water
Zando
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Zando
Blessed Water, by Margot Douaihy
You might think a mystery about an inked-up lesbian Punk musician-turned-nun is a little far-fetched; but New Orleans, the setting of the Sister Holiday series, is the city of far-fetched phenomenon, both sacred and profane. Margot Douaihy’s second book in this queer cozy series is called Blessed Water and it finds the 34-year-old Sister Holiday up to her neck in murky flood waters and priests with secrets. Douaihy’s writing style — pure hard-boiled Patti Smith — contains all the contradictions that torment Sister Holiday in her bumpy journey of faith. Here she is in the Prologue recalling how she survived swallowing a glass rosary bead:
After my prayers for clarity, for forgiveness, for a cigarette, … deep inside the wet cave of my body was an unmistakable tickle. …
The bead fought my stomach acid for hours, leaching its blessing or poison or unmet wish. Anything hidden always finds a way to escape, no matter its careful sealing.
Amen to that, Sister Holiday.
The Expat
Pegasus Crime
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Pegasus Crime
The Expat, by Hansen Shi
The main character in Hansen Shi’s excellent debut spy novel is an alienated young man named Michael Wang. He’s a first generation Chinese American a few years out of Princeton who’s hit the bamboo ceiling at General Motors in San Francisco, where he’s been working on technology for self-driving cars. Enter a femme fatale named Vivian who flatters Michael into believing that his brilliance will be recognized by her enigmatic boss in China. Once Michael settles into life in Beijing, however, he realizes he’s been tapped, not as a prodigy, but a patsy. The Expat wraps up too abruptly, but it’s also true that I wanted this moody espionage tale to go on longer.
The God of the Woods
Riverhead Books
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Riverhead Books
The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore
Liz Moore’s extraordinary new literary suspense novel reminds me of Donna Tartt’s 1992 debut, The Secret History. There are superficial similarities: Both are thick intricate novels featuring young people isolated in enclosed worlds — in Tartt’s story, a Vermont college campus; in Moore’s, a summer camp in New York’s Adirondack mountains. But, the vital connection for me was a reading experience where I was so thoroughly submerged in a rich fictional world, that for hours I barely came up for air.
There’s a touch of Gothic excess about The God of the Woods, beginning with the premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from Camp Emerson in the Adirondacks 14 years apart. Moore’s story jumps around in time, chiefly from the 1950s into the ’70s and features a host of characters from different social classes — campers, counselors, townspeople and local police — and the Van Laars themselves.
The precision of Moore’s writing never flags. Consider this reflection by Tracy, a 12-year-old camper who recalls that: “Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.”
Moore’s previous book, Long Bright River, was a superb social novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia; The God of the Woods is something weirder and stranger and unforgettable.
Happy summer reading wherever your tastes take you.
CNN
Barack Obama‘s half sister was inadvertently tear-gassed during a deadly demonstration in Africa … and it’s all on video.
Auma Obama was being interviewed by CNN in the middle of Tuesday’s protests in Nairobi, Kenya — when all of a sudden, explosions could be heard in the background … and she starts coughing and tearing up.
The ex-Prez’s half sibling — to whom he’s related on his father’s side — says she can’t see anymore because of tear gas in the air … and CNN field reporter Larry Madowo starts coughing too as the street interview is forced to end.
Before police unleashed tear gas on protesters outside parliament, Auma — a Kenyan activist — told CNN she was at the demonstration to show the world what was happening to the young Kenyans demonstrating for their rights with flags and banners.
Widespread protests are breaking out in Kenya, where citizens are pushing back against a controversial new finance bill, which includes proposed tax increases.
Reports out of Nairobi say police opened fire on protesters who tried to storm parliament after tear gas and water cannons failed to disperse crowds … with at least 5 people shot dead and dozens more wounded.
Barack hasn’t addressed what happened to his sister just yet — but we know they’re close.
Striking Writers Guild members picket alongside SAG-AFTRA members outside Netflix studios in September 2023.
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This time last year, Hollywood writers were picketing outside the offices of major studios and streaming companies. Throughout their nearly five month-long strike, writers often convened at Bob’s Big Boy, where TV host Drew Carey often picked up the check.
“I remember eating a lot of hash browns, and then if it was dinner, they’ve got a good soup situation,” says Taylor Orci, who recently returned to the Burbank diner to reminisce with writer Bill Wolkoff.
“It saved us,” Wolkoff nods. “It was a vote of confidence that ‘I believe in writers.’ Thank you, Drew Carey, for that.”
Wolkoff writes and produces the series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Last year, when the show took a pause, he was a Writers Guild of America strike captain outside CBS Studios in L.A. Thanks to the union’s new contract, he’s looking forward to getting higher streaming residuals with each hit season.
“That’s going to be a noticeable difference in my life,” Wolkoff says. “And the AI protections too. I mean, we got in our contract language that ensures that AI will not replace writers. That’s huge.”
But, he admits, he’s one of the lucky few Hollywood writers still working these days.
Like many others, Taylor Orci still struggles. One writing job fell through recently, and they’re still living on loans, with max’d out credit cards and a baby on the way.
Writer Taylor Orci outside Bob’s Big Boy, a diner in Burbank.
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“I knew it was gonna be slow, but I thought I’d have a job,” they say. “It’s tough right now to find work, especially if you didn’t have a job before.”
‘We needed a sea change’
Across town in Encino, Lannet Tachel says that the union’s gains are helpful, but, “in the long run, you still have to be one of the lucky few to get in so that help applies to you.”
Her writing partner Corey Grant agrees: there’s not much production these days.
“It was hard before the strike. It’s even harder now,” he says. “I think it’s a backlash because of the strike. I think they’re trying to … shore up their pockets a little bit, but it’s less TV, less episodes getting made, tighter budgets, half the shows got canceled.”
Lanett Tachel and writing partner Corey Grant.
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NPR reached out to eight major studios and streamers for a response. They didn’t get back to us. But the president of the WGA West, Meredith Stiehm, says those production changes started before the strike, not because of it. She says there had been a boom, with streaming companies ordering a glut of new shows. But in 2022, so-called “peak TV” went bust.
“Netflix announced that they’d lost subscribers. Streaming was not profitable for anybody. It was kind of a failed model. Everybody started retreating. At the same time,” she says, “our contract was untenable and we needed a sea change.”
The WGA spent nearly five months on strike last year starting in May. Actors and performers in the union SAG-AFTRA also went on strike last summer. The writers union reached a tentative deal with studios in September, with new residual models in streaming, new minimum lengths of employment for TV gigs, more guaranteed paid work for feature films and other protections. Then, SAG-AFTRA reached their own tentative agreement in November.
“When we all returned to work, the decline continued, meaning not as much content is being ordered,” Stiehm says. “And it seems that the studios are sort of regrouping, and writers are feeling the post-Peak TV pinch.”
During a recent earnings call, SONY Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra said his company was hit by more than just the streaming revolution.
“We had to go from a pandemic where production was severely limited, to a strike, where there was no creative work being done for literally seven or eight months,” he said. “It had to restart. And that’s what you’re seeing right now.”
The industry continues to transform, with shrinking ad revenue and layoffs at just about every entertainment and media company. Last month, Netflix announced it would produce more non-scripted material, like reality shows and game shows. Disney said it will offer even more live sports through ESPN over the coming years.
Nick Geisler got his first writing job in Los Angeles in 2018. He was a strike captain outside Amazon Studios last year. After the strike ended, he says, he returned for a few months to the writers room for the Disney show Bunk’d: Learning the Ropes. But he says he hasn’t had much luck with other studios.
“There’s just no appetite for risk,” Geisler says. “And there’s a lot of requests for rewrites. A lot of them are free. There’s a lot of, ‘Hey, we’re so, so close. Can you just make these changes and get it over the line?’ ‘Hey, we’re turning it into our higher ups tomorrow. Can you do this in three hours?’ I don’t think that’s really changed much. Because of the climate we’re in, there’s a lot of ‘Well, I’ll just get this done because there’s not a lot going on.’”
Now, he says, “I’m actually working on a short film for a writer that I met on the picket line.”
‘This time feels different’
Things are tough for those who’ve been in the business for decades, too.
“I reach out to my agent and he tells me it’s really bad out there. Hopefully it will turn around,” says Jon Sherman, who hasn’t had a writing assignment for three years.
Jon Sherman began his career in Hollywood three decades ago.
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He began his career 30 years ago, writing for Bill Nye the Science Guy. He also wrote and produced for the original TV series Frasier. Sherman was a WGA strike captain outside Amazon Studios last year.
“It’s been the first time in a long career, for which I’m grateful, that I’ve had a real long layoff. I’ve reached a point where I’m like, ‘Oh, this time feels different.’”
To pay the bills, Sherman says he was in a focus group for dried fruit and in a UCLA research study on exercise. He’s also now a TV game show contestant. But he sure would still love to write for television.
Note: NPR News staffers are also members of SAG-AFTRA, the union of actors and performers that also went on strike last year. Broadcast journalists are under a different contract, however, and were not on strike.
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