Will Dragon Boys fall to stereotypes?

A thriller set in Vancouver about triad gang violence has Asian Canadians watching closely, but producers of the miniseries insist they have made every effort to make sure concerns about racism have been addressed, ALEXANDRA GILL (Globe and Mail) writes

VANCOUVER -- A group of thugs gun their way into a dingy Vancouver apartment. They have been sent by Movie Star, a ruthless drug dealer with connections to a Hong Kong triad. When the low-life apartment dweller fails to come up with the money he owes, they savagely carve his face with a butcher's knife.

The gruesome segment is the opening scene of /Dragon Boys/, a gripping two-part miniseries that premieres tomorrow night on CBC Television. Directed with pulsing momentum by Jerry Ciccoritti and written with layered complexity by Ian Weir, the series has been hailed for its depth and realism by some of the most celebrated Asian stars in Canada, Hong Kong and Hollywood, who leapt to be part of it.

The executives at CBC Television are so pleased with the miniseries they have already told the producers at Omni Film to go ahead with /Dragon Boys II/, a movie, and are now touting it as a "prime example" of their network's new programming strategy to reach untapped audiences and rake in higher ratings.

But some members of the Chinese community are warning the series could face a backlash. Critics have argued that a drama in which the criminals are
Chinese-Canadian can be nothing but racist, but others say the series could be the beginning of a new era of complexity in depictions of Asian Canadians on television.

Executive producer Michael Chechik was not prepared to concede that as Caucasians, he, Weir and Ciccoritti had no right to make the series, as some have been saying.

"If Ang Lee, a heterosexual Chinese director, could win an Academy Award for /Brokeback Mountain/, a movie about homosexual cowboys, why shouldn't we be allowed to make a television drama about another racial group in Canada?" he said last month, at an advance Vancouver screening for cast and crew.

Weir, an English-speaking Canadian of Scottish descent, stresses that the series isn't just a crime story. It's a human story, he says, about families, the immigrant experience and Canada's West Coast.

"When I moved to Vancouver in 1978, it was essentially a small town. Now, it's a world-class Pacific Rim city. It has been completely transformed, for the better. More than any, it's the Chinese culture that has transformed it. And if you're looking to tell a story about the West Coast today, you need to look at Chinese culture as an absolutely dominant part of that story because it's had such a big impact on shaping the community we live in."

The negative response to the miniseries could be muted by the pre-emptive efforts of the producers to address concerns raised early in the production's life. As soon as /Dragon Boys/ was added to the CBC lineup in June 2005, Colleen Leung, a Vancouver documentary producer and community activist, took it upon herself to track down the producers and warn them about the negative buzz that was already building.

To answer such charges, the producers hired Leung and historian Jim Wong-Chu as cultural advisers to look over the script and highlight what rang true or what might be insulting.

The subsequent changes were small and subtle, but powerful, says Weir, who had already spent years researching Asian gangs with the help of the local RCMP and learning as much as he could about the Chinese-Canadian experience by picking the brains of his friends and reading contemporary literature.

For example, when Wong-Chu read an early draft, he took an extreme dislike to Inspector Buckles, a lunkheaded -- white -- senior RCMP officer.

"You're not getting it," Wong-Chu complained to Weir. "Why is the boss always white? Why can't it be a Chinese asshole in power?"

Weir later added a second senior RCMP officer, who was Chinese, and added a new layer of complexity to a subplot about generational differences.

As helpful as the community advisers may have been, Weir says his greatest resources, as far as cultural content is concerned, were Byron Mann and Tzi Ma, the show's lead actors.

Ma, a familiar face who has starred in countless Hollywood productions including /The Quiet American/ and/ The Ladykillers/, was so impressed with an early script he simply presumed it was written by a Chinese Canadian or American.

"It rang so true to me," Ma explained by phone, while shooting /Rush Hour 3/ with Jackie Chan in Vancouver.

"It reminded me of the seventies in New York, when a huge influx of Asian immigrants flooded the city," says Ma, who was doing some social work in Chinatown at the time.

"The city infrastructure couldn't absorb it. The kids were bored because they couldn't communicate. It was easy for gangs to recruit them," says Ma, who plays a father whose son falls in with a gang.

Ma says /Dragon Boys/ is a "seminal" project because it was the first script (or at least the first that he had read) about Asian crime that fully addressed the victims and their families.

"Every character is flawed. It represents us well. It gives us three-dimensionality."

What everyone wants to avoid is a repeat of 1991. That year, CBC Radio aired a miniseries entitled /Dim Sum Diaries/. Its fifth episode sees a new immigrant from Hong Kong cut down two rare sequoia trees in his front yard because they interfere with his property's/ feng shui/ (design harmony). The episode, narrated by a fictional white speaker, was based on a nearly identical incident which had occurred in the tony neighbourhood of Kerrisdale. The aim of the episode had been to combat
racist preconceptions. By the end of the segment, written for Morningside by Mark Leiren-Young, the narrator's racist preconceptions undergo a complete sea change.

In real life, however, the drama only heightened racial tensions and sparked an explosion of protest that ricocheted from Vancouver to the House of Commons and back to the CBC in British Columbia, where an apology was eventually issued to representatives of the Chinese-Canadian community, who alleged that the production was racist.

For all its gritty realism, and precisely because of it, /Dragon Boys/obviously won't please everyone.

Steph Song, the Canadian actress who plays a Southern Cambodian factory worker who is forced into prostitution after coming to Canada, says she, for one, was actually relieved when she heard that the miniseries was being written and directed by Caucasians.

"I was worried that if it were directed or written by Chinese Canadians, there would be too much sympathy," she explained at the preview screening. "I was worried that they would sweep all the drugs under the carpet, that it would be too sanitized, that they might not expose the truths. The truth is what makes a good story."