On my quest to consume more non-American, Asian-ish television, I started watching a Canadian mini-series about Chinese triad gangs in Vancouver called Dragon Boys. I’m a half hour in and everything seems just a little bit “off.” My expectations are calibrated around a fairly narrow (or perhaps overly broad?) Southern Californian/Chinese-American sensibility, which is being flummuxed by the inherent Canadian-ness of the show. Here are a few examples.
First, race. Everyone is either Asian or white; there have been no blacks or Hispanics. I shouldn’t find this weird since Dragon Boys is largely about Chinese-Canadians, but I do because it’s also about gangs. Thanks to the demographics of Southern California and the regional press, every time I think of gangs, I think in terms of black or brown. I blame the LA Times. Apparently to make up for the lack of diversity, the filmmakers had all the white people in the show speak in Ebonics…badly.
Second, relationships, particularly of the romantic variety. Every interracial couple depicted so far (three) has consisted of an Asian male paired with a white female. That, too, is just weird because the more popular pairing in America would feature an Asian female and a white guy…for whatever reason.
Finally, guns. So far, there haven’t been any. People get beaten with bats and chopped with cleavers, but no one has had a bullet planted in their skull. How can you have a show about gangs without guns? Gun control may or may not be a good thing for society in general, but it’s definitely horrible for pop entertainment. (Perhaps the best argument for a libertarian reading of the Second Amendment yet.) Anyway, the dearth of guns doesn’t disturb me too much since I fully expect the filmmakers to find a way to either work around strict national gun control laws or ignore them altogether, a la Hong Kong cinema.