Cover Korean American filmmaker Liz Sargent, a mentee of Cape (Photo: courtesy of Liz Sargent and Cape)
Korean American filmmaker Liz Sargent, a mentee of Cape (Photo: courtesy of Liz Sargent and Cape)
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Cape, an NGO that champions AAPI artists and leaders, has been shaking up Hollywood’s storytelling for three decades. But the team feels there’s still work to be done on making representation more nuanced and global
Half-Chinese, half-Japanese American producer and writer Julie Wong recalls the day her “Chinese American, risk-averse engineer dad suggested that I try my hand at TV writing” after she had been working in politics in the US for 15 years. “I was shocked,” she says. “But he pointed out that I loved TV and I loved to write, so why not?” A few weeks later, she signed up for her first TV writing class at an NGO called Cape—the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment. It was a decision that changed her life—in 2018, her talent would lead to her being hired as a staff writer and later on co-executive producer of the hugely popular television series Grey’s Anatomy—season 20 was released in March this year.
Wong wasn’t wrong to have doubts; conversations about racial diversity and representation in the film industry weren’t as common as they are today. “I can’t recall seeing any AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] female TV characters when I was growing up. Think about the kinds of messages that sends—you’re not important, you’re not ‘normal’, you don’t need to exist,” she says.
“Shows like [1960s series] Star Trek were very popular, and there used to be a saying that there were more space aliens than Asians on [American] TV.” When the AAPI community did appear onscreen, they usually portrayed biased or denigrating stereotypes: the model minority, perpetual foreigner, dusky maiden or noble savage," says Michelle K Sugihara, Cape’s executive director. “It’s not just a silly thing that you see onscreen. It actually shapes how people view, think, feel about our communities and act. It has a direct consequence to how we’re treated in the real world.”
Above Michelle K Sugihara (Photo: courtesy of Hao Feng)
Michelle K Sugihara (Photo: courtesy of Hao Feng)
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Canadian-born Chinese Malaysian actor Osric Chau, best known for starring in Supernatural (2012-19), felt it first-hand. He grew up consuming American media that by and large did not include Asians. “That led to an internal bias against my own culture and a self-hatred that took me over a decade to [get over],” he says.
It was these observations that inspired Sugihara’s predecessors—publicist Fritz Friedman, television producer and creative executive Wenda Fong and film producer and executive Chris Lee—to set up the NGO in 1991 to champion diversity by educating, connecting and empowering AAPI artists and leaders in entertainment and media. “At the time, three senior Asian executives [in Hollywood] looked around and said, ‘There has got to be more of us’,” Sugihara says. They reached out to and created a mixer event for about 90 AAPI members working in the industry. Today, the number of beneficiaries and mentors has grown to thousands, with support from a board of directors who are industry leaders, including Bing Chen, the chairman and co-founder of the NGO Gold House, and Rina Brannen, the vice-president of development of television production company Universal Content Productions.
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Above Osric Chau on the set of ‘Supernatural’ (Photo: courtesy of Osric Chau)
Above Osric Chau (Photo: courtesy of Osric Chau)
Osric Chau on the set of ‘Supernatural’ (Photo: courtesy of Osric Chau)
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In the last 32 years, Cape has focused its efforts on three key areas. First, it organises fellowships for writers and executives, which feature writing workshops and leadership development programmes. “We realised that it’s one thing to have the talent, but if you don’t have the executives who are inside the studios championing, buying and shepherding, it’s really hard to get our stories onscreen,” Sugihara says. Second, it consults with Hollywood studios and networks on its members’ projects, “From whether it be ‘We’re thinking of buying this IP, what do you think?’, to ‘We’re staffing our writers’ room, can you help us with casting and trailer or script reviews?’. Most recently, we’re doing media training as well.” Third, it promotes projects to distributors. In this way, Cape is changing representation everywhere “from the writers’ room [and] the boardroom to the living room”.
Since Sugihara joined in 2015, she has been expanding the scope of Cape’s work. She identified animation as an increasingly popular genre due to the rise of video and online games in recent years, and one that has a huge influence on pop culture. So three years ago, she and her team launched an initiative called Cape Animation Directors Accelerator, supported by Sony Pictures Entertainment. This sees selected early-career animation directors attend one-on-one mentorship, panel talks, workshops and masterclasses given by high-level executives, producers and creatives in the animation industry to hone their skills.
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Above Michelle K Sugihara attending Golden Globes (Photo: courtesy of Michelle K Sugihara)
Michelle K Sugihara attending Golden Globes (Photo: courtesy of Michelle K Sugihara)
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The work is paying off. “At this point, we have writers on over 65 shows on every network and streamers such as Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022), [Game of Thrones prequel] House of the Dragon (2022) and Grey’s Anatomy— you name it. They’re all mainstream shows. A lot of them now have made it up the ranks and are now circling back to hire someone who just graduated from our programme,” says Sugihara. Graduates from Cape’s executive fellowship, who greenlight shows and hire cast and crew, are also diversifying the C-suite pool. “We’ve created both a vertical and horizontal feedback loop and this ecosystem where everyone behind and in front of the camera can thrive,” says Sugihara.
Adele Lim, the Malaysian screenwriter and film producer best known for writing Crazy Rich Asians (2018), has been a mentor at Cape for more than a decade. She says the NGO has been “amazing at giving the new generation of AAPI storytellers a peek behind the curtain of Hollywood, which can be a closed-off bubble for those without connections or privilege”. For Cape, she created a “mock writers’ room” that simulates a TV writing studio attended by young writers to gain practical experience and hone their talent. “The key lesson I’ve learnt here is that there is a nonstop wave of passionate, talented storytellers in our community, which has given me so much hope” for the future of the film industry, she says.
Despite seeing a greater degree of awareness in demystifying Asian identities onscreen, and the rising number of AAPI and Asian stories in recent years—Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Beef (2023), Past Lives (2023), and South Korean hit Squid Game (2021), to name the most high-profile—Lim feels “we still have a long way to go in terms of spotlighting AAPI faces as the main hero of the story”.
Above Adele Lim (middle) in a movie set (Photo: courtesy of Lionsgate)
Adele Lim (middle) in a movie set (Photo: courtesy of Lionsgate)
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Sugihara agrees. “We were just so happy to be represented onscreen, but as the conversations have [become] much more nuanced, we [need to]talk about issues like colourism.” She speaks from experience: her team was once consulting on an action-adventure film which had an all-Asian cast. But when they looked closely, all the heroes were light-skinned and the villains dark-skinned. “The studio might not have even noticed that or it might have been how the casting chips fell. But it’s something that we should have a conversation about: that we’re not a monolith.”
A fourth-generation Japanese American born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Sugihara also wants to see “more stories that aren’t so culturally imbued, but that may have some cultural touches or may just be stories about people who happen to be Asian. I’m not an immigrant; I’m not even a child of immigrants. I haven’t seen [my kind of experience] onscreen yet.”
She thinks the next step is to improve on the range of stories. “The more authentic stories we have, the more we can take off that pressure of needing to balance [the specifics of traditions and the universal],” she says. When Cape was set up, it mostly focused on Asians in America. “In more recent years, we’ve started to look more globally, as [entertainment] content itself is just becoming more global.”
Above Daniel Dae Kim and Adele Lim on the set of ‘Joy
Ride’ (Photo: courtesy of Lionsgate)
Daniel Dae Kim and Adele Lim on the set of ‘Joy Ride’ (Photo: courtesy of Lionsgate)
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Sugihara is coming up to her tenth year leading Cape next year. Her own story isn’t unlike a gripping drama itself. She started as a lawyer at the Asian Pacific American Bar Association before moving to Cape. “Lawsuits are true stories of human drama. In both fields [entertainment and law], it’s peddling and persuasion, and persuasion is facts plus emotion. If people can listen to the story, believe it and think it sounds reasonable, then you’re more likely to win,” she says, “so that has a very strong tie to what I’m doing here.”
Chau adds, “The Cape team proves over and over again the incredible force that can be generated by a dedicated few.” The “Cape graduate” is now one of many who are continuing and expanding the NGO’s efforts by helping out at community or industry events in their own cities. He is optimistic that the ripple effect will continue to spread: “When I started in this industry, the only Asian actors in Hollywood I could name were all action stars from Asia. A decade later there were a couple of us that all knew each other. Now we have a handful of bona fide stars and up-and-comers that I am constantly discovering and in awe of. Our growing talent pool on and offscreen will only continue to inspire the next generation of storytellers to allow more of our stories to be told.”
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
