From honorary whites to yellow peril: Reflections on the Golden Globes’ treatment of ‘Minari’ in a climate of heightened anti-Asian violence

On March 1st, Lee Isaac Chung’s ‘Minari’ won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes— a kind of pyrrhic victory that saw Asian-Americans once again awarded a meritocratic star of white approval. Some two weeks later, eight people, six of whom were women of East Asian descent, were murdered by a white mass shooter in three Atlanta-area spas. The proximity of these events firmly demarcate the poles of the Asian diasporic experience— a constant oscillation between the exalted stature of ‘honorary whites’ and that of perpetual foreigners travailing at the margins of society.