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. "Members of the Chinese community can't wait to watch it and expect to be infuriated by the stereotypes," Nancy Nam-Ju Han writes in Ricepaper magazine, a Vancouver-based quarterly about Asian Canadian culture that details the controversy in its current issue. 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.
"Throwing money into a drama themed specifically on criminals of the Chinese Canadian variety is subtle and devious wanton racism and is utterly unforgivable," said one of the anonymous community leaders Leung later canvassed for opinion and whose comments are quoted in the Ricepaper article.
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.
