Michelle Yeoh and Britain’s invisible East Asians

This week Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian to win Best Actress at the Oscars – and not by playing a wise mentor, a martial arts fighter or an exotic villain, those classic Asian pigeonholes. No, the 60-year-old played a struggling immigrant mum in the mind-bending film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which also won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Yeoh, who is Chinese-Malaysian, dedicated her acceptance speech to ‘all the little boys and girls who look like me’.

You don’t need to be little to appreciate the moment, though. For much of my life, Asians have been firmly out of the spotlight. But in the past few years, there’s been a noticeable change in Hollywood, with far more films portraying East Asians, made by talented East Asian directors. I’ve watched these films keenly, their stories helping me come to terms with my own identity and the difficulties of being a first-generation immigrant.

Here in the UK, East Asians don’t get so much screen time. After my family left China for London when I was nine, I seldom saw faces like mine on the telly. Over time, representation of other minorities has got better, but it seems that East Asians are still largely missing from public life.

How many British-East Asian politicians or newsreaders can you think of? Or actresses or novelists? There are more than half a million of us in the UK, but you can probably count the number of public figures of this heritage on two hands. There’s Alexa Chung and Gemma Chan, a couple of TV chefs and one or two MPs, but beyond that, it’s hard to think of any well-known East Asians.

I don’t doubt that prejudice once prevented people like Michelle Yeoh from succeeding in Hollywood.