The Asians are coming! The Asians have landed! Suddenly China is chic. So are the more familiar Asian totems of American envy and remorse, Japan and Vietnam. The U.S. may dominate pop culture around the world, but at home there is a brisk new breeze -- a wind from the East. In films, fiction and fashion, from Madonna's video to Fendi's new perfume (Asja), the future looms in the rising sun. Go, for a start, to the movies. Or stay away, as Asian-American activists urged audiences to do when Rising Sun hit the screens. The Sean Connery thriller, which opened to yowls of bad publicity about its caustic view of Japan's business intentions in the U.S., has been a decent-size ($55 million) hit anyway. Get thee to an art house, where Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou and other sumptuous dramas directed by Zhang Yimou and starring glorious Gong Li have helped make China a new force in world cinema. Check out Hard Target, as millions of teenage boys already have. The director of this martial-arts pummeler is Hong Kong's John Woo -- the first director from Chinese-language cinema to make a Hollywood picture. With its deft skullcrackery and its breathless chase scenes, Hard Target is The Kung- Fugitive.
Now there are two, three, many Asian-style films. Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet -- an ingratiating comedy-drama about a gay Taiwanese man in New York City who gets married to please his parents -- has grossed $1 million in its first month of specialized release. This week the Toronto Film Festival opens with M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's film of the David Henry Hwang play about a tryst between a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) and a Chinese man (John Lone) whom he believes to be a woman; it opens commercially Oct. 1. This Wednesday, Wayne Wang's lovely The Joy Luck Club, a fourfold Terms of Endearment based on Amy Tan's best-selling novel about a quartet of Chinese-American families, premieres in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. "Maybe Asian is the flavor of the month," Wang says. "That taste keeps changing, but now it has coincided with the maturity of talent." Lee has a simpler explanation for the burgeoning: "Natural law. It looks like a coincidence, but nothing is a coincidence in this world."
And the hits just keep on coming. Farewell My Concubine, which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, brings its gorgeous panorama of Chinese history and sexual hysterics to U.S. screens in early October. Oliver Stone has returned to Southeast Asia to film Heaven and Earth through a Vietnamese and feminine perspective, basing his movie on the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip. And if you can't wait for the December opening of Heaven and Earth for a Vietnamese take on the ravages of war, scout around now for From Hollywood to Hanoi, a singeing documentary journey on film by Tiana Thi Tranh Nga.