Crazy Rich Asians is certifiably the movie of the summer. Since its opening in mid-August, the film has won both critical and fan acclaim thanks to its highly obsess-able plot line, incredible fashion, and its casting (it was the first cast to feature actors who were all of Asian descent since 1993’s Joy Luck Club). And it’s making a boatload of money to boot: The movie raked in more than $26 million over its opening weekend and has held the No. 1 box office spot in the U.S. ever since—and now, it’s set to make box office history again.
The movie’s expected to make up to an additional $30 million by the end of the Labor Day weekend, which means it will be the best performing movie over the holiday in more than a decade. The only other film to make $30 million over Labor Day holiday was 2007’s Halloween, according to Business Insider,.
But that’s not all. According to Forbes, the movie has already surpassed other major romantic comedy winners including 2015’s Trainwreck, 2016’s Bad Moms, and 2017’s Girls Trip—meaning it’s now one of the biggest romantic comedies in recent film history. All it needs to do now is surpass 2002’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which made $283 million.
To date, Crazy Rich Asians has grossed more than $111 million at the domestic box office—and you can bet there’s a sequel or two coming our way. According to Rolling Stone, Warner Bros. has already obtained the rights to author Kevin Kwan’s follow-up novels China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems. Director Jon M. Chu will return to helm the production of China Rich Girlfriends, though there’s no official word yet on casting or a release date. But at least this way you still have plenty of time to read all the books—and obsess over the wardrobes of incredible couture—first.
If you’ve ever had to drag a space heater into your cubicle or resort to that workplace Snuggie tucked under your desk to beat the office chill, New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon understands how you feel.
Nixon, the SATC alum up against Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, sparked a conversation we didn’t know we needed over office thermostats when her team requested that event organizers turn up the heat (literally) at Wednesday night’s scheduled debate between the two, hosted by New York station WCBS-TV.
Cuomo reportedly prefers his AC blasting high, but because Nixon refuses to shiver through her first and only debate with New York’s current governor, she’s asking for a comfortable 76 degrees. According to The New York Times, Nixon strategist Rebecca Katz wrote to WCBS-TV with the request, noting that working conditions are “notoriously sexist when it comes to room temperature, so we just want to make sure we’re all on the same page here.”
In other words, blame the patriarchy for your chattering teeth.
The idea of sexist room temperatures has now ignited a Cold Room War of sorts. The conversation is, in part, a matter of workplace attire deemed appropriate for men and women: Men can usually don a suit and feel perfectly comfortable in an arctic room. But for anyone who shows up for a 9-to-5 in a dress or a skirt, office climate quickly becomes an issue.
Kerry Howley, a professor at the University of Iowa, shared her perspective on Twitter and with the Times, saying that she feels like “cold office temperatures are a burden that are placed on women.”
“I feel like it affects performance in a way that is surprising to people. I become less effusive, less articulate, less extroverted when I’m uncomfortable with the temperature,” she added. Other women also chimed in quickly: “Cynthia Nixon asks for the debate hall to be 76 degrees, and I’m sitting here in my work Snuggie wondering if this is actually the opening salvo of the revolution,” writer Monica Hesse shared.
While the discussion may feel heated on the Internet, Governor Cuomo’s camp responded to the whole situation with a statement that can be best described as, well, chilly:
“Unlike Cynthia Nixon, the Governor has more important things to focus on than the temperature of a room,” Lis Smith, a Cuomo campaign spokeswoman told The Hill.
Nixon, for her part, isn’t letting this get in her way. She told Refinery 29 that she’ll debate Cuomo in a parka if she has to. We’re sure anyone sitting at their desk, wrapped in a blanket while doing their job effectively, can relate.
The film, which officially hit theaters in the U.S. on Friday, has been receiving a surplus of positive acclaim from both audiences and critics alike. Thanks to the movie’s cast of actors, who are all of East Asian descent—the first such cast in far too long—and aesthetically staggering sets (not to mention the incredible clothes), Hollywood’s standard rom-com formula got what seems to be a much-needed changeup.
Taking to Instagram, the film’s star, Constance Wu, immediately showed her excitement after learning how well the film was being received. “#crazyrichasians is certified fresh…. and I can’t believe we’re playing in the DOME! Amazing. Thank you everyone for all your love and support.”
But Wu wasn’t the only person to express her happiness over how the film turned out—particularly with respect to its ability to break boundaries in the Hollywood inclusion arena. On Friday, the Asian Voices editor at the Huffington Post, Kimberly Yam, took to Twitter to explain, in an emotional eight-part thread, exactly what seeing a cast of predominantly East Asian descent in the film meant to her.
“You’re 8 years old. Your 3rd grade class orders chinese food & your father delivers it. You are so excited to see your pops in school. He’s your hero. But apparently other kids don’t think he’s so cool. They laugh at him and mimic his accent. You don’t want to be Chinese anymore,” she begins—continuing through a series of difficult moments throughout her life when she felt ashamed of her Chinese ethnicity while growing up in the U.S.
Concludes Yam in her last tweet: “You’re 25 years old. You see a movie with an all-asian cast at a screening and for some reason you’re crying and you can’t stop. You’ve never seen a cast like this in Hollywood. Everyone is beautiful. You’re so happy you’re Chinese. #CrazyRichAsians #RepresentationMatters”
Crazy Rich Asians hasn’t even hit theaters yet, but it’s already slated to make movie history. The film, starring Constance Wu and Henry Golding, almost cast a white female in the leading role, but thanks to the author of the source material, Kevin Kwan, that’s not happening—and it’s a major win for representation.
Supporters of the movie, though, don’t just want Asian Americans to feel seen; they want it to slay at the box office. That’s why there’s a hashtag circling on Twitter right now, #GoldOpen, that’s all about making sure people buy a ticket to Crazy Rich Asians for its opening weekend.
It started when Crazy Rich Asians director Jon Chu said the film is “more than just a movie,” but a “movement.” That prompted digital media entrepreneur Bing Chen to take action. “EVERY MOVEMENT NEEDS ITS MAFIA,” he tweeted. “That’s why 100+ of us have bought out theaters to give #CrazyRichAsians a #GoldOpen. Join us and buy your tickets NOW for opening week on @Fandango.com.”
More theaters and influencers followed suit after Chen’s tweet. “We’ve joined the #GoldOpen movement and bought out a whole theater at the @alamodrafthouse for our #crazyrichaustin VIPs! #crazyrichasians,” the Austin Asian American Film Festival tweeted shortly after Chen’s initial proposal.
It’s frustrating some people in Hollywood still think minority-led films can’t be financially successful, despite the fact that’s been proved wrong many, many times. (Please see Get Out and Girls Trip for just two recent examples.) Hopefully, a killer weekend for Crazy Rich Asians will shut that notion down for good. The film hits theaters everywhere August 15.
We meet 12 months into her gubernatorial bid, but Gwen Graham has not tired of the political rigmarole.
Graham proffers a firm handshake. She peppers me with questions—and listens with such attention to the answers that I feel like she’s prepared to be quizzed. In a deep blue pantsuit, with her warm attitude, she exudes the same calm command that the best CEOs and leaders (and moms) do. And like the most successful of the women who assume those positions (hip to the realities of what it means to be female in public), Gwen Graham is prepared to tick off her (extensive) credentials.
A prominent gubernatorial candidate in Florida, Graham was born in the state she seeks to represent. She has lent her talents to three progressive presidential candidates and worked in her local school district. In 2014, she ran for a seat in the United States House of Representatives and won it, becoming one of the few Democrats nationwide to beat an incumbent Republican that November.
But it’s her tenure on the cutthroat PTA that she seems most proud of when we sit down earlier this month. “I was the president!” she tells me. She leans forward and whispers, like she has a secret. “Some people think that’s the hardest job I’ve ever had.”
For over a decade, Graham was a PTA mom, a band mom, a school pick-up and let-me-look-at-that-homework mom. Until she had her first child—up to the minute, in fact, given that she went into labor at her desk—she’d worked at Andrews Kurth, a law firm in Washington, D.C. But with an hours-old infant in her arms, she decided to become a full-time parent. It was a “position,” as she puts it, that she held while she raised two more children.
When she did return to the workforce, it wasn’t law that drew her back; it was politics. In 2003, with her children grown, she became an advisor on her father’s presidential bid. (She is the daughter of former Florida Gov. Bob Graham.) When he dropped out of that race, she volunteered her services to candidates Howard Dean and eventual nominee John Kerry. After a stint with her school district in Tallahassee, Graham decided to run for office with her own name on the ticket, much to the bewilderment of most people she knew. It was 2014, one of the grimmest election seasons for new Democrats nationwide.
“I’m a mom, first and foremost,” she insists. But the time she spent at home wasn’t a complete break with her career. As she tells it, it was a kind of leadership bootcamp. She’d become an expert dealmaker, a person both able to stand on principle and prepared to compromise. She knew how to balance interests that sometimes competed for attention and resources. She’d come to feel like she’d mastered one of the secret skills motherhood—the ability to be in several places at once.
PHOTO: Gwen Graham.
Graham and her daughter, Sarah.
“It was an asset,” she concludes. And in 2014, the constituents who elected her seemed to feel the same. Her success meant, perhaps, that the public didn’t need to “see past” a woman’s choice to become a stay-at-home mom. It was motherhood as a bona fide for public service, and Graham isn’t alone in her intention to tout it.
All across the United States, mothers of small children, some of whom work from home or not at all, have decided to run for office to noticeable effect, despite studies that show that some voters don’t believe women with children can balance their public and personal responsibilities. (On the heels of the 2016 presidential race, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation released a report in which researchers found that voters still express deep concerns over how women candidates with small children would fare in elected positions.) The task ahead of them is formidable: re-enter the workforce in a position that doesn’t offer flexible hours or any kind of a structure that lets staff work from home—instead, these women will be on the trail, as candidates for public office.
But whatever the odds, these moms want in. “Maybe there’s a little bit of an initial obstacle to overcome,” allows Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List. But mothers who run for office, she continues, have a unique perspective to share in political races. Motherhood can be a boon to female candidates because it gives them an authoritative voice on all the issues that matter most this election season: health care, education, the opioid crisis, student loans.
These are women who’ve taken their kids to hospitals, lost children to violence and addiction, served in the armed forces or supported spouses who did. From the women who compelled us not to drink and drive, to the ones who want to overhaul gun laws, mothers command moral attention. And “relatable,” that exhausted, but still essential buzzword in politics, is a descriptor mothers earn with relative ease, Schriock explains. “These women have the lived experiences that families and communities in their districts and states care about. You just can’t overlook that.”
For Kristina Lodovisi, a candidate for the Michigan State Senate and a combat veteran, her children—three and one, along with a 10-year-old stepdaughter—are central to her pitch to voters. When she meets with people in her district, she explains how it was her armed forces experience that prepared her for motherhood, and her time at home with her children that drove her into this race. In Afghanistan, she tells them she learned to wake up in the middle of the night, to make decisions fast, to prioritize. With little children, she realized what it means to be a role model, and moreover, what it means to be an advocate.
PHOTO: Kristina Lodovisi
Kristina Lodovisi and her children.
Hers are transferable skills, and she didn’t have to hone them in the traditional political machine. “It helps, I think, to come at this from a different perspective,” Lodovisi adds when I reach her over the phone. “A lot of these career politicians, other moms don’t feel aligned with them.” When she looks around her district, she sees women like her, who want a better education for their children, more resources, fewer potholes. It’s a simple calculus, familiar to listeners of bedtime stories nationwide: “It’s up to moms to save the world.”
From the women who compelled us not to drink and drive, to the ones who want to overhaul gun laws, mothers command moral attention.
Lindsy Judd didn’t have quite so grand a scale in mind when she started to take her kids out for walks in Reno, Nevada, where she is now vying to be county commissioner. She just wanted somewhere to sit. In an effort to clean up downtown Reno, the city had just passed new laws to fend off loiterers and trash accumulation. As a result, when Judd needed a rest, there were “zero benches, not one.” She decided to look into it, and the more she learned about the ordinances that had been approved, the angrier she became. A city, she explains, should be built with real people in mind. She started to feel like her representatives didn’t have a keen sense of what women like her needed. Or for that matter, what their children needed. A progressive, she started to drop into local Democratic Party confabs, but was disappointed to find that no one else had children with them. Her kids are one and three; they’re loud. More than once, Judd remembers, volunteers would shush them in the halls.
PHOTO: Lindsy Judd
Lindsy Judd and her son.
“It’s hard,” she admits. “You don’t want to be a disturbance, but at the same time, shouldn’t Democrats want people in their twenties and thirties in the room?” The more time Judd spent with local officials, the more she’d have to call her own mother to have her pick up the kids. There was nowhere for them to sit. The room was too hot or crowded. People wanted them to quiet. She wasn’t offended, exactly. Just bemused. How could the people she voted for be so out of touch with middle-class families? No wonder so few of them seemed concerned about the crisis in access to childcare. The issue didn’t even touch them. She mulled it over: What if she ran? “I realized I wanted to be a representative for people who felt like they couldn’t participate, like there was nowhere for them in the room.”
Both Lodovisi and Judd have attended VoteRunLead summits, all-day events that train women to run for office. The last time VoteRunLead held a national session, 41 percent of attendees were moms. The sessions impressed upon Judd in particular that if she wanted to win, she’d need to be honest about the challenges of full-time motherhood. It’s true, Judd concludes, that she has to endure different and more personal queries than her opponents. She’s noticed that people are more skeptical. They want her to prove that she’s up to the responsibilities of this office. But Judd isn’t fazed: “It means I research a lot more to compensate. I tend to pull out more facts and statistics. I like to surprise them with just how much I know.”
But the hurdles that full-time moms have to clear in elections aren’t just political. As Lodovisi knows, the simple coordination (not to mention the financial responsibilities) of childcare becomes a serious impediment. A recent Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision could ease at least that burden.
Earlier this month, the commission ruled that a congressional candidate in New York could use campaign funds to cover the cost of childcare for her two children. Over two dozen members of Congress and Hillary Clinton had written letters to support the petition, in which Liuba Grechen Shirley contended to the FEC that her childcare-related expenses were the direct consequence of her bid for elected office. After the FEC approved her bid, she said she wanted to see the decision drive more mothers, especially those that are responsible for the care of small children, to run for office. Our government, she said, is “desperately” in need of women “who understand firsthand what it’s like to balance a checkbook while raising children.”
Gwen Graham’s children are older, but scores of her supporters are still in the throes of new motherhood. A few months back, a woman came over to meet her at an event in Fort Lauderdale. She wanted to tell Graham that she was and remains a Republican, but that she intended to vote for Graham in the gubernatorial race. (To reach it, Graham will first have to win a competitive primary contest in late August.) The woman, a stay-at-home mom herself, was tired of the current political deadlock and repelled by the message it sent her kids—that to get ahead, they should shut down people who don’t agree with them. She told Graham she saw her vote as a teachable moment; “that in this next election, we will elect people who are committed, who want to break through this negative environment.” Graham, who declares she has “a genetic predisposition for optimism” and boasted of her daughter’s impressive position in the school band (drum major, thank you very much), promised the woman she shared her aims.
“Well,” the woman said, “then I can’t wait to vote for the first female governor of Florida.”
This year, I ran for a seat on Illinois’ Cook County Board of Commissioners in the second largest county in the U.S., which includes the city of Chicago. It’s a district that is larger than 28 states. I made national headlines in this era of a record number of first-time female candidates: At 20, I was the youngest and first Pakistani Muslim person to ever run for this seat, and I campaigned against the male incumbent who has held the position for 16 years. I wanted to change the status quo, shake up the system, and challenge some of the preconceived notions of what a “politician” looks like. My policy ideas included increasing the minimum wage, heightening awareness of county programs, and decriminalizing marijuana.
Before running I interned for a Republican senator’s reelection campaign. When someone on that campaign asked me to run for office, my initial reaction was: no way. I didn’t think I was old enough; I didn’t think I could manage a campaign while going to college; and I certainly didn’t think I was qualified—I’d never seen a Muslim woman in elected office. But I remember while I was interning for that senator, I asked voters survey questions, and one of them was: On a scale from one to ten, how fearsome are you of an Islamic terror attack on U.S soil? The answer, almost unanimously, was 10. I talked to people who not only didn’t agree with my politics (I’m a Democrat), but were scared of me. I found out many of them responded that way because I was the first Muslim person they’d ever met.
I took a step back and recognized that I was old enough to run, and that a lot of the things that go into campaigning (like going to events and talking to people) were things I was already doing as a community organizer.
I lost my election in March, but I still made history: I registered more than 2,000 people to vote, and 30 percent of my votes came from people who voted for the first time. I realized that when people are informed, they want to use their voice. Some other things I learned from my experience as a first-time office-seeker:
People were obsessed with my Muslim identity as a political candidate.
Growing up post 9/11 as a Muslim woman who wears the hijab, I’m hyper-aware of my identity. While I was running, the first thing most people wanted to talk about was how I wore the hijab. Most of the time, the questions were fueled by innocent curiosity, but it distracted the message of my campaign. People were excited to see a Muslim woman running for office and focused on that—more than they did my policy ideas.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Bushra Amiwala
Amiwala at a campaign event.
Almost every article written about my campaign mentioned that I was Muslim. In one article that debriefed a debate between my two male opponents, it noted: “Amiwala wore a stylish, light pink hijab.” No one mentioned what the two men were wearing.
Everyone doubted me, even people from my own community.
Within a week of filing my paperwork to run, I got a call from a man active in area politics to come meet at his office. I was so excited, and was looking forward to what he’d say when we met.
“Almost every article written about my campaign mentioned that I was Muslim. In one article that debriefed a debate between my two male opponents, it noted: “Amiwala wore a stylish, light pink hijab.” No one mentioned what the two men were wearing.”
“Don’t run for this position. I say you drop out,” he told me in our meeting. I was stunned; it was the last thing I expected to hear.
I was broken in the moment, but his doubt ended up serving as the fuel that ignited the fire in my campaign. But I faced more hurdles: When I reached out to the local mosque, most of the men there had no idea what to do with me running for office, and didn’t know how to support me. Many of them didn’t take what I was saying seriously.
Other women and first-time voters are essential to grassroots campaigns.
From the beginning of my campaign, I sought the support of the marginalized: mobilizing hundreds of first-time voters—young people, people of color and people from immigrant communities.
“Why bother engaging groups of people who do not matter?” political experts said to me. “Those people will not vote for you, and they won’t vote against you—they won’t donate a single dollar to your campaign.”
Well guess what? They did show up. Over 400 of “those people” came out to my second fundraising dinner where I was able to out-fundraise the incumbent by three times the amount.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Bushra Amiwala
Amiwala with some of her campaign volunteers.
I personally registered thousands of “those people” to vote for the first time. I spoke to every high school in my district and oftentimes left with hundreds of email addresses from young people eager to register. I led a voter registration drive at our mosque, and hosted an event specifically for people in the South Asian community. At that event, we looked up attendees’ polling locations, and made sure every single one of them were registered to cast their ballot.
Running against a man who was already part of the establishment was one of the most difficult political challenges that I could have taken on. But as a first-time candidate, I learned that other women were my most important allies.
Early on, I reached out to one woman at the mosque who I didn’t know very well; I texted her that I was running for office, and she called me about 10 minutes later. She mentioned how she normally stays away from politics, but that she had an abundance of materials and resources to share with me. She helped me with every aspect of my campaign from assisting me financially to introducing me to people in her network who later became invaluable. I am so appreciative of that sisterhood that I tapped into. As we enter a crazy midterms season with many women running, my story is proof that women can and do lift other women up.
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