a. A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point.

Slaying The Dragon and The Slanted Screen are both notably missing LGBTQ representation. Saving Face presents a crisis to the canon of “acceptable” Asian American cinema.

While The Slanted Screen and Slaying The Dragon confront racist stereotypes of Asian Americans, and highlight some of the positive and multi-dimensional characters of recent times, they are firmly grounded in a “we’re just like you” approach to staking their claim in American nationality. The average American is not only white, they are heterosexual, and both films fail to engage with alternate sexuality, embodiments, or non-nuclear conceptions of family. Saving Face presents a crisis to the respectability politics of Asian American cinema, forcing us to acknowledge who is or isn’t being represented on screen.

Saving Face revolves around internal crises. Both Wil and her mother (Gao) struggle with their transgressions of cultural norms relating to sexuality. Gao is unmarried and pregnant with a much younger man’s child; Will is gay and confronting her internalized homophobia. Keeping in mind the above definition of crisis, these characters are at a turning point, at a crisis of choosing to live authentically, or “saving face”. In Orientals, Lee describes the immigration of Asians to the United States as initiating several crises: of boundaries, of the domestic sphere, and racial purity. Chinese immigrants caused a crisis in the domestic Victorian family, “an alternative or imagined sexuality that was potentially subversive and disruptive to the emergent heterosexual orthodoxy” (88).  Wil and Gao both embody sexualities that are subversive to the traditional Chinese American family.