How K-dramas are teaching Asian men what Hollywood can’t
While Western media often stereotypes Asian men, Asian content portrays them as multifaceted people in touch with their emotions
"The Dream Life of Mr. Kim," features a middle-aged man questioning everything he worked for, and includes a lot of tears.
Netflix
Words by Sanaphay Rattanavong
While in college and graduate school in the late aughts and 2010s in the Urbana-Champaign area of Illinois, Munyun Cai enjoyed Western media—which was a buffet compared to his home country of China, where there was less access.
As a comedy fan, the 33 year old has no problem laughing at himself. But the chuckles didn't materialize when he came across Ken Jeong’s character in The Hangover (2009), an emasculated, vulgar, and heavily accented criminal-buffoon leaning more into the yellowface of Mr. Yunioshi (Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961) than a supposedly reclaimed Long Duk Dong (Sixteen Candles, 1984). “It's definitely not good,” Cai reflects. “It's a little humiliating, right? There's not a lot of portrayals of Asian males, and if the only few times I see it, they're showing us as a ridiculous type of clown, it doesn't feel very good.”
He adds, “I would rather you just don't give us anything at all,” echoing the well-worn adage of “if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.” “The only time Asians show up, you portray an uglier version of the Asian male. If you give me a bad version of us, I don't really feel comfortable.”
He isn't alone in that sentiment. Across North America, Asian diasporic men are making a quiet exodus from Western platforms and content that have spent more than a century teaching them that they're invisible at best, ridiculous at worst. They're finding what therapists call “representation refuge” in Asian-created content. And what they're discovering isn't just better representation. It's a better model of what it means to be a man.
A century-long crisis
“Asian American men have been portrayed for over a century as weak, emasculated, asexual beings, never the lead character, never the romantic lead,” explains Kevin Nadal, professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University of New York, and a leading expert on microaggressions. That century of messaging doesn't just shape how others see men of Asian descent, but how they see themselves.
The mental health toll is staggering. Asian American young adults ages 15–24 are the only racial group in the United States for whom suicide is the leading cause of death, even as overall suicide rates in the community remain lower than for some other racialized groups. When you ask mental health professionals why, they point to exactly what Cai describes: the psychological weight of being rendered either invisible or ridiculous. “When you see yourself, you're validated,” Nadal says. “When you don't, you internalize that you're insignificant.” He experienced this firsthand growing up Filipino American. “I remember from a very young age, being embarrassed by my parents' accents, being embarrassed by the cultural foods that I ate,” he recalls. Leaving for school created “a sort of shame for that,” even as he loved his family at home.
The research backs the insight that representation directly impacts self-esteem, identity formation, and mental health outcomes. But for Asian American men, the overwhelming majority of Western media doesn't offer representation so much as a rigged choice: you can be missing, or you can be a joke.
Only 3.4 percent of Hollywood lead or co-lead roles go to Asian Pacific Islander actors, and when Asian men do appear, 58 percent are shown without a romantic partner—a far higher rate than for Asian women. Most of those roles still fall into familiar stereotypes such as emasculated sidekicks, martial arts villains, or nerdy overachievers.
The great content migration
For 31-year-old Danmeng Yin, who grew up in China but has lived in the greater Toronto area for years, the shift happened gradually, then all at once. “Years ago, Hollywood and those Western films used to be super good,” he says. “But recently the Western thing has become overly repetitive, people getting bored of it. And then there's a lot of very fantastic Chinese movies.” So he went looking for what felt close. South Korean dramas. Chinese films. Content in which Asian men aren't playing assimilated versions of themselves for Western approval, but are simply men. “They don't feel like authentic Asian people. They're just like Asian Western people,” he explains about Asian men in Western media. “It just doesn't feel close to me.”
Jeanie Chang, a licensed marriage and family therapist and founder of the K-drama-focused mental health platform Noona's Noonchi, has seen this same realization transform her clients. “It's not a Korean drama unless you have a guy cry,” she says. “And men have told me from across races and cultures, they appreciate that.”
She points to The Dream Life of Mr. Kim, a 2025 drama about a middle-aged man questioning everything he worked for, including his prestigious career and his definitions of success. “What does success mean? I thought it was a brilliant portrayal of a man,” Chang says. “Lots of tears.” Men tell her about watching Extraordinary Attorney Woo and realizing, “The dad is just so loving. I'm not like that to my daughter, right? So I want to be better.”
Men—Asian and non-Asian alike—tell her they feel genuine relief watching male characters cry, because those scenes give them permission to be emotionally available in ways Western media has spent billions of dollars teaching them are weak.
Within this permission structure, Chang walks her clients through Korean cultural concepts that reframe masculinity entirely, such as jeong, a bond of affection that's generous and purely platonic, nothing owed or transactional. “Two strangers can have a bond like in My Mister that's unbreakable, that's understandable, that's not sexual,” Chang explains. “Generous and kind thanks to an affection and a bond that's purely platonic.” Another example is han, the ability to hold grief, bitterness, and sorrow without violence or suppression. Chang literally wrote the book on such therapeutic frameworks: How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life: Powerful Lessons on Belongingness, Healing, and Mental Health ( 2024).
Validation as medicine
The stereotypically emasculated Asian male in Western media transforms entertainment preferences into therapeutic interventions. When Asian American men describe watching Korean dramas or Chinese films, whether they use the exact word or not, they repeatedly point to one particular concept. “The biggest thing about watching a story is being validated,” Chang explains. “That validation is what can change a life.” She's not exaggerating. In clinical terms, validation—seeing yourself reflected as complex, worthy, and fully human—is fundamental to mental health. Its absence undermines identity formation. Its presence unlocks possibility. “When you're lonely and you see yourself, even though it's on television, it helps you feel less alone,” Chang says.
She has built an entire therapeutic practice around this principle. She leads K-drama tours, facilitates group discussions, and watches men process emotions they didn't know they were allowed to feel. She says men tell her, “After watching that Korean drama and being here in Korea, I want to be a better husband, better father.”
When I ask what shape he hopes the media landscape will take as his own young children are coming of age, Nadal says simply, “I would just like them to be able to find media that matches what their actual interests are.” Not just representation that technically includes them. “The reality is people of all backgrounds deserve to have choices in the media that they consume.”
What looks like retreat is actually reclamation: of cultural values that honor compassion over conquest, of models of masculinity that allow for tears, of identity that doesn't require Western approval to feel whole.
“Vulnerability is so misunderstood, especially in the Asian community,” Chang says. “Just because we say you were vulnerable doesn't mean you are weak. Actually I see vulnerability as this huge strength when you can be honest about your feelings.” K-dramas model exactly that strength.
What comes after refuge
So where does this go? Is a generation of Asian American men finding better masculinity models in K-dramas a victory or an indictment?
Both. And that's exactly the point.
Netflix has responded to market demand with a massive investment in South Korean content ($2.5 billion was earmarked in 2023, on top of $1.2 billion earmarked in 2021). But corporate response isn't systemic change. Asian American men shouldn't have to migrate to K-dramas to learn that crying doesn't make you weak, that compassion is strength, that their stories deserve to be told without white translation.
Nadal is optimistic but realistic. He points to Zohran Mamdani's election as New York City's mayor—a South Asian Muslim representing the United States' largest city by population—as proof that possibility is expanding. “When you see yourself, it demonstrates that we do have possibilities out there,” he says. Representation doesn't just reflect reality; it creates it.
But possibility isn't enough if it requires constant individual curation. The men seeking representation refuge aren't waiting for Hollywood to catch up. They're actively building their own media diets, finding communities, reconnecting with cultural values that were devalued in the West.
Yin, who now consumes primarily Chinese content, already worries about children he doesn't yet have. “That's one of my concerns about my kid,” he says. “I personally definitely want them to be, ‘At least you gotta learn Mandarin, you gotta be more Chinese.’ But would that also hinder them from blending into Canadian society? That's something I don't know.”
When mainstream platforms and media fail you for more than a century, it's untenable, even pathological, to wait another century for meaningful change that may or may not materialize. You find where you're already whole, to the extent that exists. You train your algorithm to surface your humanity—not as a gesture of escape, but of survival. This, in our media reality, is what self-determination looks like when institutions refuse to grant it.
Published on March 9, 2026
Words by Sanaphay Rattanavong
Sanaphay Rattanavong is a versatile writer and educator with a deep passion for arts and culture. With a diverse background in arts, culture, mental health, science communication, and technology, his work spans from journalism to fiction writing. He has received various grants and awards for his contributions to the arts and cultural discourse, including the Walker Art Center Twin Cities BIPOC Artist Grant, selected by The SEAD Project (Southeast Asian Diaspora), and the Artist's Initiative Grantee from the Minnesota State Arts Board. He currently resides in Toronto, Ontario. More of his work can be enjoyed at: https://sanaphay.portfolio.site/.