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  • Charlotte Chow
    • Aug 31, 2021

Nicole Kidman and Expats: An insensitive, poorly-timed series


Who is Nicole Kidman?

Nicole Kidman is an award-winning Australian actress who has won five Golden Globes, a British Academy Film Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has also starred in a variety of television episodes and films, the most well-known of which are Big Little Lies (2017), To Die For (1995), and Birth (2004). Recently, she came to Hong Kong to film the new Amazon Prime series The Expats, bypassing quarantine protocols and being granted exemption.


What happened?

Two days after her arrival in Hong Kong, she was spotted shopping at the COS boutique in Central and filming in a hotel instead of staying in quarantine for 21 days. Despite Hong Kong's strict quarantine rules and the novel Delta Variant outbreak in Australia, Nicole Kidman and her crew were exempted from quarantine, with the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau (CEDB) stating that her “designated professional work” is “conducive to maintaining the necessary operation and development of Hong Kong’s economy.”


Given that Australia was still categorized as "low risk" upon her arrival in Hong Kong on August 12th, Kidman and her crew should have been subject to quarantine conditions depending on their vaccination statuses: If they were fully vaccinated, they would be required to undergo 7 days of mandatory quarantine in a designated hotel, along with 2 covid tests as well as self-monitoring in the following 7 days. If they were not fully vaccinated, they would have been required to undergo 14 days of mandatory quarantine in a designated hotel, along with 4 covid tests as well as self-monitoring in the following 7 days.


Nicole Kidman not only skipped 14 days of mandatory quarantine but she and her crew did not get tested for Covid. Despite experiencing an almost two-year pandemic, she showed an appalling lack of self-awareness and proceeded to go shopping in Central almost immediately after landing. This not only puts tens of thousands of citizens at risk of getting infected with the Covid-19 but even worse, the crew may be unwitting carriers of the Delta variant, which is more infectious than other strains. Being the 8th most densely populated city in the world, an outbreak of the Delta variant in Hong Kong would be devastating and could potentially bring about another round of lockdowns and school suspensions.


The cultural insensitivity of Expats

Expats is based on the 2016 novel The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee, a Hong Kong-born American author who is ethnically Korean. The story follows three American expats in Hong Kong whose lives get intertwined after an incident. Mercy, a young Korean American woman, is torn apart by a tragic occurrence in her past; Hilary, an affluent housewife, is concerned by her inability to conceive; and Margaret, a happily married mother of three, is torn between her maternal and paternal identities following the disappearance of her child.


The expats' struggles are not to be shrugged off lightly, but the novel, and presumably the show, do not fully represent Hong Kong or its rich culture and history. In fact, not only is Hong Kong reduced to an exotic backdrop for the plot but the expats' perception of themselves as "superior" to local Hongkongers makes the story more of a conceptualization of white privilege. This was a missed opportunity to showcase scenes of bridging differences between the local and expat communities or better yet, tell the stories of the locals instead of the privileged and wealthy. The author and screenwriters are certainly entitled to make soap opera-esque works set in Hong Kong, but in a time when many are dealing with health or financial issues as a result of the pandemic, it seems especially ignorant to create a show about well-off expats that live in luxury and are largely detached from local issues.


The production crew and casting decisions

Aside from the aforementioned problem, another glaring issue is the fact that none of the confirmed producers or actors are Hongkongers. 4 out of 6 confirmed executive producers are Caucasian, while the director, Lulu Wang, is a Beijing-born Chinese American. Without any Hongkongers in the production crew, it’s doubtful whether the nuances in Hong Kong culture can be accurately conveyed. Moreover, among the 4 confirmed cast members, only 1, Ji-young Yoo, is Asian. It could be argued that this was because the original story featured no local characters that had a significant role, but TV adaptations don’t have to be 100% faithful to the source material; in fact, changes are often made to improve or reimagine the original story. The show could have been an opportunity for underrated actors from Hong Kong to showcase their talents on a global stage, but instead, Hong Kong will likely be portrayed through a heavily whitewashed lens.


In a nutshell, Kidman not only came to Hong Kong disobeying the regulations and putting millions of lives at risk, but she also did so just to produce and star in a show that completely glamorizes Hong Kong and is directed by someone who is not necessarily the right person to “grapple with the cultural specificities of Hong Kong”, to quote the director’s tweet about Lang Lang’s biopic being directed by a Caucasian man.

 

Sources

 

Writer: Charlotte Chow

Editor: Rachel Yu

Artists: Irish Felix, Pihu Agarwal

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