Beijing, China – Frankie Huang could not hide her excitement when she heard that Hollywood blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians was going to be screened in China. For the Beijing-born, US-raised writer, the story of the daughter of a Chinese-American immigrant going to Singapore to meet her fiancee’s traditional Asian family hit close to home.

“The thing that moved me most wasn’t the love story,” says says Huang, 31. “The real fairy tale is for someone from the traditional culture to really understand an immigrant.”

A Shanghai resident, Huang was eager to see how the film – based on the first book of a three-part series by Singaporean-US author Kevin Kwan – would be received on the mainland. It presented, she said, an opportunity for Chinese audiences to learn about and feel a connection to the wider Asian diaspora, and “feel part of this family”.

The first Hollywood movie to feature an all-Asian cast for 25 years, the last being Joy Luck Club in 1993, Crazy Rich Asians was a global box-office smash, generating more than $230m worldwide. It has been hailed as a major step forward for Asian representation in Hollywood, with 2019 Golden Globe nominations for Best Movie and Constance Wu rounding out the trilogy’s rapturous launch this year.

But in China, where the film opened on November 30 under the title An Unexpected Tale of Picking Gold, the response was starkly different.

Since its release, Crazy Rich Asians has only grossed $1.5m in China, an “atrocious” performance, according to independent China film industry consultant Jonathan Papish.

“It ranks in the bottom half of all films released in the country this year,” Papish told Al Jazeera, pointing out that the film earned even less than Show Dogs, a US family comedy given a paltry 3.6/10 rating on film-ranking website IMDB, which made $2.2m.

And while internationally buzz has already been building over Crazy Rich Asians’ sequel – China Rich Girlfriend, which producers say will be filmed partly in Shanghai over the coming year – the abysmal performance of the first film at the China box office suggests dubious prospects for the series in the world’s fastest-growing film market.

“My advice is just to make the movie for its core market,” Papish said, referring to the sequel.

Online criticism

Zhao Yi, manager of Shanghai’s Premiere Cinema, said she was shocked by how few tickets Crazy Rich Asians sold. “It’s doing far worse than I expected. I saw the film in advance and thought its box office would be at least RMB200m ($29m).”

While most cinemas in the city have discontinued or drastically reduced screenings, Zhao says she’s been able to maintain viewings at her theatre only because “it’s popular with foreigners”.

Meanwhile, Chinese cinema lovers have sharply criticised the film online. According to popular reviews posted on Chinese movie websites mtime and douban, Crazy Rich Asians wasn’t a celebration of Asian culture – it was a demonisation of it.

Many review writers took issue with the film’s extreme materialism and promiscuity. “It shows the dregs of oriental culture,” wrote one. “A film that openly exposes the ‘ugliness’ of the Chinese is being brought into our cinemas.”

While director John Chu said the film aimed to quash stereotypes of Asians, one reviewer said it propagated them, saying “all the female elders in the film are given the most stereotypical and cliche image: serious, reserved and maintaining strict control”.

Others said Crazy Rich Asians presented traditional forces, embodied by the character Eleanor (played by Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh) as villainous and backward. “The confrontation between Rachel and Eleanor – two women representing completely different countries and ideas about family, marriage and being female – ends with Rachel’s victory. It almost implies the destiny of contemporary China: thanks to the wind from the West, the old and unprogressive East is given a new life.”

For Huang, the overwhelmingly negative reviews felt like “a gut punch”. She says Chinese audiences simply failed to relate to the film’s main character, and even felt rejected by her.

“Rachel is essentially seen a race traitor. She turns up and doesn’t speak Chinese, doesn’t understand the customs etc. Because of her appearance, she’s still considered a Chinese person but one who turned her back on her culture,” says Huang.

‘Panda Express of Chinese culture’

Beijing-based filmmaker Stanley Tsang says scenes where lead male Nick Young (played by English-Malaysian actor Henry Golding) speaks Mandarin with a foreign accent might have also been off-putting.

He says the same happened Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, a Mandarin-language King-fu epic directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee which was a major global hit but suffered a similar fate at the box office when it was released on the mainland in 2000.

“Cantonese was the actors’ first language, not Mandarin,” says Tsang, referring to leads Michelle Yeoh – who also starred in Crazy Rich Asians – and Chow Yun-Fat, adding that the different accent “might have perplexed the audience at the time”.

Ultimately, the filmmaker says the film portrayal’s of the Asian culture might lead to its flatlining in China.

“Crazy Rich Asians is the ‘Panda Express’ of Chinese culture,” says Tsang, referring to the popular US-based food-chain which serves Westernised Chinese dishes. “I studied in Canada and relate to the overseas Chinese people, so I enjoyed the movie. But the mainland market has a different palate.”

Papish agrees. “Mainland audiences prefer their ‘Chinese’ stories to come from China and their Hollywood stories to come from Hollywood; they walk away when the lines are blurred,” he said.

It’s a point Huang understands. She says Hollywood’s appeal on the mainland is based on presenting an “exotic white experience”.

“When they see this movie filled with Asian faces, that’s not really what they’re used to or want. When they see Chinese faces what they expect is a Chinese story with Chinese sensibilities,” she says.

But according to Hu Shan, a Beijing-based creative producer and self-described movie buff, the reason for the film’s lacklustre Chinese performance is much more simple: its key selling point – an all-Asian cast – was irrelevant for the world’s biggest Asian country. Instead, mainland movie-goers opted to spend money on films like Venom, a Marvel action movie released in early November which has so far grossed more than $240m in China alone.

“The novelty of Crazy Rich Asians only works for Western people who don’t know much about Asian culture and are fascinated by how ‘crazy rich’ Asians can be … and the Asian diaspora, who are mostly happy just to see their own culture presented in a Hollywood movie,” says Hu.

“For the Chinese, both of these points aren’t relevant. The love story itself isn’t even touching because it’s too distant from their own lives.”

Marketing complaints

The film’s late release date in China didn’t help either. Crazy Rich Asians hit mainland screens almost three months after debuting in the United States, giving any keen Chinese viewers plenty of time to source and watch bootleg versions online.

Hu says most of her friends hadn’t even heard of the movie. Herself, she only watched it because it was available on-board a recent long-haul flight.

But for Huang, a diehard fan of what she described as the movie’s unique exploration of the “misunderstandings and the misgivings between Asian diaspora and the motherland”, the lack of substantial marketing in China was “lazy and ironic”.

“They should have known that there’s a big gap. You need to reach out and make an effort to establish an understanding between people in China and abroad. The movie is a great metaphor for how to attempt to do this, but that wasn’t reflected in the marketing. They just took the American trailer and gave it Chinese subtitles.”

She still holds out hope for a better result for the sequel, but says one thing at least needs to change.

“If they don’t want it to be a fail from the beginning, their marketing needs to start yesterday.”

The Rohingya are facing a “lost generation” as children both in Myanmar and in the refugee camps of Bangladesh struggle to get an education, a new report has warned.

The Rohingya youth who remain in Myanmar’s Rakhine state have faced serious restrictions on access to schooling since the outbreak of violence there in 2012, with children often kept in separate facilities and unable to attend mainstream schools, the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) said on Thursday.

Older students are unable to attend university.

In Bangladesh, where more than 700,000 Rohingya now live in sprawling refugee camps after fleeing a brutal Myanmar army crackdown last year, authorities have banned formal education, and even the construction of any structure that might seem like a permanent school building.

As a result, most young people only have the option of attending informal learning centres run by civil society groups.

“Now more than ever, we need educated Rohingya who can act as leaders for the community, but as long as education remains severely restricted this will be impossible,” Tun Khin, president of BROUK, said in a statement.

“We are facing the prospect of a lost generation.”

‘Learning centres’

The mostly Muslim Rohingya are one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, attacked and driven out of Rakhine in what United Nations investigators have said remains an “ongoing genocide”.

An international law firm hired by the US State Department said earlier this month it had found evidence of genocide in the August 2017 military crackdown that drove the Rohingya into Bangladesh, and urged a criminal investigation into the atrocities.

“Right now, Rohingya are not getting any kind of formalised education in the camps,” John Quinley, a human rights specialist with Fortify Rights in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, where the refugee camps are located, told Al Jazeera. “This is a big concern for future generations of Rohingya. We are talking about lots of children who are unable to access education.”

Education in the 27 camps around Cox’s Bazar is provided by international and local NGOs as well as community-based organisations, and quality depends on who is running the centre.

The report, titled The Right to Education Denied for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh, noted that what classrooms existed were often overcrowded and poorly resourced. Many of the learning centres were located in refugees’ own shelters, it said.

Years of discrimination in Rakhine itself, “an apartheid state” according to Fortify Rights’ Quinley, had made the recruitment of teachers a serious challenge.

BROUK said of the teachers who arrived initially in August last year, only 21 percent had education beyond the secondary level while the segregation in Rakhine meant that Rohingya teachers were not allowed to travel and were therefore unable to access government-run teacher training programmes.

‘Inescapable’ challenges

UNICEF, which has been heavily involved in the provision of education in the camps, admitted in an August report that there were “inescapable” challenges in addressing the issue.

“Without an agreed and approved curriculum, children were taught with a variety of materials,” the UN agency for children said. “So enthusiastic were the children to learn that classrooms were often over-crowded.”

BROUK said that while aid groups had made “heroic efforts” to respond to the crisis there had been little long-term planning in relation to education, while prioritising primary over secondary education had created a shortage of opportunities for teenagers.

By July 2018, approximately 1,200 learning centres were operating while almost 140,000 Rohingya children had been enrolled in non-formal education of some kind, according to UNICEF.

BROUK noted that more than 150,000 children remained excluded from any kind of education, particularly those between the ages of 15 and 18.

UNICEF said it was developing a Learning Competency Framework and Approach (LCFA) to address some of the problems faced by school-age Rohingya.

The LCFA aims to double the amount of contact time for each child from the current two hours of teaching a day, expand classes for older children and teach in the languages used by the Rohingya including English, Burmese and local dialects.

Community involvement

According to BROUK, any solution required the involvement of the community who had been “largely absent” from any decision-making on education.

“It is essential to both the access and acceptability of education that communities have the freedom to establish their own schools – with the curriculum and language of their choosing,” the group’s report said. “While politically unpopular – such permissions should acknowledge the reality and potentially protracted nature of the situation.”

BROUK urged authorities in Bangladesh to remove all barriers on Rohingya refugees access to education and reiterated its call for the Myanmar government to address the hurdles facing the minority in their homeland.

“The only long-term and viable solution to the crisis lies inside Myanmar,” the report said. “The Myanmar authorities must immediately remove all restrictions on the human rights of Rohingya (including on access to education and freedom of movement), and grant Rohingya citizenship under national law.”

A November plan to start the repatriation of Rohingya to Myanmar fell apart after the refugees refused to leave.

The repatriation, agreed at the government level without the input of the Rohingya themselves, has been postponed indefinitely.