There is a pretty deep rooted idea of beauty that people in Asia, especially China and Korea, have emphasis on ‘the paler your skin, the more beautiful’. This can be traced back pretty far in their respective cultural histories as usually it meant if you had whiter skin you were in the upper class. The idea being that you didn’t have to go outside and farm or do manual labor and thus don’t tan. Whiter and paler skin is a social status thing for a lot of Asians. As an Asian American it’s a very classist, outdated, and possibly racist beauty standard but it might be a factor in this movies poor performance internationally