Over the duration of its two seasons, ABC’s family comedy, “Fresh Off The Boat” ― the first television show about an Asian-American family in over 20 years ― has continually asked complicated questions about the Asian-American experience in a country that prefers cultural assimilation over true integration and celebration. From Eddie Huang, the oldest son of the family, being called a “chink” by a classmate in the pilot episode, to Eddie’s mother, Jessica Huang openly wondering if their assimilation into American society has diluted her family’s Taiwanese heritage, the show acutely reflects contemporary anxieties that Asian-Americans grapple with today.
As television critic Dan Caffrey pointed out last week, “Fresh Off The Boat” asks viewers, “is [assimilation] something to be resisted or desired? Or is it a little bit of both? ... what does it mean to be Chinese? What does it mean to be American?”
Last Tuesday’s season premiere of “Fresh Off The Boat” seemed less concerned with questions and more interested in making statements about Asian-American identity ― statements that were amplified and made powerful given the context of Jesse Watters’ racist Chinatown segment that aired earlier this month on the “O’Reilly Factor.” In the premiere, the Huang family travels to their native Taiwan for a family wedding. Once they arrive, they’re shocked to discover that they, as Americans, feel just as out of place in Taiwan as they do in the United States.
Jessica Huang, who throughout the series expresses how much she misses Taiwan, confesses to her husband Louis at the end of their trip that she’s “homesick for Orlando.” She reflects, “Well, maybe we’ll never feel completely at home in either place.” Louis has a revelation, “We are like Patrick Swayze in ‘Ghost’ ― stuck between two worlds, part of both, belonging to neither.” Jessica nods and whispers, “Damn it. It is the best movie ever.”
While “Fresh Off The Boat” has never been perfect in depicting complex Asian-American experiences, this quiet, fleeting exchange was made radical by the assertion of two characters who, for most of the series, seemed obsessed with being liked by their white neighbors and assimilating. Louis and Jessica, in that moment, weren’t asking questions about what it means to be both Asian and American in the United States. They knew what they were: proudly American and proudly Taiwanese. They weren’t asking others to validate their identities or assert themselves as wholly Asian or wholly American. They were speaking in statements, quietly, definitely and defiantly affirming and accepting for themselves an Asian-American existence that wasn’t the butt of someone else’s joke, but complex, nuanced, conflicted and real.
They belonged to both worlds, and to neither — and that feeling in of itself wasn’t a bad thing, but a matter of fact. It was one of the very few times where I saw my dilemmas as an Asian-American not only reflected, but normalized on mainstream television.
This nuanced approach towards Asian-American identity was made even more powerful considering the fact that the Asian-American experience has long been represented in popular culture as either a punchline, or a wholly, foreign “other” in American society. Long Duk Dong of “Sixteen Candles” is often brought forth as a prime example of this perception, but recent stories about anti-Asian racism and stereotypes attest to this truth.
Earlier this month, the “O’Reilly Factor” aired a “comedy” segment showing correspondent Jesse Watters harassing Chinese-Americans in New York City’s Chinatown to the backdrop of “Oriental” music, asking them: “Is it the year of the dragon?” “Do you know karate?” and most infuriatingly, “Can you guys take care of North Korea for us?”
A week after Watters’ segment, The New York Times deputy Metro editor Michael Luowrote an emotional open letter to a woman who yelled at his family to “go back to China!” Asking the woman to understand his experiences as an Asian-American, he wrote, “It’s this persistent sense of otherness that a lot of us struggle with every day. That no matter what we do, how successful we are, what friends we make, we don’t belong. We’re foreign. We’re not American.”
Luo’s pieces following his open letter, the conversation ignited by Watters’ segment and the cancellation of a racist NBC sit-com pilot “Mail Order Family,” proved something else: Asian-Americans of all colors and backgrounds shared experiencesbeing vandalized, harassed and discriminated against because they were “othered” as being foreign. While Asian-Americans have come to be seen as an assimilated “model minority” who has become the “highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing” racial group in America, we are still seen as a foreign, exotic, un-American and sometimes, menacing caricature.
