Fresh off the Boat – Bitch Flicks

Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture Theme Week here.

The Social Network and the China Doll/Dragon Lady Syndrome by Stephanie Charamnac

Part Dragon Lady, part China Doll, Christy is 100 percent stereotypical. It’s hard to believe that such a distorted representation, steeped in age-old myths, only dates back to 2010. Even more disheartening is the fact that most film critics did not raise an eyebrow at this deeply flawed portrayal.

Fresh Off the Boat’s Jessica Huang Is Loud, Abrasive, Intense, and Exactly What We Need by Deborah Pless

I don’t want to jump the gun here, since the show has only been on now for a month and a half, but Jessica Huang might just be my new favorite female character. Why? Because she is hilarious, brilliant, incredibly sarcastic, and because she refuses to let anyone get away with anything. Basically, because I see myself in her and I love it. What can I say? I’m naturally egotistical.

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai: Bollywood Hurts Men, Too by Brigit McCone

By supplying excuses all around, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai upholds the status quo while venting its resulting frustrations; the performances lovingly celebrate female feistiness, while the plot constantly punishes and suppresses it in favor of traditional ideals of self-sacrifice and emotional martyrdom. Cue predictable feminist outrage. You already know everything I would write. So instead, I’d like to focus on another aspect of the film: its utter contempt for male agency. Yes, male.

Kalinda Sharma Is My Favorite Queer Uncanny Star by Rosie Kar

Though based in downtown Chicago, there is a paucity of people of color in the show, and those who do make appearances seem to be present for only short amounts of time, save for one: Kalinda Sharma. She is an independent private investigator for the firm Lockhart and Gardner, and is a supporting character in the series’ narrative. Played by actress Archie Panjabi, the role of Kalinda Sharma is one that is groundbreaking in terms of thinking about queer South Asian bodies onscreen in the American imaginary.

The World Before Her: Between Liberalization and Fundamentalism–India’s Two Faces by Asma Sayed

Pahuja sees the film as going beyond the issues of women’s rights; according to her, the film is about India, and what’s happening there, and the fear about the future as the culture of the country goes through extreme changes. She adds that, through the film, she would like to showcase the kind of “hatred being taught in the camps in the guise of patriotism.”

Ouran High School Host Club: Haruhi, Heteronormativity, and the Gender Binary by Jackson Adler

At its heart, Ouran is about gender and, for better or worse, how it is perceived and performed. Though often praised and adored for its challenges to heteronormativity and gender roles through its range of characters, especially its protagonist, it ends up reinforcing heteronormativity and the gender binary to a large extent.

Mother India: Woman, Pillar of the Nation by AP

Mother India treats Radha’s abnegating nature as a positive. Look how nobly she suffers for her husband and sons, the movie seems to say. In real life, such glorification of women’s suffering enables an exploitative system of economic growth on the backs of underpaid, overworked women. They get nothing except lip service, sometimes not even that.

Saving Face: About Chinese American Women, Not Based on a Book By Amy Tan by Ren Jender

Like Chutney Popcorn, Saving Face is one of the few films focused on queer people of color and their families. Having those two elements together might seem like a modest achievement, but Pariah is one of the only recent films that also includes both. Mainstream movie makers apparently think queer people of color don’t have families, but instead are deposited as eggs in a sandy, warm spot by a pond until they hatch and make their way, independently, into the world.

Not Everybody Is Kung Fu Fighting by Katie Li

English-Vinglish: Straddling Patriarchal and Linguistic Hegemony by Asma Sayed

Moving away from the Bollywood style masala and dancing-around-the-trees numbers, this film focuses on the real-life issue of the position of women in the domestic and social spheres in India.

Why Fresh Off the Boat Is Kind of a Big Deal by Katy Koop

So, in a world where people think you don’t have to cast Asians to play Asian parts, Fresh Off the Boat gives hope that maybe Asian kids or mixed kids like me will actually see a sitcom and see themselves a little. And maybe if it’s a success, more shows and better casting will follow.

The Kims Next Door: Korean Identity on Gilmore Girls by Elizabeth Kiy

While Rory struggled with the myriad of concerns afforded to a main character: her love life, her future, her friendships and family, Lane’s biggest conflict was always her overbearing, uber-religious mother and to a lesser degree, her own Korean heritage. Being Korean is never posed as a positive thing for Lane, it is only a marker of difference.

Why ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ Is Kind of a Big Deal

So, in a world where people think you don’t have to cast Asians to play Asian parts, ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ gives hope that maybe Asian kids or mixed kids like me will actually see a sitcom and see themselves a little. And maybe if it’s a success, more shows and better casting will follow.

This guest post by Katy Koop previously appeared at Medium and appears now as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture. Cross-posted with permission.

I am so excited about Fresh Off the Boat. I may only be 3/8ths Burmese, but I’m 100 percent down for a portrayal of an Asian family. As a child I was always a huge fan of shows like My Wife and Kids, The Proud Family, The Family Garcia, or even Ugly Betty–at the time I couldn’t place why I liked them so much more than your standard run of the mill “white people” sitcom and it was because anything that looked moderately diverse, anything that looked moderately like my family was great.

This is my dad’s side of the family (the one with Burmese in it):

I just thought this picture was also relevant to my case.

I have never seen a TV show with as much diversity as every Sunday at my grandma’s house when I was little–straight up. My dream is to pitch a sitcom called “two or more races” or “other” and what honest to goodness mixed-up large families look like. My dad and his brothers and sisters, there were eight of them, so as you can see, there was a lot of opportunity to spread the genes. But that’s not what this article was about–the fact is, I never really had a show where I saw Asians.

Yeah, it rocked my world to see Lucy Liu anywhere, especially as Watson in Elementary, and Ashly Perez from the Buzzfeed video is currently rocking my world, but beyond the prince in the Brandy version of Cinderella being Asian (and to be honest kinda looking like my dad), I didn’t have a lot to satisfy the 3/8ths part of myself that super proud to say, “I’m multiracial so I mark other,” when talking about this new standardized test thing in the third grade. So it’s a really big deal that there are like six whole Asians with lines and characters with real parts–and I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal but it’s a big deal. You wouldn’t think it, but we still live in a world where people don’t think Asians actually have to be played by Asians. Blackface was terrible and I’m glad we live in a place where people (generally) know you can’t dress a white person as a Black person and just use a little makeup and everyone will just be OK with it because they totally earned the part–but that happens all the time for Asians.

Like I know you’re thinking, well it’s not Breakfast at Tiffany’s anymore, people don’t actually do that still.

My sophomore year of high school in auditions for Anything Goes, my drama teacher asked if I could read for the characters Ping or Ling in an “Asian Accent.” I straight up didn’t do it and roles went to an Asian girl, a white guy, and a Black guy.

Two years ago I stage managed a production of The Mikado, and with no Asians in the cast, everyone put on white face paint and did “Asian makeup.” And to be honest I can’t even find that, that amazingly offensive because that’s actually what EVERYONE DOES when they produce that show. It’s a show standard. It’s one of the most popular Gilbert and Sullivans and is done constantly. Here’s an article about a 2014 Seattle production. You can’t argue with people that don’t know they’re doing wrong.

And you might be saying, “Hey, that just sounds like a personal experience,” “Maybe you just live somewhere not quite sensitive to race”–maybe, if it wasn’t just something that happens all the time.

Let’s talk about Batman: Does the name Ra Al Ghul sound like it would be played by someone as German-looking as Liam Neeson?

We meet him in Batman Begins surrounded by unnamed Asians. And then he sprouts up, and surprise–you thought I’d totally be Asian but I was just using all these Asians as a mean to an end (wait what?).

And this isn’t an Asian part but if you’ve seen the commercials for the movie Pan, Rooney Mara is playing the role of Tiger Lily–there were no Native Americans, there was no one, there were no people of color, I guess, obviously?

Even kind of mediocre, the NBC Peter Pan had a woman of color playing Tiger Lily. And the list keeps going–who knows what was going on with all the race bending in Cloud Atlas, Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia, or the whitewashing travesty that was the live action version of Avatar: the Last Airbender. Not to mention the fact that I’ve seen Avenue Q three times on Broadway and local theater and I have never seen Christmas Day played by an Asian woman–though I did a Google search and I actually see a lot of Asian women in that role so my hope in humanity is restored.

I repeat SIX WHOLE ASIANS GUYS. ASIANS–Fresh Off the Boat IS OUR TIME.

Katy Koop is a recent graduate from Meredith College with degrees in English and Theatre. She currently works at a movie theatre by day and tries to do theatre and get freelance writing jobs by night (also netflix and general internet procrastination by night). She has a website at katykoop.com and can be found trying to be funny or trying desperately to get advice from celebrities on twitter with the handle @katykooped.

Not Everybody Is Kung Fu Fighting

This guest post by Katie Li appears as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.

“So, do you know kung fu?”

This question is the scourge of Asian-America. The assumption that we all know martial arts is one of the handful of stereotypes that pop culture has been mainlining to the masses, leaving individuals to challenge these overly-simplified notions of Asian identity: the China Doll, the Dragon Lady, the Laundry Man, the Kung Fu Hero. We’ve been fighting against these stereotypes for decades—and Hollywood isn’t helping.

This question—like all stereotypes—is born out of unchallenged ignorance. As frustrating as it is for this assumption to be made, I understand how someone could believe that it is real. Fresh Off the Boat is the first show in 20 years to feature an Asian-American family; before that, Margaret Cho was trying to prove that she was an “All American Girl” on her sitcom that was wrought with Asian stereotypes.

In the decades between these two shows, Asian actors have been cast in some movies—but when have Asians in Hollywood held a leading role in a film other than an action movie? The only one I can think of is Harold and Kumar. We have been the perpetual sidekicks, rarely the stars. Lucy Liu, introduced to us in her role as Dragon-Lady-Gone-Lawyer in Ally McBeal hasn’t strayed far from this first impression, constantly portraying the alluring-exotic-sometimes-lethal love interest, never the hero of her own story, never someone a wider audience can identify with as they travel on an emotional journey together.

When we are the leads, we are featured in action movies, doing slick martial arts. The story doesn’t get any more complex or meaningful than getting out of a tricky situation using some kung fu. Since kung fu movies became popular in the 1970s, audiences have sat in dark theaters, absorbing these same images with nothing left to challenge these notions other than people who aren’t too weary of this microaggressor to answer, “No, I don’t know kung fu, and neither do all Asians.”

Cast of Fresh Off the Boat — Cast of *Fresh Off the Boat*

But what do you do when you actually fit those stereotypes that you must fight against?

I am an Asian-American woman of Chinese and Irish descent. I was a straight-A, piano-playing overachiever in high school. My grandfather was a laundry man and my grandmother owned a restaurant. I grew up doing kung fu.

My parents were my teachers. I didn’t get sugary cereal and cartoons on Saturday mornings–I was at their school, practicing kung fu. A common backdrop of my childhood was basically a Rocky training montage, people red-faced and sweating, doing drills to improve their skills.

The school would do street performances, impressing crowds of tourists in Fanieul Hall with fighting sets and animal-inspired techniques that they had only ever seen in movies. I watched my parents and their troupe as they flew through the air, doing butterfly and hurricane kicks, sometimes whipping weapons under their legs as they took flight. I clapped when the audience clapped, but I had also seen these routines practiced countless times before the show. Even at a young age, I understood that these skills weren’t just magically bestowed or gained in a montage. They required hard work and sacrifice.

My everyday life was a behind-the-scenes look at the kung fu movies that left everyone so impressed. Many of my parents’ students were actually super heroes—stunt doubles for movies like Mortal Combat, Batman, and Power Rangers. I watched these movies at home and understood that those characters were real people—people I knew. I understood that there was a difference between the action portrayed in films, and real stories in our lives.

The majority of my parents’ students were not in movies, they were just regular people looking for a new way to work out and feel good about themselves. They were young and old, college students and professionals of many different racial and cultural backgrounds. Kung fu wasn’t something that was just for Asians. But that’s not what the media would have us believe.

When people ask me, “Do you know kung fu?”

I can actually answer, “Yes.”

Being able to affirm someone’s stereotype isn’t a proud or happy moment. I stopped expecting people to shut up, satisfied with knowing that they met an Asian who did kung fu. Instead, I am met with more questions, microaggressors that are just as presumptuous and ignorant as assuming someone of Asian ancestry knows martial arts.

I don’t usually tell people I know kung fu, but when I do, I brace myself for the same conversation I have had with people my whole life—literally my whole life, ever since I was in preschool:

Are you a black belt?

To which I explain that not every school has a rank system, and that my parents’ school is one of those that does not. The emphasis in their training is not about forcing their students into the same rigorous, ever-advancing tests, but helping each student individually. But that’s not what people want to hear. When I tell people I’m not a black belt, they become incredulous, questioning my skills. They continue to prod, often asking:

Can you kick my butt?

This question became more sexualized as I grew up. Other women don’t usually want to know, it’s only men who ask, accompanied by a not-so-subtle smugness that suggested they wanted me to be able to physically dominate them. I got that question and that look even when I was a young teenager.

Because every Asian-looking school girl is super smart and can kick ass, right?

The honest answer: No.

I might be able to throw a punch, but hitting a pad in a kung fu class is different from fighting off Go-Go and the Crazy 88.

Western audiences aren’t interested in the talking points though; they just want to fast-forward to the action. They glorify the violence and exotify Chinese culture, while completely missing out the subtle, important messages of martial arts training: values like discipline, hard work, and how your training and skills aren’t used to harm others, but to better yourself. Kung fu isn’t about fighting an enemy. It’s about making yourself a better human being—inside and outside. By focusing on the action without compelling storylines or characters we can care about, the art of kung fu itself—like Asian action stars and layman—has been flattened to a caricature.

What 24 years of martial arts training has given me aren’t skills to show off my physical prowess, but mental endurance and confidence, a sense of empowerment to speak up when something isn’t right. In the end, those are the battles that really matter.

Raised by martial artists, Katie Li grew up with fascinating stories and an eclectic cast of characters. She continues this tradition in her work, writing fiction and narrative non-fiction about personal transformation and unlikely possibilities. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Xenith, and Write From Wrong. Learn more at www.katieliwriter.com or follow her on Twitter @KatieLi_Writer.

‘Fresh Off the Boat’s Jessica Huang Is Loud, Abrasive, Intense, and Exactly What We Need

Fresh Off the Boat’s Jessica Huang, played by Constance Wu — *Fresh Off the Boat*’s Jessica Huang, played by Constance Wu

This guest post by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.

Guys. Guys. Guys. I don’t want to jump the gun here, since the show has only been on now for a month and a half, but Jessica Huang might just be my new favorite female character. Why? Because she is hilarious, brilliant, incredibly sarcastic, and because she refuses to let anyone get away with anything. Basically, because I see myself in her and I love it. What can I say? I’m naturally egotistical.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with it, Fresh Off the Boat is a new sitcom based on celebrity chef Eddie Huang’s childhood. It starts when his parents, Louis (Randall Park) and Jessica Huang (Constance Wu) move their family of three boys and a mother-in-law from the tight-knit Taiwanese immigrant community of Washington DC to Orlando, Florida.

Louis has purchased a steakhouse and wants the family to pursue the American dream. Eddie (Hudson Yang) is miserable that he’s being sent to suburbia. And Jessica is mostly pissed that the humidity is going to wreck her hair. Also that she’s leaving all her friends and family behind for an uncertain future.

Still, she supports her husband and she believes in his dream. In fact, Jessica can be very accurately described as the world’s most supportive spouse, even if to our eyes she frequently doesn’t seem it. She’s harsh and critical and nit-picks and nags with no remorse, but she does all of that because she genuinely cares that Louis gets to see his dream fulfilled. She loves her husband and she loves her kids, and she’s willing to do a heck of a lot to help them achieve their full potential. Whether they like it or not.

And while the story mainly follows Eddie’s frustrations with middle school and his attempts to be cool in all-white suburban Florida, Jessica’s role is much more than just as a foil to her son and husband. She’s a full character in her own right, and her storylines have as much weight, if not more, than the other characters on the show.

When the season begins, Jessica is isolated and miserable, stuck at home all day while her husband goes to work and her kids go to school. So she reads Stephen King novels (even though they give her nightmares) and watches the news (even though it makes her paranoid) and tries to make friends with the neighborhood moms. Which is hard, because she hates them.

She loves Stephen King novels, even though they inevitably give her nightmares

Eventually she does make a friend and her life gets a little less lonely, but there’s still something missing. While Jessica tries to sublimate her frustrations and boredom with concentrating on helping her sons with their school work (and creating an entire extra-curricular tutoring program from scratch) and helping her husband at the restaurant (whether he likes it or not), she still finds herself un-fulfilled and bored.

I love that this is a plotline. Jessica’s internal malaise at having been pulled from the life and job she knew isn’t laughed off or glossed over. It’s a real problem that the show addresses. In Washington DC, Jessica managed her brother-in-law’s furniture store. In Florida, she doesn’t do anything, and she hates it. She loves and supports her husband, but she isn’t happy.

And this is huge, actually. Because this is where we see that Jessica’s character on the show really does transcend stereotypes: both the stereotype of the Asian-American woman on television and that of the sitcom mom. She has her own crap going on, and the story validates that. Jessica is bored and frustrated. Is that her fault? No, the show tells us, it’s a problem that has to be fixed. And it is.

Eventually Jessica finds that her critical nature and skill at strong-arming people into a bargain works perfectly in real estate and goes on to pursue becoming a realtor. It’s not a huge point in the show, but it is one that is showcased and presented as important. It’s important because Jessica isn’t just there to make Louis and Eddie look good, she’s her own person and she has her own story. The narrative supports that, and so too do Louis and Eddie. They’re happy for her, and they should be.

Jessica and Louis work together to vandalize a competitor’s billboard

It’s funny to say, but I think the Huangs might be one of the most functional sitcom families in a long while. They’re up there with the Belchers. Because while Jessica might not really understand Louis’ love for the American dream, and while she frequently wants to strangle Eddie or her other two sons, she doesn’t. She supports them and loves them and sometimes tough loves them. They stick together and they work. As a family, they work.

What makes Jessica Huang a legendary character, though, and one of my personal favorites, is how all of this is worked in with her identity as a Taiwanese immigrant coping with the stresses of American society and culture. It would be very easy for the story to descend into cheap stereotypes with her. So easy.

Like I said before, she could be idealized into a sweet, soft-spoken “Asian flower” racial stereotype, or she could be cast as the “tiger mom,” a mother so obsessed with her children’s success that she destroys their lives, or she could be a “dragon lady,” a woman whose seductive powers are legendary but who has no real agency in her own life. Granted, this is a sitcom, so she probably wasn’t going to be that last one. But still.

Or she could have fallen into the trap of just being yet another sitcom mother. She could be defined by her relationships on the show, confined to the house and portrayed as someone with no further ambitions or inner life. Since the narrative is told from Eddie’s point of view, and people generally view their parents with a solipsistic lens until well into adulthood, it would make sense for the story to sort of gloss over Jessica as a person, and leave her as “just a mom.”

But this show doesn’t do that. This show makes Jessica an active agent in her own life, fully cognizant of who she is and what she’s doing, flawed and also incredibly, fearfully competent, and generally badass. And the show is a lot better for it.

Jessica, Eddie, and Emery help unpack in Florida

The key is context. I mean, while, yes, she does sometimes veer towards “tiger mom” territory, it’s always incredibly clear that Jessica is hard on her kids because she knows that they have barriers to their success that the other kids don’t. Jessica is written to be fully aware of the impact that being non-white will have on her children, and she strives to offset that. And while she is supportive of Louis pursuit of the American dream, she is also critical of “America” in general. She sees little to value in white culture and is openly against some aspects.

As she says in the first episode when her youngest son, Evan, discovers he is lactose intolerant, “His body is rejecting white culture. Which makes me kind of proud.”

She’s a complex figure in Eddie’s life. On the one hand, he really admires his mother. He respects how driven she is and how she refuses to take anyone’s crap. You can tell he has learned a lot about being tough and strong from her. But, on the other hand, she clearly drives him nuts. She gets fierce and overprotective beyond the point of it being helpful, like when she assaults him with a stuffed animal to demonstrate why he shouldn’t date rape. It’s a great message, but the delivery is flawed. And that makes her a much more interesting character.

Credit here has to be given to all the people involved in the development process of the character Jessica Huang: from Eddie Huang and his real life mother to Nahnatchka Khan (who also produced Don’t Trust the B* in Apartment 23) to Constance Wu. All of these people and the many others who influenced her portrayal deserve a lot of thanks for their thoughtful intentionality in making Jessica Huang as grounded and real as she is.

Jessica holds a seminar on sexual harassment at her husband’s restaurant

Because that’s the thing, the real reason I love her so much. Jessica Huang is a real person. And not just in that she’s based on an actual human being. I mean that she has flaws and makes mistakes and overreacts and underreacts and sometimes she’s a bitch and sometimes she cries and sometimes she’s the best mother in the world. She’s a person, not just a cartoon.

I could go on here about how vital and wonderful this is when you consider the deeply sad state of women of color, particularly Asian women, on television, but I think I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. Fresh Off the Boat is only the second mainstream sitcom in America to feature an Asian family. The first was Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl, and that show tried to strip as much Asian-ness from its characters as humanly possible.

Jessica Huang, though not the main character of the show, is undoubtedly its central figure and breakout star. And she is a fully fleshed out, complex, and fascinating character. Jessica’s existence doesn’t negate the fact that Asian women are chronically underrepresented on television, but she certainly is a step in the right direction.

Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a freelance writer and editor in western Washington when she’s not busy camping out at the movies or watching too much TV. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr just as long as you like feminist rants, an obsession with superheroes, and sandwiches.