We need to have a picture of Asian Americans. If it’s “Asian-American meet in a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown,” that’s the only time you picture it. ![]() They fall in love, but then she has to move away.” If you say that to anyone, including an Asian person, you picture a white person because that’s what’s become normative to us. that a producer says, “Guy and girl meet-cute at an ice skating rink. It’s important to see Asians in those leading roles because it changes what I’m calling the anglo-heteronormative status of TV. We’re not here to do the taxes of the white person, or to be the chipper best friend to the white person. I would say visibility as the stars of a show is important. I wouldn’t say that just visibility is important. What would you tell someone who doesn’t understand why the kind of visibility Fresh Off the Boat offers matters? I told them they just have to get used to it because that’s who I am!” That’s something to be admired. She even said to me at dinner, “My sons always told me that I’m too loud and I need to not be so loud. I think he gets a lot of that from his mom. But he’s not afraid to say them, and he’s actually acutely aware of the fact that that is what makes him special. He doesn’t always say things that are smooth and easygoing. That’s what makes Eddie special: he’s not a placater. And instead of that being something that Asians should be embarrassed of, I think that’s something that we should be proud of - the types of characters who know they don’t speak perfect English, who know they have different customs, who don’t think that that’s any reason for them to not have a voice. She’s aware of her difference, yet she doesn’t think that’s any reason for her to not have a voice. I don’t think her foreignness is ever the butt of the joke. The joke isn’t that she doesn’t understand because she’s an immigrant - it’s that the familiar things we take for granted aren’t any “stranger” than the things that strike us as foreign. One of my favorite scenes is when Jessica’s neighbors try and explain the rules of the Daytona 500 to her. Maybe he doesn’t think it helped, or maybe he thinks it hurt, but the awareness and the concern to get it right was there. I can see why that’s annoying to him, but it was the network’s effort to at least try to make it as authentic as possible. And I hear that, that he doesn’t hear his mother’s accent the way I heard it. There’s no such thing as like carbon-copy accents. ![]() It’s very apparent that Randall and I are attempting to do the same accent, but we’re doing it differently - like if I tried to do a New York accent and you tried to do a New York accent. I break my accent work down like a drama student does, in a phonetic and rhythmic way. I’m an actor who creates characters based in voice, movement, emotional quality, speech.Īnd you worked with accent coaches, right? I know Eddie has taken issue with the accents and the ways they don’t resemble those of his parents. It’s my privilege to be able to play somebody not myself. Randall actually wrote an article in which he was like, “If it were up to me, I’d never have to do an accent.” Not only am I okay with doing an accent, I actually think, as an actor, character work is one of the most fun parts. ![]() If you see Tina Fey on television, you’re not like, “All white women are like Tina Fey.” And I would challenge people to see if those alleged “stereotypes” are really there, or if they’re just the truth of the actual Jessica Huang, who is a real living and breathing woman in Orlando. So to anybody who accuses us of utilizing stereotypes, I would challenge them to point them out when they’re used as humor tools, because they aren’t. We’re not writing the show to placate the idiots. The people who are going to laugh at the alleged stereotypes are the same people who are going to laugh at their Chinese waiter in the restaurant next door for very coarse, uneducated reasons. It’s choosing authenticity over safety, and I think that’s bold. Making the choice to have that is a way of not watering down the character and making it politically correct. It’s just a fact of life: immigrants have accents. If there were jokes written about the accent, then that would certainly be harmful. Some people are like, “Oh, stereotypical accent!” An accent is an accent. I think the reason people have been quick to throw the stereotype criticism on us is because there will always be people who are laughing at the wrong thing.
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