Fresh Off the Boat

Helen Lee:

The skewed reality of on-screen television demographics merely perpetuates the fallacy that those of us who are not white are just visitors in this country.  In the ten-year history of the show Friends, only two actors of color ever appeared, and only as minor characters, despite the real-life setting of multicultural/multiethnic Manhattan. So a show like FOTB [Fresh Off the Boat], whose very cast features 200 percent more racial diversity than ever existed over 236 episodes of Friends, communicates volumes to Asian Americans: that we are not invisible, that our presence matters. These are ideals to celebrate. And the celebration will be much longer lived if the show actually holds its own. Which I am rooting for. I am.

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But at the same time, I am not. There is a downside if FOTB actually does well. One of the risks of being a minority in America is that people tend to ascribe the attributes of one example from that particular minority and apply it to the whole group. If viewers of the show have little personal knowledge of other Asian-American families, they might be inclined to assume that the FOTB family is a fair representation of what all or even most Asian-American families are like. And nothing could be further from the truth.

By appearances alone, a viewer of FOTB might assume that my own family is just like the Huangs depicted in the show. As a person of Asian descent married to another person of Asian descent, and with three sons almost the exact same ages as those on the show, we look just like the fictional on-screen Huang family. And yet we are completely different. My family is not Taiwanese American, but Korean American. I am not a recent immigrant like Eddie’s mom on the show, but a natural-born American citizen. I don’t speak with an accent, as far as I know, and I don’t have a problem with feeding my kids “white people food”—an issue Eddie wrestles with in an early episode of FOTB. My family eats “white people food” much of the time, only we just call it “food”.