![]() This cafeteria is ridiculous.”īut life is ridiculous, Walter. A rejected Walter rolls his eyes and says, “A white dude, and an Asian dude, bonding over a black dude. T-shirt and invites Eddie to sit with his friends, Eddie eagerly saunters over. But when Brock asks Eddie about his Notorious B.I.G. The implicit leader of that group is named Brock. Fresh Off the Boat doesn’t ignore this dynamic.Īt school, there is a table of white boys, the “in-crowd,” or at least, a crowd more “in” than Eddie sitting one table over. But this divide-and-conquer tactic has left a wound wherein minority groups often battle one another. In the 1960s, to quash the civil rights movement’s platform, the Model Minority Myth was created as a response - “if these new immigrants from Asia can succeed in America, why can’t you?” And many Asian-Americans bought into that myth - because it’s superficially a flattering one. It is one of many ways people of color are traditionally disempowered. It is the Model Minority Myth in a microcosm, the two minorities pitted against each other. Later, the one person who calls Eddie a Chink is…Walter. Walter knows there is a social hierarchy in place. And Walter does not bond with him - Walter knows he and Eddie are the odd boys out, and that doesn’t mean instant friendship. Eddie finds his way to that one kid, Walter (played by Prophet Bolden), at lunch. There’s one other student of color at the school, and he's African-American. That said, the show doesn’t shy away from race in real terms. ![]() I don’t understand how it is that all the actors in the movie 300 can speak plain-old English (or British English, because in olden-times Greece, they spoke…British English?) but Asians in America have to always be portrayed speaking Ching-Chong-ese. And maybe being funny about it first is the way to go.Įven so, the faux accents bother me most about the show. But Fresh Off the Boat is representative of the conversations we can now have. So much of what Orion and I can say to each other now are things we Asians had to keep to ourselves 30, 20 years ago. That I can even have this conversation with Orion is something I couldn’t have imagined as a child growing up in 1980s America. Why do they have accents? It seems like an unnecessary flourish to satisfy the masses. Because the women were ridiculous.īut the one off-note for me - and for Orion, who brings it up first - are the accents that the Asian adults speak in. And because the women were ridiculous.Īlso: My boyfriend laughed. And because Constance Wu’s comedic timing is brilliant. She was the one making fun of white people. You think I like pretending Samantha isn’t carrying a baggie of dog poops in her hand? No! I don’t like this! We all see the poops there - it’s rolling around! But I am trying - you have to try too!” Like I am doing with these neighborhood women. Later, when Eddie (Hudson Yang) tells his mom that the kids made fun of his lunch at school, Jessica says through gritted teeth, “We have to make the best of it. One of them is carrying a bag of dog poop - at Jessica’s eye level. There is a scene in the pilot in which Eddie's mother Jessica (Constance Wu) Rollerblades around with the very blonde, spandex-clad women neighbors. Orion sat beside me as I started it over, for him. What would our reactions be? Would we share any understanding? Would there be any point at which we laughed together? I wondered what it would be like to share this moment together with Orion. But now I wondered if it would be funny to white people. “You-" I gasped, “have to watch this.” Thank goodness Fresh Off the Boat was funny. Orion found me giggling on the sofa watching the pilot, mid-try-on. If it wasn’t good, I was just going to stuff it way back in the closet. I watched the first 10 minutes of the Fresh Off the Boat pilot by myself, just in case it sucked, like putting on lingerie before showing it off. ![]() Meanwhile, I remember watching All American Girl when I was in college, and feeling so sad when it wasn’t funny. Because there has, in the last 20 years, only been one Asian-American sitcom on television - Margaret Cho’s All American Girl in 1994 - and he missed that one. Orion had never watched an Asian-American sitcom. My name is Christine Lee, I am Korean-American, and I watched Fresh Off the Boat - the new ABC sitcom about an Asian-American family that moves to Orlando in 1995, inspired by chef Eddie Huang’s memoir - with my white boyfriend, Orion.
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