As U.S. politicians and activists push towards a new era of immigration reform, they must consider America’s fastest growing population, Asian Americans, whose numbers increased from 12 million people in 2000 to 17 million in 2010. The Asian American population’s unprecedented growth has brought about a subsequent bolstering of their political and economic power. Asian American buying power is predicted by Nielsen to reach $1 trillion by 2017, and in some states, Asian Americans have transformed political landscapes as their numbers have grown. North Carolina, for example, has become a swing state largely by dint of Asian American immigrants’ democratic leanings, according to Washington Journal’s “Think Tank.”
Yet even as Asian Americans ascend into political and economic prominence, they are still dogged by racism in much of American society, stereotyped variously as servile, mysterious, and robotically industrious. ABC’s newest sitcom, Fresh Off the Boat challenges this racial confinement. It is arriving on the scene at a critical juncture for the Asian American community and American society at large, as our nation confronts an immigration crisis and attempts to reform the faulty system. After years of congressional turmoil over American immigration reform, in November of 2014 President Obama used an executive order to allow more paths to legal residence for some five million previously illegal immigrants. In his speech, he cast immigration reform as a question not of politics, but of American identity. “We have to remember that this debate is about something bigger,” Obama proclaimed, “It’s about who we are as a country, and who we want to be for future generations.” Amidst a socio-political climate that is increasingly determined by identity politics, Fresh Off the Boat probes America’s xenophobia, clarifying the identities of Asian Americans and ultimately granting Asian Americans, and immigrants writ large, a rightful place in mainstream American culture.
The show is based on celebrity chef Eddie Huang’s memoir of his childhood as a Taiwanese-American in Orlando, Florida. In its portrayal of a loveable family trying to gain acceptance in Florida, the show creates a narrative both crucially relevant and sorely missing in the mass media. Asian American representation in network television is historically both sparse and tinged with racism; Fresh Off the Boat is the only sit-com about an Asian-American family ever aired, aside from one season of Margaret Cho’s poorly received All American Girl. A recent study found that in Hollywood’s top 100 grossing films, Asian Americans make up only 4.4% of speaking roles. When Asian Americans do appear in movies and television -the majority being in guest roles- they are often portrayed as exotic foreigners, strange and out of touch with American culture. Just this year, the white cast of How I Met Your Mother dressed up in yellowface and spoke in mocking Asian accents, prompting uproar in the Asian American world voiced in the hashtag, #HowIMetYourRacism. Most recently, The Interview serves as a prime example of the twisted nature of Asian representation in American film.
The history of hostility towards Asian immigration – and towards all immigrants, for that matter – is inextricably bound to identity politics. Institutional animosity towards Asian Americans has its roots in the previous two centuries, with legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Acts barring Chinese immigrants from entering the United States from 1882 to 1943. This hallmark of institutionalized American racism was justified in part on the basis that the Chinese, with their own culture and a distinct phenotype, were “inassimilable,” unlike their European immigrant counterparts. In portraying American culture as strange and foreign, Fresh Off the Boat challenges the implicit xenophobia of the nation’s past legislation, and in doing so, mitigates the entrenchment of such in the common American misconceptions of Asian identity. During the pilot episode, for example, Eddie and his mother, Jessica, go to the supermarket to buy “white people lunch” so that Eddie won’t be made fun of at school. They enter a military bunker-like building with sterile aisles punctuated by harsh fluorescent light. “This place looks like a hospital,” Jessica proclaims, and in doing so bravely questions the norms and values that many Americans use to justify their discrimination against immigrants.
In placing the narratives of immigrants at the forefront of mainstream America, Fresh Off the Boat is carving a unique space. Network television produces a deplorably small number of shows depicting any immigrant family, let alone Asian Americans. Despite their larger numbers in the United States population, Latina/o Americans are conspicuously absent from network television, with only one sitcom, Lifetime’s Devious Maids, currently running about Latinos. A report titled “The Latino Media Gap” recently found that, “Today, Latino talent in top movie and television programming is extremely limited (less than two percent) and not increasing at a rate near the rise of the U.S. Latino population.” It went on to assert, “Latino stereotypes are prevalent in mainstream media and they restrict opportunities for Latino talent, as well as the public perception of this racial/ethnic group.” Fresh Off the Boat, then, is a critical platform for all immigrants, not just for Asian Americans, in that it has the potential to humanize an immigrant experience that has become a battlefield for political debate.
In making immigrants a part of the American narrative, Fresh Off the Boat emulates the pro-immigration movement’s emphasis on identity politics, which has helped push immigration reform to the forefront of the nation’s political agenda. Immigration activists have called on Americans to empathize with alleged “aliens,” drawing attention to the human rights violations inherent in deportation and imprisonment. These calls to empathy come in the face of anti-immigrant activists, who stress the essential differences between immigrants of color and white Americans. One activist at a Tea Party event in Texas last year compared influxes of immigrants to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and said that he feared “ethnic replacement.” Other anti-immigrant rhetoric has called immigrants potential terrorists, despite data that shows otherwise. Fresh Off the Boat, as a space for likeable, nuanced immigrant characters, is at the very least an opportunity to showcase immigrants as relatable Americans, rather than dangerous “aliens.”
Fresh Off the Boat lampoons American traditions from the point of view of an outsider, employing comedy that, while not comprehensively representative of the “Asian American experience,” can appeal to an immigrant experience shared by the vast majority of Americans. The show does the exact opposite of what network television has been doing to immigrants of all nationalities for decades: it pushes against the idea of immigrants as threatening work machines. The show’s second episode features the mother, Jessica, tutoring her sons after school because she doesn’t think their elementary school is challenging enough. While this plays into some racial stereotypes about Asian Americans, it also humanizes their position. The family is just scraping by, reliant on a struggling restaurant that Eddie’s father, Louis, opened up. Their hard work and dedication therefore makes sense. Jessica, wary of a white family’s celebration of their son’s C’s on his report card, remarks, “It’s like success isn’t important to them.” In this light, the Huangs are strivers working their way up from nothing, not robotic Asian Americans threatening to take over America with precision and intelligence. These scenes feed not into Asian stereotypes but rather into the story of the American dream, a cornerstone of American culture to which immigrants are central.
The distinction between “hardworking family” and “job-stealer” emphasizes the chiasmic divide between the opposing sides of immigration reform. Politicians like President Barack Obama have argued that industrious immigrants are crucial to the United States economy, while anti-immigration pundits have painted immigrants as threats to American jobs. To counter these attacks, pro-immigrant activists have mobilized around the stories of struggling immigrant families in America. Immigration Reform For America, for example, campaigns by broadcasting the stories of families broken up by deportation— an especially fraught danger for the Asian American community, which is “the most likely to have family members caught up in visa backlogs,” according to Asian Americans Advancing Justice. The Huangs in Fresh Off the Boat are much like the families whom the reformers evoke: normal ones, struggling for their piece of the pie.
At the end of President Obama’s speech about his executive order on immigration, he quoted the bible, saying, “Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger –- we were strangers once, too.” Fresh Off the Boat is all the more relevant as America examines its identity as a nation of strangers. Moreover, in incorporating an actual immigrant family into the mainstream space to which they were previously excluded, the show forces viewers to reflect on their own identities, revealing the irrefutable ambiguities between “American” and “foreign.”