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ABC’S “Fresh Off the Boat” and the Masculinity of Asian Men

 I identify as an Asian-American woman. I am the eldest daughter of first generation immigrants, which means I am the first in my family to be born and raised in “The Greatest Country on Earth”: The United States of America. Growing up, not only have I been told to go back to go back to my own county, spat on, bowed to with a “Konnichiwa”, and have been fetishized to be your sexy oriental schoolgirl because I am Asian but I have been cat-called, told to put on more clothes, told to wear less make-up, and told I am too stupid and deemed too incompetent for a task because I am a young woman. Yeah, I know. It’s AS IF I didn’t already have it hard enough from my *Asian* parents and their *Asian* expectations.

Anyways, you get it. I’m Asian and I’m a woman. And although I consider myself lucky to be so privileged, life is tough and I could go on and on about my experiences growing up in America. But enough of me because I’m here to talk about Asian men.

The only two Asian male role models I had growing up were my dad and (yes, you guessed it) my very own grandpa. Why is this you may ask? Well, when you picture your standard male superhero or lead role superstar hunk, who do you see? Not too many Asians? Well, don’t worry. That’s not your fault. As we all may know from media, Asian men are either oriental foreigners who have micro-penises or are super geeky nerds who have absolutely zero game with chicks or all the above. Because of this, Asian men have rarely ever been the ideal type of guy a girl would want to date. This exact factor is predominantly why many of my Asian male friends have had self-esteem issues from never being “good enough” in the eyes of their love interests.

Thus, from these stereotypes and generalizations, one fact stands strong amongst the Asian-American community: Asians are misrepresented and underrepresented in Hollywood. We are known as the socially awkward Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles and as Me Love You Long Time from Full Metal Jacket. We have had white individuals being cast for roles meant to be played by Asians and have had predominantly white individuals paint themselves to represent an Asian character. Slowly, however, the Long Duk Dong mentally is changing and the film industries are tackling social justice issues head on.

I essentially wanted to bring all of this up because I recently started watching ABC Channel’s Fresh Off the Boat, a sitcom based off writer Eddie Huang’s memoir about him and his Chinese family’s experience with moving to suburban Orlando, Florida. When this show initially came out in 2015, I was completely psyched out. It was the first time I’ve ever seen so many Asians together on one American TV show. Finally, we were being represented. For the first time, I even thought I had a chance at Hollywood.  

To get a better idea about the vibes of the show, here is the trailer:

I remember watching the first two episodes on TV when they first aired on ABC with my dad. Personally, I thought they were wonderfully constructed because of the well-written plot amd the immense level of relatability. My dad, on the other hand, thought differently. My dad is in his late 50s and lived in America for about 30 years now. I’ve heard quite the fair share of stories about racism and acts of prejudice geared towards my dad because of the way he looks. Therefore, he felt that the show only highlighted the discriminatory remarks and that “some things are better left unsaid”. I, of course, tried explaining to him that Asians have always been the silent minority and that if we never say anything, nothing will ever change. We can’t continue keeping our head in the books and being pushed around like the cliché nerd in movies who gets forced to do someone’s homework “or else” (he meets a fist). I truly thought Eddie Huang had created the start of something for us. But by no means is this show perfect, especially when the executive producers continued to produce a show that was entirely different from Huang’s original vision.

In Season 1, Episode 3, “The Shunning”, young Eddie Huang is desperate to fit in with the popular white American boys at school. Not only does he get ridiculed for bringing Chinese cuisine to lunch, but he also struggles to gain popularity to make friends and impress the girls. Accepting the fact that he is unable to afford a pair of Jordan sneakers, he comes up with a new idea to integrate himself into the cliques at school and “change the way the kids at school saw” him. 

Here’s a clip from the episode that I will be viewing through a hegemonic masculinity lens: 

Eddie’s role model and inspiration for his version of ideal masculinity isn’t his own father, but it is Ol’ DB. Ol’ DB is Eddie’s adored rapper whose lifestyle of fame, fortune, and access to limitless women inspires Eddie to be just like him in order to fit in with the other boys at school. In Eddie’s fantasy, he imagines himself in one of Ol’ DB’s rap videos. There’s cash flying everywhere, expensive cars and jewelry, and women—a ton of women dancing seductively and wearing revealing clothing. The moment an attractive black woman steps out of a car, Eddie has quite the epiphany: “That’s it. A hot girl was the ultimate status symbol”. In order to gain a higher status of masculinity, he suddenly alters his idea of women. No longer are they seen as women, but they are now considered “symbols” and objects because even if he didn’t have Jordans, as long as he had a “fine shorty on [his] arm”, nothing else would matter.

According to our MACS 356 lectures on Normative Masculinity, Eddie’s fantasy would fall under the umbrella of “toxic masculinity”, which to reiterate, does not mean that men are toxic. Instead, toxic masculinity is the idea that society has these expectations as to how “real men” should or should not behave. Because emasculation is a huge no-no when it comes to being a “real man”, Eddie’s fantasy portrays women as just objects, using them to gain popularity amongst the white boys at school. Without even realizing it, young Eddie put women in a lower hierarchy than men, which would make it easy to manipulate women if he were rich and powerful like Ol’ DB. He created a totem pole mentality where men are superior to women and thus, being a man and impressing his white male friends at school doesn’t seem as hard anymore when he has the ladies wrapped around his fingers.

However, male privilege is not just based on gender and it is especially clear in Eddie’s case in this single episode. When examining male privilege, the idea of intersectionality plays a huge role in a man’s rise to success. In this episode, Eddie’s gender is not the only thing that keeps him from fitting in. Like I mentioned earlier, Eddie gets shunned at the lunch table for eating Chinese food prepared by his parents. When he pulls out his noodle lunch, the boys around the table cover their noses and exclaim, “Ew what is that?”, “Get that outta here”, and “Ying Ming is eating worms!” This ends up in him announcing to his family at the dinner table: “I need white people lunch”. This is an example of a concept known as “white-washing”. White-washing is essentially this belief that an individual is willing to neglect and abandon their culture to assimilate to white, western culture. Eddie felt the strong urgency to “white-wash” himself after his bad lunch experience because he wanted to completely get rid of his Chinese roots by removing a huge part of what makes a culture unique: one’s cuisine. 

If we had more movies and TV shows with Asian male lead roles, perhaps white washing and Asian male insecurity wouldn’t be such an issue. Eddie’s experience of being rejected at the lunch table because of his Chinese meal is not unheard of. In fact, it even happened to me when I attended a predominantly white suburban high school. In my freshman year of high school, there was a boy who teased me for a whole week by asking me if I liked the dog meat I ate at lunch. He didn’t stop teasing me until I finally mustered enough courage to call him out on his ignorance.

I believe that ignorance is more likely to occur when there is not enough proper exposure and education of different cultures. If we had more Asian lead roles in general, people wouldn’t stereotypically view us as just “chinks” who are good at math. Asian male representation is needed not only for young Asian boys, but for young Asian girls to realize that the men in their lives aren’t just men who get pushed around and bullied. If I had the examples of strong Asian male lead roles (Steven Yuen from “The Walking Dead”, Aziz Ansari from “Master of None”, and Vincent Rodriguez III from “My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) that we have today, I probably would have had more courage to stand up for myself as a young girl against racist remarks from my American peers. Now, I can only have the hope that Hollywood and media industries will continue to develop dynamic character roles for the Asian population and hire more Asian actors to fill their lead roles for future generations of Asian-Americans to look up to. 

If you enjoyed reading my post about Asian male representation in Hollywood, take a look at http://starringjohncho.com/. John Cho is a Korean-American actor best known for his role as Harold Lee in the Harold & Kumar films. On his website, Starring John Cho, he raises awareness about the lack of Asian representation in film and brings the “vision of tomorrow’s Hollywood to today”.