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Fresh Off The Boat Diversity

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“By 1960, 90 percent of U.S. homes owned one” (Phruksachart, 100). The statistic this quote is referring to this the rise of televisions in America. Recently, television has taken steps in an effort to include more diversity in their shows an example of this is seen in ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat. Following the life of Eddie Huang, a middle schooler who has just moved from Chinatown in DC to a predominantly white neighborhood in Florida, Fresh Off the Boat is a sitcom that that showcases some struggles immigrant families face. The show brings the question, are these inclusive shows being handled correctly? By portraying a Chinese immigrant family that addresses specific immigrant issues while still connecting with mass America, Fresh Off the …show more content…

Is the integrity of race sacrificed in order to obtain these large audience ratings? Original author of the book, Eddie Huang seems to think so as he expresses his worry to journalist McDonald, “The network's approach was to tell a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo goo gai pan written by a Persian-American who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane” (1). Huang’s main concern is in what he calls “reverse yellow face” meaning the portrayal of white ideals and values through asian actors. This was clearly seen with Margaret Cho as she faced this issue in her 1994 sitcom called All-American Girl (Jones, 1). However, what these two shows are going through are not the same. Cho struggled in trying to explain issues of racism to her nine out of eleven writers who were white. The cultural gap caused alarm as the writers thought it was okay to add in content that actually belittled Asian American life. Fresh Off the Boat, on the other hand, has never used a stereotype in their show. Instead, it seems Huang's issue is just that the show straying from some accounts in his book. Yet this is something that commonly happens in all text to screen

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