Is it just me, or are things getting worse? 

Some background: I love television.  Like, so much.  It’s kind of my best friend.  So I have a big blind spot for it, I love to give it the benefit of the doubt, laugh things off, roll my eyes and think, aw television, you will get better and be better, just take your time.  I will wait for you.  

But I’m kind of getting fed up.  I can only ignore so much, television!  You may be shiny and exciting but so much stuff is just lazy, and unfunny, and I’m getting tired of making the same excuses for you. 

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So my genre of choice after a long day of dastardly lawyerly deeds is the 22-minute sitcom.  It’s easy to digest, it makes me chuckle, and it’s easy to forget so that I can rewatch it again and again.  Fast food for the brain.

This week I was flipping through the usual channels: CBS, Fox, etc.  And within a 2-minute window of lingering on 2 Broke Girls, I heard 2 racial stereotype jokes said by 2 extremely white ladies (so many twos!) and I just roll my eyes.  (If you are interested, one joke was about how Asian folks are good at taking the SATs, and the other joke was about how Hispanic people are good at cleaning.  Real creative, smart comedy here.)  Then I start watching Raising Hope, a show I actually really do like, and there are these 2 Chinese gymnastic twins who don’t really have any lines, do a lot of acrobatics, eat noodles out of bowls that look like they were crafted in medieval China, and only listen to Chinese pop. 

Of these 2 shows, I infinitely prefer Raising Hope, and while I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a bit (I swear they will get stuck that way one day), at least the humor in the ep was not at the expense of the Asian folks.  2 Broke Girls on the other hand….with their ridiculous portrayal of an Asian diner-owner named Han Lee (which translates to “Rice” Lee apparently) and the constant racially charged jokes at his expense….that I have little to no patience for.  Just because the main characters are disenfranchised in some way does not mean they have free reign to target other disenfranchised communities.  Being poor doesn’t allow you to suddenly be a card-carrying member of every minority. 

And where Raising Hope at least occasionally has other Asian representation (i.e., an Asian American pawn shop owner that spoke English just fine and whose race was completely irrelevant to the plot), 2 Broke Girls makes lazy pan-Asian jokes about racial stereotypes (karaoke, notions of “honor,” his accent, his general emasculation), and all we get is Mr. Fake Accent.^*

Wow I lingered longer on 2 Broke Girls than I thought I would.  Working out some inner angst here.

But it certainly is not the only perpetrator.^**  I caught some Mike and Molly a while back, and within the first 5 minutes of watching this show, I saw another Asian restaurant owner with a thick (and methinks, very fake) accent.  And then his pretty daughter comes on the screen, and she also has a thick accent.  Now this is kind of where I draw the line.  Sure, immigrants are real.  And have real accents.  And a portrayal of that is not unrealistic, or offensive per se.  But then to have a younger daughter from the next generation also have an accent, be an Other—it made me think, man, Asian will never just be Normal!

Even though the majority of older Asian immigrants came over in the 70s and 80s, and there are now several generations of Asian Americans that speak perfect English (well maybe there are still some issues with grammar, I can’t speak for all Asian Americans but my grammar kind of sucks, but I’ll blame that on Mrs. Hildebrandt, my third grade teacher), we still feel so comfortable with the image of the Asian American with an accent.  How have we made zero progress from the days of Pat Morita?  Seriously, in the last 2 years, 2 NEW shows have come out with Asian restaurant owners that put on fake accents to fit some comfortable yet distorted racial notion.  When will we age out of this portrayal?

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