In fourth grade, Catherine Haena Kim could not muster the courage to audition for the female lead of her school’s production of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” But her teachers saw something in the way she held herself in the classroom.
Across industries, Asian Americans have long been held back by unquestioned biases rooted in racial stereotypes. Employers often paint Asians as passive, lacking in gravitas or not a “cultural fit,” said Justin Zhu, co-founder of the advocacy group Stand with Asian Americans. Advocates are mixed on whether this rise in visibility is a sign that Asian Americans are actually gaining wider, meaningful representation. Over the last decade, there have been ups and downs: For two years, ABC even had two sitcoms with all-Asian casts — “Fresh Off the Boat” and “Dr. Ken” — but the latter, starring Ken Jeong, was nixed after only two seasons.
Also, most of these broadcast shows don’t showcase an Asian main couple or all-Asian ensemble. The conventional wisdom that many industry executives still hold firm to is that casting a white actor as the lead will make a series relatable to more viewers, so it will be more profitable. Liu said that demographics for network viewers are trained to older audiences, which skew predominantly white.
It was “The Company You Keep” executive producer Jon M. Chu, the director of “Crazy Rich Asians,” who suggested that agent Emma Hill be Asian American — and have an on-screen family with a Korean American father and Chinese American mother. The Hill family is also a political dynasty. In 2003, the FBI learned he was the target of an assassination plot by a white supremacist and anti-government extremist who “specifically said that there’s no way that an Asian American could be a legitimate governor of the state of Washington,” Locke recalled.
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