44 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
tweet, since deleted, the journalist Yashar
Ali wrote that Wu’s “conduct today
comes as no surprise to anyone who has
worked with her in recent years,” be-
cause of her “reputation for being rude,
petty, mean-spirited, and ungrateful.”
Such is the state of cultural politics
in 2019 that Wu’s every success and fail-
ure is fraught with significance; these
days, no tempest can be relied on to re-
main in its teapot. What did it mean,
politically, to see Wu as “ungrateful,”
when so many stars—white stars, male
stars—exhibit much worse behavior
without provoking outrage? In Slate, the
Korean-American writer Inkoo Kang
suggested that Asian-Americans finally
had “a diva to call our own.” Diva sta-
tus, she wrote, “however undeserved the
allowances it gets, is one that’s long been
denied to a group of people often char-
acterized as unoriginal robots and mean-
for-meanness’ sake Dragon Ladies.”
In the time I spent with Wu, the scars
of her recent bout with the media felt
fresh. She oscillated between irreverently
confiding—“Maybe I’ll get drunk and
tell you all my secrets!” she joked one
night—and watchful. “Is this recording,
by the way?” she asked at our first meet-
ing, in Los Angeles, when I set my phone
on the table. Before answering questions,
she would pause, fingers pressed to her
temples and a twitch of her mouth con-
veying apprehension. She revised and
retracted her statements, as if calculat-
ing every possible angle from which her
words could be viewed.
In any minority group, the most
prominent members are expected to
somehow speak for the entire constitu-
ency. But, if the burden of being Con-
stance Wu seemed to weigh heavily, it
was also evidently not something that
she felt she could renounce. The day of
the “Simple Man” makeup session, we
wandered the scruffy beachfront of
Kaiaka Bay, picking our way through
cow bush and sugarcane ferns to the wa-
ter’s edge. A fetid stench wafted on the
breeze and flies buzzed at our ankles.
On the beach were the rotting remains
of a school of fish. “It’s actually a good
metaphor for the movie,” Wu said, ex-
citedly. “Of how colonization happens.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but she
went on for several minutes about the
film’s exploration of ancestry, coloniza-
tion, and death—“not just the death of
the protagonist but also of a way of life,”
she said. “Seeing these dead fish is kind
of to see the voices of the ancestors.”I
first encountered Wu four years ago,
when I tuned in to the début episode
of “Fresh Off the Boat.” The show fol-
lows a family of Taiwanese immigrants
who uproot their life in an urban Chi-
natown and move to Orlando, Florida,
in order to run a Western-themed steak-
house. Wu plays the matriarch and tiger
mother par excellence Jessica Huang, aspirited and indefensibly blunt woman
whose fierce devotion to her children is
matched only by her uncompromising
expectations for them. Wu’s presence on-
screen—impetuous, possessive, pugilis-
tic, winsome—quickly made her char-
acter the axle around which the other
family members rotate. Jessica Huang
may not always be pleasant, but she is
never boring. Shipwrecked on the shoals
of assimilation—adjusting to the cultural
peculiarities of America less easily than
the rest of her clan—she fights harder
than anyone else to keep the family afloat.
When critics hailed Jessica Huang
as the most compelling character on the
show, it felt momentous: here was an
Asian woman charming Americans by
playing something other than a victim
or a temptress, the two types generally
assigned to Asian women since the time
of Anna May Wong. (Wong, Holly-
wood’s first Asian-American star, is per-
haps most famous for the role she didn’t
land, as the lead in the 1937 adaptation
of Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth,”
whose Chinese characters ended up
being played by white actors.)
As I watched the show, I realized that
the woman onscreen was very much like
my mother, who arrived in the U.S. from
China in the early nineties. Like her,
Jessica wears visors and high-waisted
khaki shorts, refuses to turn on the
air-conditioning even at the height of
summer, and packs her children pun-
gent stir-fry lunches that earn them the
scorn of their classmates. Like her, Jes-
sica speaks with an accent—flattened
“R”s, tightened “O”s, elided consonants—
and has a predilection for dropping ar-
ticles. But in Jessica the alienated edge
of immigrant identity, which my mother
and I both strove to hide, is played up
and endowed with a kind of sideways
charisma. Wu can render a petulant scowl
hilarious by allowing it to linger on her
face past the point of excess. Humor
often comes from the dissonance be-
tween the expression in her eyes—panic,
grievance, barely concealed resentment—
and her belief that she projects an air of
supreme control. When she says, “All
white people look the same” or “It’s true,
I am good at everything,” there is vul-
nerability to her vainglory because it is
so transparently insecure.
On the Internet, the character’s id-
iosyncrasies are a matter of gleeful cel-