THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 45
ebration. Listicles (“27 Lessons Jessica
Huang Has Taught Us”) compile her
wisdom on such matters as child rear-
ing (“It’s just like chess, children are the
pawns and you are the queen”) and up-
ward mobility (“I’m gonna treat myself
to a pedicure done by a white lady. That’s
when you know you’ve made it”). On
the one hand, it’s remarkable to see a
woman like my mother, and her shabby,
marginal occupation of a country that
she’s never understood, become a sub-
ject fit for prime-time TV. On the other,
it’s all played for laughs, and the more
you watch Jessica the more you see her
not as someone fully realized and human
but as a marionette with stereotypes for
strings, controlled by a legion of writers
who know that they can rely on her spunk
to give punch to any scene.
When the show débuted, its most
ferocious critic was, unexpectedly, Eddie
Huang, its producer and also the au-
thor of the memoir on which it was
based. “This show isn’t about me, nor
is it about Asian America,” Huang
wrote, in an essay for New York, calling
it “a reverse-yellowface show with uni-
versal white stories played out by Chi-
namen.” Huang’s essay provoked pre-
dictable obloquy in the entertainment
industry, but Wu told me that she felt
it was important to stand up for him.
“Eddie got to where he is today by not
mincing his words, and people loved
him for it,” she said.
At the same time, Wu, who, I figured,
had fielded her share of questions on
stereotyping, maintained that the prac-
tice was harmful only if it was taken as
defining a group. “If somebody just so
happens to fall into stereotypical traits,
it doesn’t mean that we should try to
take that part of her away and hide it
from the light,” she said. “Because that’s
a manifestation of shame. If anything,
I think that people who have been re-
duced by pop culture their whole lives
deserve to have their stories expanded
upon.” Later, she added that she always
found it weird when Asian actors re-
fused to play stereotypes. Why, she asked,
when there weren’t enough Asian roles,
would you turn one down, rather than
take the opportunity to invest a stock
type with “character and human expe-
rience that it’s never fucking gotten?”
To research the role of Jessica, Wu
went to Orlando to spend time with
Eddie Huang’s mother. “She’s very, very
extravagant,” Wu once said, describing
the real Jessica’s white minidress, giant
platform sandals, and body “dripping in
diamonds.” Eddie Huang told me about
the encounter from his mother’s side.
“The first thing she said was ‘O.K., she’s
hot enough to play me,’ ” he recalled.
“Constance really captures a lot of my
mom, because my mom is very much a
diva. They both are.” He laughed. “They’re
both just super-alpha, super-diva, super-
unstoppable forces. Constance shows up
anywhere, and it’s a hurricane.”A
popular episode in the show’s first
season centered on Jessica’s belief
in traditional Chinese superstitions. The
beliefs had been unfamiliar to Wu, who
discussed them with other Asian-Amer-
icans in preparation for shooting. “Ev-
eryone knew about it,” she said. “But, be-
cause I grew up in America, I didn’t grow
up around Chinese people or relatives.
And I didn’t get these superstitions from
my parents. So I had to integrate them
into Jessica’s origin story.” Jessica’s ori-
gin stories—flashbacks to her formative
years, in college, say, or meeting her hus-
band—are Wu’s favorite part of the show,
and it is easy to see how they have helped
her inhabit a Chinese-American expe-
rience that is not her own.
Wu was born in Richmond, Virginia,
the third of four daughters, to Taiwan-
ese immigrants who had moved to the
U.S. in the nineteen-seventies. Her fa-
ther pursued a doctorate in
biology and genetics and later
became a professor at Vir-
ginia Commonwealth Uni-
versity; her mother was ini-
tially a homemaker, then went
to the local community col-
lege to study computer pro-
gramming. By the time Wu
was born, the family was sol-
idly middle class—“not up-
per-middle, not lower-middle,
but fucking middle-middle.” On the
weekends, she went with neighbors to
the local Third Presbyterian Church. She
took piano lessons and did gymnastics
at the Y.M.C.A. English was spoken in
the household. “I speak Chinese like a
toddler with an American accent,” Wu
told me. The family went on vacation to
the Blue Ridge Mountains or Disney
World, not to their ancestral home.Like the Huangs in “Fresh Off the
Boat,” Wu’s family were virtually the
only Asians in their town. But, whereas
Eddie Huang has written about being
called a “chink” on his first day of mid-
dle school, Wu can’t recall being treated
differently, much less bullied, because
of how she looked. When the Wus
moved into a new house, she told me,
neighbors came to greet them: “They
were literally baking us pies to welcome
us to the neighborhood.”
Genteel Southern culture figured
more prominently in Wu’s upbringing
than ancient Chinese traditions did.
“Richmond is the city that built me,”
Wu said. “There was a lot of J. Crew
and Ann Taylor.” At her high school,
whose mascot was a Confederate Rebel,
she was a cheerleader for the wrestling
team. But school, in general, wasn’t of
much interest to Wu; community the-
atre was where she thrived. “Theatre
was the place where adults listened to
you, with respect, and valued your feel-
ings, instead of trying to make you sup-
press them,” she said. Wu made her lead
acting début, at the age of twelve, as
Mole, in a stage adaptation of “The
Wind in the Willows.” A couple of years
later, she saw college productions of “All
My Sons” and “Who’s Afraid of Vir-
ginia Woolf ?”—shows that, she said,
“knocked my socks off to the other side
of the fucking theatre.”
Christianity and political conserva-
tism were integral to the identity of the
adults she knew. Although
Wu is coy about whether she
believes in God, she uses re-
ligion as a framing device for
understanding certain parts
of her life. When she was
twelve, she wrote to the local
paper to advocate a fervently
pro-life position. (Wu, who
campaigned for Hillary Clin-
ton in 2016, is now pro-
choice.) “I was proud of being
a virgin when I got to college,” she told
me. “Because, where I come from, it was
cool to wait until marriage.”
College was SUNY Purchase, where
Wu earned a B.F.A. in acting. She de-
scribed her academic schedule as rigor-
ous, and said that it made her reckon
with her work in a serious way. “It took
me a long time to marry that seriousness
with the playfulness and the freedom