THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 47
humble Chinese-American background,
whose sense of her heritage is trans-
formed when she accompanies her boy-
friend to Singapore and discovers that
he is the scion of the city’s most prom-
inent family. But, to Wu, the character
is a child. “She never feels quite at home
in America, where she grew up, yet she
has never been to Asia,” she said. “When
she finally goes, she is bullied.”
I asked what animal was behind her
performance in “Fresh Off the Boat,”
but Wu worried that the real Jessica
Huang would be offended by her an-
swer. She told me eventually, but in-
sisted that it be off the record. “You have
to understand that Jessica sees herself
as a peacock,” Wu said.
In “Hustlers,” Wu plays a squirrel—
which is to say, she plays a woman from
Queens named Destiny who strips in
order to support a young daughter and
the grandmother who raised her. “Des-
tiny was always on the lookout, always
afraid of predators,” Wu said. “She’s al-
ways trying to store up all the nuts be-
cause she has a scarcity complex.” Wu
seemed to retreat into herself, and then
come to a realization. “I know that well,
because I think I am very much a squir-
rel,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to play
somebody who’s really lonely.”
In the movie, Destiny is mentored
by Jennifer Lopez’s magnetic charac-
ter, Ramona—a lioness to Destiny’s
squirrel—who teaches her how to ex-
tract money from clients and later
hatches a scheme to drug and defraud
them. When I saw the film, I noticed
how watchfully Destiny enters every
room. Whether navigating a club or
celebrating Christmas with her sisters
in crime at a lavish apartment, she al-
ways seems to be observing the scene,
and to be slightly apart from it.
“Destiny needs money, but Destiny re-
ally gets caught up in it because she loves
feeling like she’s a part of something,”
Wu explained when I brought this up,
a tenderness entering her voice. “She’s
so excited that she’s part of a family.”
But Wu’s flitting eyes betray that
Destiny doesn’t quite dare to believe
that she really belongs, and, the more Ithought about the characters that Wu
has inhabited, the more connected they
felt to me, a band of outsiders.T
he story of Asian-Americans is the
story of being marooned between
vertiginous aspiration and compensatory
diligence, between being probationary
Americans at best and perennial aliens
at worst. America is the strange place
where Asians are stranded, yoked to-
gether by difference. As Wu put it to me,
“ ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ is not about being
Asian. It’s not about being Chinese. It’s
about Asian America—the fact that, even
though we are from different cultures,
what we share is the way our dominant
culture, which is white America, treated
us growing up and lumped us together.”
White America tends to ignore the
fact that Asian America encompasses
a vast variety of experiences—not just
different countries and cultures of ori-
gin but a whole spectrum of assimila-
tion, class, and other markers of identity.
“For most Asians, either you’re super-
poor or you’re gonna go to school and
be a professional,” Eddie Huang told me.
Wu’s Asian America, he said, was “a lit-
tle bit whiter” than his own. “The first
week we hung out, Constance wanted
no part of the Asian-representation stuff,”
he recalled. “She was, like, ‘I’m an actor.
I’m focussed on acting as a craft.’ Con-
stance definitely ran from the Chinese
home in a lot of ways, and then came
back around to find it through consciously
exploring her identity on the show.”
When Huang and I spoke, we used
English threaded with Chinese words
and expressions. Huang, who has a book
and a movie coming out, both featur-
ing Asian-American protagonists—“I
can only ever write what I know”—told
me that he recently found himself ask-
ing a Barnes & Noble clerk for a copy
of Sally Rooney’s novel “Conversations
with Friends” in his “white voice.” “I
didn’t even realize I had a white voice
until the person I was with pointed it
out to me,” Huang said, with a dry laugh.
Huang’s words reminded me of all
the times that I’d been charged with
“sounding white” or being a “banana”—
yellow on the outside and white on the
inside—and of how baffled I’d been
by the accusations. If the prototypical
American was white and middle class,
and my parents’ Chinese accents andTOWED
I understands how you might feel
that where she parked the car
reveals a kind of disregard
bordering on disrespect.You didn’t say or have to say
as much—it was the way
your eyelids fluttered near each
other in caress, as if to armyour consciousness against
expressing exasperation
at the continual arrival
of unpredictable eventsthat come along with I.
Much like the world
destabilized by rising
temperatures and seas,I can approach
catastrophe, a carnival
whack-a-mole
run amok. I is sorry.—Eliza Griswold