1. In Sarah Moon Cassinelli’s article, “If we are Asian, then are we funny?”: Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl as the First (and Last?) Asian American Sitcom, the author explains Margaret Cho’s role in the Asian American sitcom called All-American Girl. She explains that the show had the potential to accurately represent any minority figures, but due to the criticism that came from audiences about authenticity, they moved their focus more on ethnic authenticity rather than comedy. This show was focused on an Asian American family, and they weren’t capable of expressing that aspect so they focused more on the Asian aspect and that led to audiences seeing the show as “racist”. This portrayal lacked the aspect of an Asian American family as one single culture, instead showing it as two separate ones and that led the audience being uninterested and the showing being canceled.
2. The author mentions how the failure of the show even comes through while reading the title of it. “In this way, the show is mocking its Asian viewers and antagonizing its non-Asian audience by making it glaringly obvious that the Asian implication of the title is not worthy enough to be included” (135). With the balance of Asian culture and American culture, there were problems from the beginning which we can see from the title of the show. They weren’t capable of presenting an accurate depiction of this type of family in the context of the show as well as the title by only implementing American culture into it.
“The show seemed to overemphasize the characters’ Asianness marking the Asian face, body, and family structure as decidedly uncanny” (131). The depiction of this show was based on what they thought Asian’s should look like and followed the stereotypes that many people believe in.
3. The term Kim consistently uses throughout her article is authentic. The way she describes this term is being genuine and we can see in her article that the reason for the sitcom not being authentic is that they were constantly using stereotypes to describe and portray the characters.
4. This article reminded me of the film we watched in class, Slaying the Dragon. Cassinelli explains how many stereotypes were used in this sitcom and in Slaying the Dragon, it gives us a look at Asian American actresses in Hollywood and the ways audiences stereotyped them. Audiences saw these Asian American actresses as something that they may not have always been and that is a close representation of this article.