Maybe I'm old fashioned but all I see is a smiling boy, in traditional Chinese dress, eating what appears to be rice out of a bowl with chopsticks. Are there actually Chinese people who find this offensive? Why?
This is just cancel culture playing out. Weak, risk-averse executives cowardly bending the knee to a small group of malicious, narcissistic activists.
This reminds me of the "What is the problem with Apu?" fiasco. No Indian I knew cared, but a small number of sociopathic activists forced the hands of the cowards in charge.
> forced the hands of the cowards in charge
So you support a white actor voicing an Indian character, and don't want some Indian-Americans added to the show? Change is good when something is messed up. Our problem wasn't with the show itself, its how the show influences the behavior of society negatively, and the fact that there was simply no other representation of Indian-Americans in media at the time.
South Park, Simpsons, Family Guy and all the greats are packed full of racially-adventurous humour and that's part of what makes these shows great. Scottish, British, Indian, Japanese, Jewish, Muslim and virtually everyone is picked on.
They're equal opportunity offenders.
If you don't like it, that's your prerogative, but don't force your preferences on the rest of us.
This seems to belie the entire concept of fiction writing. Must that writer also be a straight married male with children and own a convenience store? Can a male writer write a book with female characters, or vice versa?
Hank literally agrees with me. Of course I'm not saying that in general, but in this specific case its absolutely the right thing to do.
I don't know what's special about this case. I mean I understand what's of special importance to you, but if writer <-> character matching is required here, I don't see what would prevent it from becoming a universalizable rule that would turn "write what you know" from a piece of hackneyed advice into a moral principle.
As to why not have whites play Asians even in a cartoon when they can just as easily play space aliens and pink unicorns? The same reason we all hate Big Bang Theory, it leads to tired and insulting jokes based on shallow stereotypes. This is why Asians don't like Apu, because most of the jokes around him are based on lazy and frequently negative stereotypes. The jokes about space aliens and pink unicorns could also be lazy, but there's no space aliens or pink unicorns to get affected by them, fortunately. Remember that Nahasapeemapetilon isn't even a name in any culture, it's made up to sound funny to western audiences.
Apu is on the whole a very positive stereotype - a successful and responsible small business owner who's respected by his and contributes to his community.
Compare him to someone like Cletus who is a negative stereotype of white Southerners, portrayed as an extremely low IQ ignoramus. Or Kyle's cousin in South Park who's a negative stereotype of a Jew, portrayed as a hypersensitive money-grubber. And so on.
Your injury is nothing more than an imagined grievance.
"This is why Asians don't like"
Speak for yourself. You aren't a spokesperson for South Asians, and not all of them are on the same wokeness bandwagon.
EDIT to ask: how do the Dr. Seuss books fare in that regard?
I didn't even grow up in America, but it's irritating when your coworkers think that they are meaningfully connecting with you based on what they "learned" from some hackneyed stereotype in a mildly funny adult cartoon. Doubly so when that coworker happens to be in a management position above you.
My advice: if you have a South Asian coworker, put away the Apu jokes unless they like it and bring it up for some reason.
Compare it to some of the deliberately-racist cartoons that Giesel drew during World War II:
https://reimaginingmigration.org/dr-seuss-political-cartoons...
This wasn't intended to offend, and I don't know how many people were offended by it. But if I were the publisher the similarities would distress me.
There was a white person presented in an exaggerated, outdated costume in that very same drawing.
Discriminated against in college admissions? Erased in discussions of diversity in tech? Who cares. Call me back when we can use you to get mad at a children's book.
Outdated? These cartoons were drawn in the 1930's and 40's... 90+ years ago. They were not outdated at the time.
Regardless if we find some of these drawings racist by today's standards - they are historical and should be preserved as such.
1984 becomes more real by the day...
They aged pretty f-ing fantastically considering what they could have drawn back then.
As for the wardrobe, no, it doesn't look that dated, especially for the time. Maybe the style of it, but conical hats and wooden shoes are both practical and still commonplace throughout East and Southeast Asia, last I checked. The clogs are probably the most objectionable aspect, and only because I don't know if anything resembling Japanese geta was common in China.
And further, the whole book is from the point of view of a child's imagination, so expecting it to map particularly closely to reality is entirely ignorant of literary context.
Nobody cares at all.
I'm sure that actual Chinese people have more to worry about -- though the black people living in America definitely have current fears from people living up to the racist stereotypes presented here. This is about us and dealing with our own difficult past that still afflicts us today.
Anyways, IMO the white character's coloration is just as exaggerated as the Chinese character's. "White" people aren't actually 0xFFFFFF. The white character's physically improbable nose length and hair situation are also reminiscent of racist caricatures of white people.
It's kind of a stereotype of rural farmers in China. If you do a Google image search for "rural Chinese farmers" or even "Chinese peasants" you can still see the same type of grass hat being worn today. Then remember that in the 1930s the industrial revolution hadn't reached China yet; it was very much an agrarian society (much like the US a century before then) and nearly everybody was a farmer like that.
Is Dr. Seuss's cartoon offensive? Meh, it just feels dated and out of touch with what modern China has achieved, culturally and economically. I personally don't find it any worse a stereotype than what one sees today if they do a Google Image Search for "Texan", "Frenchman", or "Englishman" but YMMV.
(Actually, the GIS result for "Frenchman" is rather amusing; perhaps Google owes France an apology for being "offensive".)
Is it, though? The wardrobe seems a fair bit elegant for some rural farmer; I'd expect a straw hat and simpler garb.
I ain't familiar with Chinese formal wear from that time period, but if I were a child in the 1930's trying to imagine a formally-dressed Chinese man (i.e. the literary context of that depiction) that's probably what I'd imagine. The white rice contributes to that perception of wealth, too; from what I understand, white rice is a symbol of affluence in a lot of Asian cultures, and brown rice a symbol of peasantry (see also: the Imperial Japanese Navy's experience with thiamine deficiency because sailors subsisted themselves entirely on "fancy" white rice instead of brown: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history). The Chinese man's presentation alongside a formally-dressed magician contributes further to that interpretation.