How Accurately Are Asian Americans Cast in Hollywood?
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
>It’s difficult to judge whether a character fairly portrays a specific ethnicity, but we can assess whether an actor and the character they portray share the same ethnicity as a baseline for accurate representation.
Do we know all the required details that the article implies?
I know folks who are from an Asian country, not China, but in their country they are thought of as "ethnic Chinese" and yet their family has no connection to China what is that then?
How does that even work?
What about people who have genetic connections but no real cultural connection? I'm reminded of a story about a black man who didn't know much about his past, he took a genetic test only to find out his genetic background was more native American than black. He asked his mom and she said "I'm too old to stop being a black woman."
Matching people to a given story seems like an endless minefield.
How the cultures are related is a powder keg. Several countries around China like Japan, Korea and Vietnam write with Chinese characters or historically have so they have had massive imports of literature from China which in turn had a lot of contact with India resulting in texts like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konjaku_Monogatarish%C5%AB
becoming foundational to their literature. Everywhere people use Chinese characters, for instance, there are legends of nine-tailed foxes.
In that situation you sure as hell find Chinese people who would be insulted to be associated with Japanese (not least because of WWII) and the opposite (China being a potential threat to it's neighbors historically not least because of its size.) I'm sure there are Chinese people who think the whole sinosphere is really Chinese and there have been movements in Korea and Japan that saw themselves as the real representatives of China back when China was on the ropes 150 years ago or so. Go to a "Japanese" restaurant in much of the US and it is likely to be staffed by Koreans who have no idea about what Okonomiyaki or any kind of Japanese food that isn't on the menu is. I could definitely see a Chinese person being offended because a Korean was cast in a Chinese role.
The data visualization is part of what made this piece so compelling to me!