Asian representation matters.

I don’t own a TV and I love it. I love it because it means that I don’t watch any free-to-air TV and instead I get to enjoy a curated stream of all of my favourite shows. I do have to watch everything on a small screen but I like the feeling of not being punched in the face by visual stimulus.

However, I recently found myself at a family member’s house watching several hours of TV. And what I found was that everything was super white. Not only the visual representation, but the messaging and content as well. I found all the shows to have a very mono-cultural perspective and it was a jarring contrast to the reality of multiculturalism that exists in this country.

Is this what people are watching and engaging with every single day?

Asians constitute 13% of the Australian population so really, we should be occupying 13% of the Australian media. To give context to this, the African American population in the US is also around 13%. I share this comparison to perhaps give a bit more understanding about how little Asian Australian representation exists in our current media.

Back in the 90’s and 2000’s, the only Asian Australian people I saw on TV were Lee Lin Chin, Geoff from the Wiggles and Kathleen from Hi 5. Because I never saw anyone that looked like me, I came to understand that I looked “wrong”. Because I never saw anyone that looked like me, I wished that I could look more Caucasian every single day.

And this caused a whole heap of problems for me later on down the track.

Things have changed dramatically since my childhood days and the representation of Asians has definitely increased. Australian Idol and Masterchef are two good examples of Asian representation. But we have to remember that these are reality TV shows so they naturally reflect the actual landscape of Australia (plus, food and music are Asian territories lol). We need more Asians visible in scripted TV shows as well as on the news and commentary pieces.

I know things are changing but this old lady is getting impatient.

And one more thing before I go. I’ll just leave this here as a statement because this requires a whole different post:

Just because we see Asian faces in the media, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Asian ideas, values or thinking are being conveyed.