# Firefly&Serenity, where are the Chinese? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 29, 2012, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789 "2012-07-29T19:25:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/101 "2012-08-01T01:57:46Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > That is a complaint about casting. > > The most sensible in-universe interpretation of the facts we’re given leads to the conclusion that the people you see on screen in the show _are_ the characters of Chinese descent. And the most sensible real-world explanation circles back around to 14 episodes and a movie. There were a handful of Chinese-descended characters, but is it reasonable to expect more with such a small sample size of episodes? ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/102 "2012-08-01T02:13:44Z")
> [@sachertorte](#): > > I assume you mean caucasian actors. Probably not a good idea. Of course, it would have been a terrible idea. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/103 "2012-08-01T02:41:39Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > And the most sensible real-world explanation circles back around to 14 episodes and a movie. There were a handful of Chinese-descended characters, but is it reasonable to expect more with such a small sample size of episodes? No, you’re not hearing me. You’re still conflating characters with actors. They were _all_ Chinese-descended. These people are the diaspora that followed a population bottleneck, in the transport ships. Mal and his crew are as likely to be, and as much, of Chinese descent as anyone else in the show. It would be strange if they weren’t. But it doesn’t matter to their world. The ethnicity of the actors doesn’t signify anything, except maybe in a metaphoric sense. ---
**Author:** ![BlankSlate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blankslate/32/80_2.png) [@BlankSlate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlankSlate)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/104 "2012-08-01T03:01:58Z")
BD Wong would have made a terrific Sheperd Book, not that I was unhappy with Ron Glass. ---
**Author:** ![zweisamkeit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zweisamkeit/32/4360_2.png) [@zweisamkeit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zweisamkeit)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 6:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/105 "2012-08-01T06:05:32Z")
> [@sachertorte](#): > > I assume you mean caucasian actors. Probably not a good idea. I know that **Peremensoe** simply misspoke and didn’t intend any offense at all, _but_ the conflation of “white” with “American” in the post is an excellent example of how whiteness is the default in American culture. It’s easy to roll your eyes at that if you’re white, but really and truly, look at it from another angle. Imagine being, say, an ethnically-Chinese person who was born in America and lived here their entire life\*. How would you feel if you read something that equated American to white? Wouldn’t that hurt a tiny bit, or at least make you feel “othered”? Again I want to stress that I absolutely don’t think the comment was made with any ill intent whatsoever. But it’s exactly the kind of comment that is really easy to say and also _to not even notice_ when you’re white yourself.\*\* - Side question: did you kinda assume right after that sentence that the imaginary person’s parents were from China instead of potentially having been born in the US, too (along with _their_ parents)? \*\* How many people read the post and didn’t even see anything until **sachertorte** pointed it out? It doesn’t make you a jerk! But it should encourage you to look at things from a different perspective. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 11:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/106 "2012-08-01T11:57:37Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > No, you’re not hearing me. You’re still conflating characters with actors. > > They were _all_ Chinese-descended. These people are the diaspora that followed a population bottleneck, in the transport ships. Sorry, I misspoke. I meant that in the 14 episodes and the movie, there were a handful of Asian-looking characters that we can make the leap to Chinese descent. Some of the townspeople from Safe, the Tams, Inarra, Fanty & Mingo, and a few others. ---
**Author:** ![BMalion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e274bd/32.png) [@BMalion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BMalion)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/107 "2012-08-01T13:41:39Z")
> [@sachertorte](#): > > I assume you mean caucasian actors. Probably not a good idea. Mickey Rooney! ---
**Author:** ![Cap\_nReynolds](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/edb3f5/32.png) [@Cap\_nReynolds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cap_nReynolds)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/108 "2012-08-01T14:09:24Z")
Here’s how it is: The Chinese and Americans fairly dominated near the end of Earth That Was. Being on opposite sides of the planet, they didn’t intermarry all that much. My crew were a bunch of lost wanderers, living on the edges of the 'verse. Folks on the edges are settlers, from the lower castes, mostly, looking for a new start, or at least, runnin’ from a bad end. They weren’t as well-heeled or educated as the people who stayed behind in their comfortable homes with their fancy cultures and such. Just knowing some Chinese doesn’t make you Chinese, so the Asian types, like all the other types, tended to stick to their own ghettoes. Easy enough to deal with, but it only takes a few bad turns to change good relations to bad. Folks out here stick to what they know, and who they know. No point in rufflin’ feathers don’t need to be ruffled. Just stick to the plan, and don’t draw attention. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/109 "2012-08-01T16:53:43Z")
> [@zweisamkeit](#): > > I know that **Peremensoe** simply misspoke and didn’t intend any offense at all, _but_ the conflation of “white” with “American” in the post is an excellent example of how whiteness is the default in American culture. :eek: You are _absolutely_ right, and I am embarrassed, because I really, really, should know better. Sorry. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/110 "2012-08-01T17:26:52Z")
> [@Cap\_nReynolds](#): > > Here’s how it is: The Chinese and Americans fairly dominated near the end of Earth That Was. Being on opposite sides of the planet, they didn’t intermarry all that much. > … > Just knowing some Chinese doesn’t make you Chinese, so the Asian types, like all the other types, tended to stick to their own ghettoes But the show isn’t about Earth. It’s about a culture centuries removed from Earth, with a severe intervening population bottleneck, during which the original cultures mixed. It would be _completely weird_ if ethnicities as we understand them on Earth now had somehow survived that–it would cry out for explanation. And there is no explanation. Nobody in Firefly-verse seems to even notice ethnicity, right? Signifiers of the cultural blending are also unremarkable. We’re talking about it now because we’re conditioned to think of ethnicity, as marked first by appearance and second by language, as a core element of a person’s identity. But their behavior and history suggest that ethnicity as we know it is gone. People in Firefly-verse, in our terms, are like a new group–sort of like New World Hispanics, where the baseline is a blend of Native, European and African genes in varying proportions. Except that in Firefly, they should be more blended, because of that bottleneck effect. The only parts of the show that don’t really reflect this are the fact that the _actors_ are still mostly of recognizable-to-us pigeonhole heritages–and they are still speaking _almost_ entirely English. These are concessions to realities of production. If Firefly had been an unlimited-budget high-concept vanity project from day one, they could have spent a couple years finding dozens of mixed-heritage actors (who would mostly all have _some_ Asian ancestry, but none of whom would be quite fixable as any particular nationality), and teaching them all a constructed language that had much larger portions of Mandarin and invented words, as well as English. So what we have, instead–assuming that we take the given history seriously–is a situation where the ethnic variation between Mal and Zoe and Inara is not a literal depiction of what those characters ought to look like in that universe, but a metaphoric one. The occasional Mandarin word or oddly-turned English isn’t their actual language, just a representation of it that still works for us English-speaking TV-viewers. In my defense, on the “American” thing: I think I had in mind the theoretical possibility of makeup on _black_ American actors, too–not that that changes the basic point there. **zweisamkeit** was right. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/111 "2012-08-01T17:41:30Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > If Firefly had been an unlimited-budget high-concept vanity project from day one, they could have spent a couple years finding dozens of mixed-heritage actors (who would mostly all have _some_ Asian ancestry, but none of whom would be quite fixable as any particular nationality), and teaching them all a constructed language that had much larger portions of Mandarin and invented words, as well as English. That’d be real horrorshow. ---
**Author:** ![Cap\_nReynolds](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/edb3f5/32.png) [@Cap\_nReynolds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cap_nReynolds)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/112 "2012-08-01T18:18:38Z")
Here’s how it is: The 'verse is an English-speaking place. At least, where my crew and I go. The thousands of languages and dialects of the past all died. English or Chinese, that’s all you hear. Except for Reaver, and ain’t no one lived long enough to learn that. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/113 "2012-08-01T18:24:18Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > But the show isn’t about Earth. It’s about a culture centuries removed from Earth, with a severe intervening population bottleneck, during which the original cultures mixed. It would be _completely weird_ if ethnicities as we understand them on Earth now had somehow survived that–it would cry out for explanation. Do we know any of that for sure? A few US-only and China-only ships is not impossible. ---
**Author:** ![zweisamkeit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zweisamkeit/32/4360_2.png) [@zweisamkeit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zweisamkeit)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/114 "2012-08-01T18:58:52Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > :eek: > > You are _absolutely_ right, and I am embarrassed, because I really, really, should know better. > > Sorry. Please don’t be embarrassed! I tried to stress that you didn’t do something wrong or mean-spirited. It was more that your post was a handy jumping-off point for a topic definitely related to the thread, yknow? I’m sorry. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![zweisamkeit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zweisamkeit/32/4360_2.png) [@zweisamkeit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zweisamkeit)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/115 "2012-08-01T19:12:08Z")
An interesting example of this phenomenon that isn’t about race, but sex/gender, is how often [male/men are the default, while women are a specific category](http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/05/24/male-as-the-neutral-default/). I was totally fascinated by this post when I first read it. I’m a woman and yet I hadn’t consciously noticed it before. I don’t think that’s surprising, though, because I don’t believe the people creating those categories (titles, labels, etc) are consciously aware of it, either. The lack of maliciousness is what makes it so entrenched; the examples given don’t point to the above individuals as responsible or to blame, but instead reflect a problem our society _as a whole_ has. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/116 "2012-08-01T19:25:17Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > Do we know any of that for sure? Of course there’s relatively little source text for the Firefly-verse compared to something like Star Trek. Some of the “canonical” understanding is based on ancillary materials like the authorized RPG, and explanations Whedon gave when asked. But while the canonical story seems to be that the successor states of the United States and China remained separate governmental entitities through the exodus and into the founding of the first terraformed colonies (then completing their formal consolidation into the Alliance), the people and cultures were definitely mixing throughout the trip. > [@firefly.wikia.com](#): > > Depleted resources, overpopulation, and a compromised ecosystem forced the population to abandon “Earth-That-Was”. > … > They set out in enormous ships they referred to as “arks.” Without “faster-than-light” capability, the journey to a new home was long and taxing. One full generation was born, lived, and died without ever leaving these space ships. > … > With so many different people of all nationalities and races inside the space ships, the old ethnic and political barriers began to blur. People learned the native languages of their fellow ship dwellers. Subsequent generations would come to speak fluently the two dominant languages, English and Mandarin, and phrases from other cultures. > … > The governments of these two planets took an enlightened view of civilization. They worked to maintain order, but also encouraged diversity of language, ethnicity, religion, and expression of thought. And then it was _another_ three hundred years before the time of the show. > [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > > [@Peremensoe](#): > > > > If Firefly had been an unlimited-budget high-concept vanity project from day one, they could have spent a couple years finding dozens of mixed-heritage actors (who would mostly all have _some_ Asian ancestry, but none of whom would be quite fixable as any particular nationality), and teaching them all a constructed language that had much larger portions of Mandarin and invented words, as well as English. > > That’d be real horrorshow. For viewers, you mean? Certainly some people wouldn’t get it. But it would be the _mostawesomethingever_ for others. On the language aspect, consider how popular “Klingon” language has become despite relatively little actual use in Star Trek. Look at the critical approval and popular acceptance for the use of “Dothraki” language in _Game of Thrones_. Or for production? Well, yeah. It’s pure geek fantasy. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2012, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/117 "2012-08-01T23:11:53Z")
“Horrorshow” is _good_, droog. ---
**Author:** ![Waenara](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/50afbb/32.png) [@Waenara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Waenara)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2012, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/118 "2012-08-02T02:12:25Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > So what we have, instead–assuming that we take the given history seriously–is a situation where the ethnic variation between Mal and Zoe and Inara is not a literal depiction of what those characters ought to look like in that universe, but a metaphoric one. The occasional Mandarin word or oddly-turned English isn’t their actual language, just a representation of it that still works for us English-speaking TV-viewers. Similarly, I’m sure I read somewhere several years ago (not sure where, maybe an interview with someone involved in the show?) that the crew’s “Old West” speech (accent, word choice, colorful metaphors) is not really a literal depiction of what they “actually” would be speaking. Instead, it’s a shorthand for us viewers to understand their milieu and place in the 'verse. Since they’re less technologically advanced than the core worlds and living out in the hinterlands/frontier areas, they would likely develop their own dialect and manner of speaking that’s different from the core worlds. This is depicted in the show with an “Old West” accent, so it’s easy for the viewers to quickly pick up on how they’re different from the Alliance. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2012, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789/119 "2012-08-02T02:31:14Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > That’d be real horrorshow. Could you recommend a good milk bar, BTW? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firefly-serenity-where-are-the-chinese/629789.md?page=5)