The Good Wife and those crazy backwards Asian names

[lilacsigil]

...The Good Wife is, in so many ways, a great show. But wow, with the exception of Kalinda, they fail hard on race. I don't just mean in the episodes where they make a Very Special Case out of racial issues - or equality in sentencing being shown as a way to be mean to innocent white men - but sometimes as an actual plot point.


I have to post this here to get it off my chest because st_aurafina is getting sick of me going on and on about it.

This week, there were two possible suspects for the rape and murder of a young (white) woman. One was white and Dutch, one Taiwanese. I was cringing at first, but the issues seemed to be centering around the legal status of Taiwanese diplomatic immunity rather than anything icky so I relaxed a bit.

Then they made the case based on the Taiwanese suspect signing a receipt with his given name before his family name. Firstly, a lot of people prefer to use givenname familyname when living in cultures that don't account well for familyname givenname, so this is hardly evidence. Secondly, the character's name was Chen Jin-Pyn*. Guess how the name was written on the receipt? "Chen Jin-Pyn". It seems that the show thought that Jin-Pyn was his family name. Could the writers not take two seconds to google the most common surname on the planet? Or Chinese name structures? This was a pivotal plot point.

*not getting into the romanisation issue, because some people do like idiosyncratic spellings, nor that I can only find one person with this given name and she's female and Singaporean.

I'm not going to stop watching, yet, but I'm going to remember to keep my guard up for Stupid.

Comments

[amadi]

This was the very first episode of the show I watched, and I was less than thrilled with the whole thing. That the young brash white prosecutor simultaneously started an (ill-advised? clandestine?) affair with his black co-worker at the same time he was making his bones prosecuting a man of color was twitch-inducing too.

I'm wondering if I'm going to bother trying it again.

[lilacsigil]

There have been far better episodes, but whenever they have a Race Issue it's fucking terrible. It's weird: they manage perfectly well with Kalinda (for example, she and Cary went to a store owned by an Indian family, he expected her to be able to speak with them "in their language" and she knocked him down about half-a-dozen pegs) but the rest of the time it's really not good.

[amadi]

I record the show because there's often an issue where the show before it, which I watch regularly, starts late because of football. (Weird scheduling.) So I might try it again.