This week on Don't Call Me Resilient, we explore the advances that the hit Netflix comedy, _Beef_ has made in television. But the brilliance of the new series, which looks at loneliness and alienation -- with a spotlight on race and class and gender -- has been threatened by the controversial history of one of its supporting actors.
Beef premiered on Netflix this month to rave reviews and quickly became the top watched series on Netflix in the U.S. In Canada, it took the No. 2 spot.
Beef is a dark comedy series created by Lee Sung Jin. It follows two L.A. strangers, courageously played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, who get into a road rage incident — and end up in an escalating feud.
The show is a beautiful meditation on life and survival and highlights universal issues of alienation and loneliness as well as class and race and gender. Critics have praised Beef for its performances and also for its revolutionary representation of Asian Americans.
But over the weekend, a Twitter storm erupted after a podcast episode featuring supporting actor David Choe resurfaced. In the 2014 podcast, Choe vividly relays a sexual assault story where he is the perpetrator. Choe has apologized since and has also said the story was made up.
This week on Don’t Call Me Resilient, we explore the advances Beef has made in television. As the controversy continues to swirl, we also explore the limits of those advancements and ask whether the brilliance of Beef will be overshadowed by Choe’s controversial history.
Joining us to discuss this is Michelle Cho, an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, specializing in Korean film, media and popular culture. Also with us is Bianca Mabute-Louie, a PhD student in Sociology at Rice University in Houston with a background in Asian American studies and racial justice work.
[Beef showcases] “a really compelling portrayal of Asian American women’s experience of female rage and the nuances of living in a world, in a society that expects a certain type of docility and a placid surface” — Michelle Cho, assistant professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto
Don’t Call Me Resilient
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Will the brilliance of Netflix's 'Beef' be lost in the shadow of a sexual assault controversy?
[00:00:00] Vinita: From The Conversation, this is, Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vinita Srivastava.
[00:00:11] Michelle Cho: There are a lot of folks who watch Netflix and they see the recommendations list and they're not necessarily part of these conversations, and they will just watch it and never know that there is this other discussion happening.
[00:00:28] Vinita: Beef is that new dark comedy series that everyone is talking about. When the show premiered this month, it was the most watched show on Netflix. The series follows two LA strangers, brilliantly played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, who get into a road rage incident and end up in an escalating feud. It's a beautiful meditation on.
[00:00:53] Vinita: And survival that highlights universal issues of alienation and loneliness as well as class and race and gender. Critics have lauded beef for its performances and for its revolutionary representation of Asian Americans. But with the show's success has come a horrifying story about one of its supporting actors, David Choe
[00:01:19] Vinita: over the weekend, a Twitter storm erupted about an old podcast episode featuring Choe in the 2014 podcast, Choe vividly relays a sexual assault story where he is the perpetrator. In years past, he has said that the story is fiction and he has even apologize. He's also said that he was mentally ill at the time.
[00:01:45] Vinita: Currently, there's been no response from the producers of beef, which include Costars, Ali, Wong, and Steven Yeun. But the controversy continues to swirl and raises questions about whether. The brilliance of beef will be overshadowed by Choe's Past. Joining us today to discuss this is Michelle Cho, an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.
[00:02:12] Vinita: She specializes in Korean film, media, and popular culture. Also with us is Bianca Mabutu Louie, a PhD student in sociology at Rice University with a background in Asian American studies and specializing in racial justice work. And before we get started, just a note to our listeners. This episode contains discussions about gender and sexual violence.
[00:02:40] Vinita: Welcome to you both. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Bianca, let's start with you then. Let's talk about beef. What did you think of the show and how did you feel when you saw it
[00:02:52] Bianca Mabute-Louie: even before it came out? Very excited about it. I was on a trip and texting my partner, don't start this show without me. Wait for me to come home the day after I came home.
[00:03:02] Bianca Mabute-Louie: We binged it in two days, which I don't know if I recommend because it's a very intense show. I mean, it was very exciting to see this huge range of humanity in the cast because there were so many Asian American characters. Um, I think a few things that stand out are the intricacies and nuances of being part of the Asian diaspora, so that.
[00:03:24] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Interracial socioeconomic conflicts and dynamics of working class and upwardly mobile, as well as intricacies of, you know, little comments about, oh, is your husband Japanese? And if you understand ancient history, you know how loaded that is. And then as someone who studies religion and sociology of religion, I mean, my colleagues and I were just having a field day analyzing the church scenes and what it means for people and what a formative space it.
[00:03:50] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Whether you've experienced harm from the ethnic church or still are enthusiastically part of it, there's no doubt that it's an important piece of a lot of our immigrant communities.
[00:03:59] Vinita: That scene with Steven Yeun in the church. Yeah. Where it just breaks down. It's, I think it's, I mean, I've never seen anything like that.
[00:04:08] Vinita: It was so beautiful. Yeah. Michelle, you're nodding your head. How does beef stand out for you from other TV shows out there?
[00:04:17] Michelle Cho: A lot of commentators on the show have remarked on the fact that the asianness of the main characters is, you know, it's, it's portrayed in ways that counter ethnic stereotypes, or especially the model minority stereotype.
[00:04:33] Michelle Cho: And while the characters. Immigrant experience or Asian American experience is very important to the specific experiences that they're having on screen. They're not necessarily drivers of the plot, and so in some ways their identities are incidental. So I think that's pretty unique. And on the other hand, because I am Asian American, I definitely.
[00:04:58] Michelle Cho: Related to a lot of the experiences that I saw, especially because I spent my grad school year, so almost a decade in Southern California and so I really understood the specific references that were being made. But I also research Korean media and K-drama is is huge nowadays, and so. I am accustomed to seeing characters who are Asian but have lots of different things going on and don't always have to represent a certain group or category.
[00:05:33] Michelle Cho: So it's a thing to compare these two realms of, of Asian representation and how much they are both becoming mainstream. That's what me and my partner did during lockdown is we turned to K drama. It's like sometimes you just wanna see good whole representations, especially of Asian men, which I feel like beef does so well.
[00:05:57] Vinita: It really disrupts some of those. Common stereotypes of Asian masculinity. One of the other things is the depiction of anger. There was an article I read last night in Huffington Post and the writer's name Ian Kumamoto, who talks about this idea of finally a show that depicts Asian American rage and how important that is.
[00:06:24] Michelle Cho: You know, it's interesting because I read a review in The New Yorker by Inkoo Kang who's a Korean American film critic who characterized the show as focusing specifically on male experience. As in my viewing, I didn't necessarily. Think that was the case. And so I think it's kind of subjective. I found it a really compelling portrayal of Asian American women's experience or, or female rage.
[00:06:54] Michelle Cho: And the nuances of living in, in a world, in a society that expects a certain type of docility and a placid surface, and then fighting to keep. Anger and other difficult emotions, negative emotions, contained that dynamic was portrayed really successful, I think by Ali Wong. To add on to that, I think the rage part was cathartic and thrilling in many ways.
[00:07:25] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Right, and like you said, Michelle, from Ali Wong's character's perspective, the suppression of the rage, especially with her. The person that she's trying to make this deal with and the response to the Orientalism in the art world that is part of her life. I think I just related a lot to that as an academic and predominantly white field and institution.
[00:07:46] Bianca Mabute-Louie: In academia, it's like visceral. You feel it in your body, right? The suppression, yes. Of you're just very natural reactions to the Orientalism tokenism that happens in our industries. And to see her just go off unhinged was extremely cathartic for me. Yeah, she really holds it together. You're talking about the deals she's trying to make with the wealthy white owner or the woman who's going to buy her business or says she's going to buy her business and how polite she has to be with her.
[00:08:14] Vinita: So let's just say that we all felt very moved by this show and we loved it for many reasons. And I wonder in the post lockdown era with the rise of anti-Asian violence, Does this show also represent a response in that to some way as well?
[00:08:35] Michelle Cho: I have interpreted the show as a commentary on the way that isolation produces really differing realities, like the kind of common space of intersubjective experience seems to have been really diminished by the ways that we were forced to.
[00:08:59] Michelle Cho: Be by ourselves or be in these very small units. Bianca, I know you're doing all of work to try and educate the public on issues of anti-Asian violence and also interracial dynamics, and so I wonder if you were connecting the show to what's been happening in the last few years.
[00:09:20] Bianca Mabute-Louie: It makes me think of Kathy Park Hong's thesis of minor feelings and also racial menloncholy a lifetime and generations of indignities.
[00:09:31] Bianca Mabute-Louie: And pain and racial trauma and grief that during the pandemic, because of the visibility and heightened attention on the attacks for many people, that all of the minor feelings in the melanChoelia related to racialization was suddenly pulled open, brought to the surface like a wound that was reopened.
[00:09:51] Bianca Mabute-Louie: And so I, I kind of thought of an interpreted beef in that sense that. You know, with the events and the attention in the last few years, it finally gave a lot of Asian Americans and Asian diaspora communities an outlet and an awareness to name all of these things that they actually have been feeling for many, many years.
[00:10:13] Vinita : That's beautiful. Thank you. I wanna turn to the larger picture this year after the Oscars, a very large moment for Asian American representation in Hollywood. Everything everywhere, all at once. Also produced by the same production company that did beef, took home many awards. Michelle, can I ask you to talk a little bit about how Asian American representation has changed in Hollywood over the last decade?
[00:10:41] Michelle Cho: The changing. Consumption habits in North America because of streaming platforms, because of, you know, a kind of cutting the cord as it's called, colloquially in, in media studies has exposed people to a lot of different types of representation that don't necessarily come from their local media industry.
[00:11:05] Michelle Cho: That has really expanded. Audience's interests and varied representation, especially of Asians. So I feel that things have shifted a lot just in the last four or five years. So a lot of people will talk about the Korean film Parasite. Yes. By Director Bong Joon Ho as a watershed moment because that film was.
[00:11:33] Michelle Cho: Awarded the Academy Award for best picture. It became very visible as a foreign film that nonetheless had a lot of residents locally and would not be pigeonholed. So I think that having media from Asia, yeah, we just a lot more commonly. Seen and consumed has also, I think, changed the horizon of what's possible, I think in Asian American productions.
[00:12:07] Michelle Cho: So if we're talking about, you know, how we've moved to beef from Crazy Rich Asians, which was also celebrated as a kind of big Hollywood studio buy-in into a film that featured Asian Americans, that film. Actually brought in and involved a lot of Asian film stars, Asian celebrities. It takes place in Singapore.
[00:12:33] Michelle Cho: You know, it's really a hybrid, I would say. And it also kind of presented a pretty limited scope of representation. I think our views perhaps are changing on that particular work now that we see what else is possible.
[00:12:50] Vinita: Bianca, do you wanna add anything?
[00:12:52] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Thinking about it from an educator's point of view, I, I remember teaching Asian American film in 2018 and how that was for a lot of my students, Asian or not Asian, their first exposure to any ethnic studies class and a gateway where we got to talk about, yes, crazy rich Asians, but also white supremacy and imperialism and all these other very important things.
[00:13:14] Bianca Mabute-Louie: My hope is that it does create on-ramps for people to know that it's not the end goal to have an Asian face at the Oscars, although that's very, I. But that it gives us opportunities to talk more about things like representation, power, racial identity, and racism. There's a slightly cynical. Part of me that thinks about a 24, for instance, as this studio that is really becoming the center of Hollywood.
[00:13:41] Michelle Cho: If you look at the way that the studio and its productions kind of swept all of the major awards at this Year's Academy Awards, which are, you know, the industry kind of awarding itself, but nonetheless the people who are in power ultimately. Are the people who've been in power in Hollywood for decades.
[00:14:01] Michelle Cho: You know, these are white producers, ultimately founders of a 24. I'm really glad that you know, film like everything everywhere, all at once. One, the kind of popular and critical claim that it did, but I just have some reservations.
[00:14:19] Michelle Cho: So might we might have gotten great, like success and representation last year, but it didn't necessarily shift the balance of power or who makes decisions about what gets made next.
[00:14:32] Michelle Cho: Right? Who the access points are, or Yeah, who grants the opportunities?
[00:14:39] Vinita: So shall we move on to this latest conversation about beef? Beef added another layer, I think, to these, to this new representations that we've been seeing of Asian Americans, perhaps at a time when it, when we really needed it and then the news broke.
[00:14:59] Vinita: That David Choe, supporting actor in the series told a story that he says is fiction about assaulting a black female massage therapist. Whether or not it's fiction or not, I don't think it matters. It's the fact that he told the story out loud. Can I turn to you, Bianca, to ask you what you think the news of Choe did, um, in your mind to the brilliance of beef as a series?
[00:15:27] Bianca Mabute-Louie: For me personally, I think. It took a day or two for me to process and acknowledge it. It felt weird because I was like, why am I so grieved by this? I mean, of course I'm grieved because what he said was disgusting and horrible and I've seen, but since then, unpacking it the last few days, I feel like I have this parasocial relationship with Ali Wong and Steven Young, right, where I've loved their work in the past.
[00:15:55] Bianca Mabute-Louie: They seem like really great people to me, who I would be friends with. And these are people who endorsed this terrible person and employed and protected him, right? And so that part felt hard. There was this disappointment in these public figures that I looked up to that they were actually part of this culture, and even mob of silence that protects abusers.
[00:16:16] Bianca Mabute-Louie: The second thing that I started interrogating was unfortunately, this brand of very violent, misogynist. An anti-black toxic masculinity. When I think about Asian American men, I have seen that in our community before.
[00:16:34] Vinita: Michelle, actually, you've spoken about this a little bit, this brashness of masculinity, this representation that this is not the first time this kind of trope has been around, that some of this brashness may be a response to the D mask utilization of Asian men in the west.
[00:16:52] Michelle Cho: I was kind of thinking about how it's the case that someone like David Choe was able to continue to work. In Hollywood or continue to get opportunities to be a public figure. And I think that also in, in kind of looking at some of the reactions to this news and seeing a lot of Asian Americans who, and others actually who are kind of forgiving of Joe, because you know, they say, oh, he apologized, he reflected on things which I don't really actually think he did, or the apologies are.
[00:17:30] Michelle Cho: Partial. I think the support comes from this desire to see a prominent Asian American kind of bad boy figure who is pushing against stereotype and walking around with this kind of like braggadocio that is appealing because it refutes a certain longstanding image of Asian men as effeminate and as.
[00:17:59] Michelle Cho: Emasculated. You know, I kind of went back to look up information about David Choe, whether or not he had resurfaced before beef, and in fact, yes, he had a Hulu series. It was picked up by FX and then Hulu as an opportunity for him to continue to enact that. Irreverent and, um, unrepentant, politically incorrect persona that he has really clung to and maintained.
[00:18:30] Michelle Cho: I also, you know, went back and looked at his appearance in the Korean American chef David Chang's Netflix series, ugly, delicious, and the kind of things that he was saying there. And incidentally, he appears in an episode of that show with Steven. Oh, eating Korean barbecue in Los Angeles. And so you see these connections.
[00:18:55] Michelle Cho: His irreverence is celebrated by a certain subset of viewers or fans. There has been some sChoelarship actually on the specifically Asian pickup artist community or. Asian American men who have become kind of prominent as like coaches and spokespeople for this form of masculinity. And it's very clearly a kind of reaction to the many hurtful stereotypes that have been circulating for decades of Asian men as as emasculated as never an objective desire, you know?
[00:19:37] Michelle Cho: And so it's, it's pretty complex because there is that kind of historical backdrop and a set of structural forces. And so in that sense, I feel like it's really important for us to think about David Choe as part of a structure and a system, and not so much just this, you know, singular individual who is perpetrating acts that are disconnected from.
[00:20:03] Michelle Cho: Social context and also larger forces that could produce what we have here today, which is a clearly abhorrent statement and way of talking about treating. Women and specifically a black woman in this case. And then, you know, the kind of silence around it and people continuing to work with this person and think of him as a valuable contribution to the world of Asian American representation.
[00:20:35] Vinita: Bianca, that whole time I was watching you nod your head. So I'd love to hear what you, what you wanna say.
[00:20:41] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Well, first of all, I did not know the extent to all of his activities in the last few years. That's wild. I was also thinking about how Asian American women and feminists in particular have been actually calling out David show for the last nine years, I think of how Jen Fang on the re appropriate blog wrote about this very interview nine years ago.
[00:21:04] Bianca Mabute-Louie: And the structure of this toxic patriarchal violence and misogyny that Michelle's talking about is also what conditions, the silencing and dismissal of women who have been talking about this.
[00:21:16] Vinita: So you are saying there's actually, there's been quite a lot of work be has been done in the past to try and hold Choe accountable.
[00:21:24] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Yes.
[00:21:25] Bianca Mabute-Louie: People have been writing and talking about this exact behavior from.
[00:21:29] Michelle Cho: You know, he has turned this into a narrative about being canceled, quote unquote, and kind of invites people to come cancel him, because that just shores up this image of being a non submissive Asian dude. So that's, that's also hard too, right?
[00:21:48] Michelle Cho: What we have going on here, I think, is this dynamic in which any criticism that gets directed at him ends up being. Useful to him in certain ways as confirmation again of his anti-establishment image. We see this argument deployed a lot these days,
[00:22:12] Vinita: so, so do you think that this is going to impact audience reception of beef?
[00:22:21] Vinita : Can we start with Michelle and then go to Bianca for some viewers?
[00:22:27] Michelle Cho: Absolutely. But I think that I am seeing. More endorsements and praise and just excitement about the show in mainstream media outlets in, you know, criticism and think pieces.
[00:22:46] Michelle Cho: And I also think that there are a lot of folks who watch Netflix and they see the recommendations list and they're not necessarily part of these conversations and they will just watch it and never.
[00:23:00] Michelle Cho: That there's this other discussion happening. That's what pains me a bit because clearly it hasn't affected the production enough that it prompts a response from the people who made this show. Do you think this is gonna affect the bottom line,
[00:23:16] Vinita: Bianca?
[00:23:17] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Yeah, I mean, I guess it hasn't enough to push Netflix and the producers and people involved to say anything.
[00:23:24] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Most of what I've been seeing has been. On Twitter and social media. And those reactions though should not be dismissed because there's very real harm that was caused. And you see that in people's responses that it did impact and it is impacting their perception of the show, and particularly among women of color and black women, it is making it so that they can't watch the show because it feels violent to them.
[00:23:50] Bianca Mabute-Louie: I think, you know, in this instance, maybe it should affect how we receive the. These things shouldn't always be separated, but we should take into account the entire process similar to how, you know, structures of Orientalism and white supremacy and immigrant experiences are part of the show storyline.
[00:24:11] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Those are all also things that are part of what conditioned and made the show and here very clearly, larger structures of patriarchy and misogyny and anti-black. Are part of the context that we live in and that this show exists in. And so I, I think, you know, we can, as a culture and as a community, we're capable of having these nuanced discussions.
[00:24:33] Bianca Mabute-Louie: And I hope this incident instigates those dialogues and becau, you know, moves on beyond, did this happen or not happen? Right? But that we can actually have these difficult convers.
[00:24:45] Vinita: So, you know, will this have any impact on the power structures in Hollywood at all?
[00:24:51] Michelle Cho: It's funny because I, in preparing for, for our conversation today, I was really looking for these kind of visible traces of the network that brings Ali Wong, Steven y, and David show together prior to this, because I think a lot of the conversation has been, But I love Ali Wong.
[00:25:13] Michelle Cho: I love Stephen Young. We shouldn't blame them. Right? And both of them are executive producers for beef. So they are both cast in it and they have some responsibility for how it came about. And Ali Wong is also a guest of David Chang on Ugly Delicious. And so there's just this kind of like tight web it, it kind of shows us that within Hollywood it makes sense that there would.
[00:25:40] Michelle Cho: A close knit community of actors, celebrities, public figures, who are trying to work together and kind of join forces to be more visible and to bring alternatives in terms of representation to the media consuming public in North America. But if the way that they do that is to. Sidestep these hard questions.
[00:26:08] Michelle Cho: I think two things can be true at the same time. Beef is is a really great show and we shouldn't participate in, you know, the project of brushing this stuff under the rug or kind of. Sidestepping it for the sake of some larger goal of continuing this momentum of Asian American representation in Hollywood.
[00:26:32] Michelle Cho: And so I hope that these conversations will continue even if there's also a, in what beef is doing really well. The other thing that I wanted to say about David Choe and the way that he is, like how did he get cast? Yeah. How did he get cast? There's also this way that he is, so he's, he's presenting this bad boy.
[00:26:58] Michelle Cho: I, I break stereotypes and he talks about this actually often, like I'm the opposite of the model minority. But he also deploys a. A very kind of western understanding of the, the kind of lone genius artist. And I'm glad that we here are saying, it doesn't matter if it really happened or not. The fact that he told this story as a form of entertainment is, is all we need to know.
[00:27:30] Michelle Cho: And that's the violation and that's the violence itself. So yeah, that, that image of. Kind of elliptical and mysterious artist. Genius is also a part of, I think, why he continues to be able to work and be a figure that. Is public such that some viewers are gonna take him as an example. I think that's really the danger that, that I'm most concerned about.
[00:28:02] Vinita: That people will sort of hold him up as kind of a role model.
[00:28:06] Vinita: Mm-hmm. Type of role model. And, and Bianca, do you agree that these two things can exist at once?
[00:28:13] Bianca Mabute-Louie: Yeah. The show meant a lot to people. And what does it mean to move forward with future project? And as a community to continue to, you know, strive for excellence in the art and the stories we produce really believe in this like interconnected kind of, you know, that we're all interconnected to each other, but also to history and legacies and structures and what's going on in the world.
[00:28:37] Bianca Mabute-Louie: And that those things should be considered when making decisions like casting because they are considered in the stories we. Transformative Justice also teaches us to center the people who felt harmed. Specifically, you know, survivors, massage workers. Also thinking about, right, like what happened in 2021 and the vulnerability of massage workers that we learned about because of the Atlanta shooting, as well as black women and others who felt harmed.
[00:29:04] Bianca Mabute-Louie: I don't know, and doesn't seem like David Choe is in a place to be having these transformative justice. Conversations and go through a process of accountability. But what does it look like for us as a community and maybe even Hollywood as an industry to take this incident to really center these folks who feel harmed by what he said.
[00:29:22] Vinita: I wanna thank you both so much for all of the time and the thought that you've put into this conversation. I. It is very, it is a very deep conversation and I feel the heartbreak myself. I feel your heartbreak too, and I feel the coexistence you've, you've both put it so well that these things do coexist together.
[00:29:43] Vinita : Um, so thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:29:51] Vinita : That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. I don't know about you, but I found that conversation with Bianca and Michelle incredibly thoughtful and enlightening. After listening, will you be watching or continuing to watch beef? Let me, I'm on Twitter at Wright Vanita. That's W R I T E V I N I T A.
[00:30:14] Vinita : If you tag our producers at conversation ca, they can get in on the conversation too. Don't forget to use the hashtag, don't call me Resilient. If you'd like to read more about the episode, go to the conversation dot. We have more information in our show notes with links to additional stories and research.
[00:30:37] Vinita : If you like what you heard today, please tell a friend or a family member about us and please consider leaving us a review those ratings, let others know that we're worth listening to. And if you're not already doing so, please follow us so that you don't miss any episodes coming up. Finally, if you have any ideas about news stories that you'd love to hear us cover.
[00:30:59] Vinita : We'd love to hear from you. Email us at dc mr@theconversation.com. Don't call me. Resilient is a production of the Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of. The series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. Boke Saisi is our producer. Ollie Nicholas is our assistant producer and student journalist. Jennifer Moroz is our consulting producer. Our audio editor is Rematuallah Sheikh. Ateqah Khaki is our audience development and visual innovation consultant, and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim.
[00:31:57] Vinita : The track is called something in the Water.