Kangmin LeeWhen the trailer for Netflix’s animated sitcom “Dang!” dropped in August, I responded by saying what nearly all of us are already thinking: the Asian diaspora seems physically incapable of creating media that isn’t about disappointing or hating their parents, being traumatized by ethnic food at lunch, or turning a rejection of a white boyfriend into an eternal racial grievance.
Maybe that was unfair. It was only a trailer, after all. So I watched all eight episodes.
It was not unfair.
Asian-Americans are physically incapable of creating any piece of media that isn’t about disappointing/hating their parents, being scared of eating ethnic food during lunchtime at school, or an Oxford study fantasy
— Kangmin Lee | 이강민 (@kangminlee) August 12, 2026
“Dang!” follows three Chinese-American siblings in New York. Andrew and Eunice are aimless 20-somethings living together when their older sister, Ruthie, a high-powered attorney, watches her life implode and moves in with them. From there, we get what increasingly feels like the default template for Asian-American prestige media: dysfunctional children, suffocating expectations, progressive identity politics, and immigrant family baggage dressed up as cultural insight.
The first episode gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re in for. Eunice livestreams her feet next to a loaf of bread while insisting it isn’t porn. From there we get National Coming Out Day, pride flags, Hayley Williams from Paramore materializing as Eunice’s hallucination-slash-subconscious, and Greta, her maximally politically correct coworker, lecturing her through one progressive social norm after another. Ruthie hates socialism, which might sound like an ideological curveball until you realize that the politics aren’t really the point; the worldview is. The writers go out of their way to make the show as unbecoming, degenerate, sleazy, gay, and racially obsessed as possible. Not to mention how unfunny and cringe-inducing the dialogue is.
Take away the Chinese surnames and Asian faces, and what exactly makes this an Asian-American story? Most of “Dang!” could be about virtually any group of terminally online, sexually dysfunctional, politically progressive millennials in Brooklyn. The characters are ethnically Asian, but their cultural inheritance feels largely ornamental. That’s what makes the show so representative of a certain kind of diaspora media: ethnicity is the costume boba liberals wear while the substance underneath it comes almost entirely from contemporary coastal liberalism and sexual perversion.
It’s always the same story. Overbearing immigrant parents. Miserable high achiever. Childhood embarrassment about being Asian. Racism incident. Identity crisis. White boyfriend. Therapy. Eventually somebody realizes that Mom and Dad traumatized them by caring too much about grades, being tiger or helicopter parents, and packing them some kimchi for school lunch.
Obviously these experiences exist. I am a Korean immigrant, and I have experienced some as well. The problem is that one extremely narrow slice of Asian-American politics has somehow acquired an outsize claim to representing all of us. Again and again, Asian tradition is portrayed as suffocating, high academic achievement as psychologically damaging, and rebellion against our Asian parents’ conservative values as liberation.
The Asian-American creatives elevated by Hollywood, particularly during its post-2020 obsession with “diverse voices,” have only come from a very specific ideological and cultural class. They are progressive, are heavily shaped by elite coastal institutions, and often operate within feminist, LGBTQ, and racially Marxist cultural frameworks. Hollywood then selects Asian stories that already speak its language, creating a feedback loop in which the same narrow worldview keeps getting presented as authentic Asian-American representation.
You can see the result in how these stories treat family and achievement. The parents are unreasonable and controlling. The successful child is miserable. The model minority must be “deconstructed.” Tradition is baggage. Expectations and standards are trauma. Liberation means rejecting whatever your parents valued. And while they complain about old-school Hollywood typecasting Asian men as weak nerds and kung fu masters, as we see in “Dang!,” they represent Asian men as weak, emasculated, gay, passive, or decorative. I’d take the martial arts guru over the gay, passive beta.
There’s a similar phenomenon constantly found in Asian-American literature: diasporic whining and agency abdication. The protagonist spends the story processing the psychological burden of being Asian in host countries while demonstrating remarkably little interest in actually inheriting anything from the culture supposedly central to his identity.
That’s what bothers me most about “Dang!” — I’m Korean-American. I grew up in an immigrant family. I love my family, and while my parents were not perfect, I lwould never portray them in the way self-hating boba liberals put down their parents in a vain attempt to self-aggrandize. I don’t need immigrant parents portrayed as saints, and I don’t expect Asian-American art always to align fully with traditional values. But why does so much of our supposedly authentic cultural output seem interested primarily in resenting what we inherited?
Our parents crossed oceans, learned new languages, worked absurd hours, built businesses and families in a country they didn’t fully understand, and sacrificed so their children could have opportunities they never did. They made mistakes; some made terrible ones. But there is something incredibly shallow about inheriting all of that and deciding our great artistic contribution is another therapy session about how Dad wanted us to become doctors, lawyers, and engineers.
The same thing happens with the “model minority” stereotype. Yes, Asians aren’t universally wealthy, brilliant, successful, or well-adjusted, but Asian-American media is always so desperate to dismantle the (quite frankly positive) stereotype that it creates another one in its place: the miserable, directionless, sexually dysfunctional Asian screw-up.
What makes this even more embarrassing is that you only have to look across the Pacific to see how unnecessary it is. Korean dramas, Japanese anime, and East Asian cinema tell stories about family, war, duty, ambition, revenge, love, sacrifice, religion, honor, crime, history, failure, and everything else real human beings experience. Yet Asian-American cinema seems allergic to creating creative stories with timeless truths and instead opts in to lecturing others about grievances and trauma.
Think about the global successes of “Parasite,” “Squid Game,” “Godzilla,” “Demon Slayer,” and the list goes on. The world already knows Asians can be funny, tragic, heroic, evil, romantic, ambitious, complicated, and human. It’s the Asian diaspora prestige machine that seems determined to keep putting us in a box of perpetual grievance.
So after eight episodes, was Asian Twitter unfair to “Dang!”? No, the trailer and the clips online show exactly what the series turned out to be. “Dang!” takes the familiar Asian-American diaspora formula, adds pride flags, preachy woke dogmas, and toe-curling millennial Tumblr writing, then packages the resulting insufferable collage as another entry in Asian-American representation.
I want more Asian-American stories about faith, business, war, romance, ambition, history, family, and sacrifice — stories where Asian characters can wrestle with their inheritance without treating it as a disease they need to recover from. Until then, I’ll be watching K-dramas and anime.
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Kangmin Lee is a Korean-American political and cultural commentator, speaker, and host of the Kangmin Lee Show. He speaks and writes on politics, culture, and the ideas shaping the modern world, focused on restoring faith, identity, and civilization.
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