When I think about great representation of Asian-Americans in media, my mind goes straight to Joan Watson of Elementary. She’s shown as a full and flawed person, one who was uncertain about her career, who experienced trauma, struggled with the urge to please someone she felt beholden to, and has a complex but entirely normal family history and relationships. Her wry line about not speaking Chinese as well as her mom would like her to is the sort of thing I’ve heard over and over from Asian-Americans I know.
I was also deeply moved by the story of her biological father’s struggle with mental illness and homelessness, the sadness she felt about it and the way she turned it to positivity–as she always does–by helping people. Mental illness is taboo in a lot of Asian communities, and Western media portrayals of Asian minority populations tend to either erase the subject entirely or use it to demonize characters. The story of Joan’s birth father was a refreshing break from that.
I also love Joan with her adoptive father Henry, their argument over Henry’s book, his attempts to reconnect with her through his craft in admittedly cringey ways. I loved the casual recognition of Joan’s multiracial family, Henry’s white and he’s her dad, no big issue there. As a family they deal with normal if sometimes very fraught family stuff like father-daughter relationships and marital problems and Joan’s mother being eccentric. I also liked the subtle recognition that Joan is very much Henry’s daughter when she wrote her own novel about Sherlock’s cases, though she is more ethical and did not try to publish it without Sherlock’s consent.
Elementary might not be a perfect show but it got a whole lot of things right and Joan’s characterization is one of them. I hope more creators take note of how it was done.
L.J.'s Obsessions 