What Fresh Off the Boat does with its Mandarin speaker that The Cloverfield Paradox couldn’t

As films and television shows grow more diverse, they raise increasingly nuanced questions about how media should portray characters who speak other languages. Mandarin Chinese speakers feature heavily in both Netflix’s horror prequel The Cloverfield Paradox and a new episode of the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. But there’s a big difference in how they come across. In The Cloverfield Paradox, a Chinese woman who chooses to speak Mandarin instead of English seems uncommunicative compared to the rest of the characters, while in Fresh Off the Boat, the portrayal of a Chinese woman who only speaks in Mandarin comes across as progressive and relatable. The context around those characters is crucial to understanding why.

The Cloverfield Paradox is set on an international, multicultural space station, and features a Chinese engineer named Tam played by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star Zhang Ziyi. The crew of the space station in The Cloverfield Paradox is international, with members from countries like Germany, Russia, and Brazil. While the rest of the team dips in and out of both English and Mandarin, Tam only speaks in Mandarin, even though she clearly understands English. This makes the movie’s sole Asian character seem foreign and out of step on an otherwise bilingual international team. And it’s a problem that would have been easy to solve just by giving her character a little more agency to choose what language to speak at any given moment.

Making matters worse, Tam’s preference for speaking Mandarin Chinese over English is also one of the few things we know about her. The movie fails to give her a family background, a sense of which part of China she came from, or even a first name. Interestingly enough, the surname Tam is Cantonese in origin, and in Mandarin, it would be pronounced as Tan. It could be that Tam has some Cantonese speakers in the family, or that the creators did not realize the difference between two dialects — we may never know.

When there’s no clear reason for these sorts of choices, it can feel like the creators simply didn’t bother to flesh out her backstory, or simply added an underdeveloped Mandarin-only character as a marketing ploy. To be fair, Tam isn’t the only character who is poorly developed — thin characterization is an issue across the board — but as the only representation for Asians in the film, she unfortunately plays into the foreign ‘Other’ trope.

ABC’s sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, about a Taiwanese immigrant couple raising their sons in Orlando, creates a very different effect. One of the show’s regular characters is Grandma Jenny Huang (Lucille Soong), who understands English but speaks only in Mandarin — just like Tam. But the context here is very different. This is a first-generation, immigrant grandma, one who is considered the matriarch of the house according to traditional Confucian values. Her age and position have their own privileges, which outweigh whatever language barriers seem to exist. As shown in the latest episode, “Ride the Tiger,” she even has the power to make everyone at the Huang dinner table speak Mandarin along with her. While not speaking English limits her communication with the exterior world of Florida or her neighbors, she’s an important figure who strengthens the household and offers her grandchildren wise insights about life.

Grandma Huang is not just a foreign stereotype, either; she’s given witty stories and monologues of her own, and plays a pivotal role in helping the Huang family stay connected to their roots in Taiwan. She’s reflective of real first-generation immigrant grandmas, who rarely make their way to the screen.

When they have well-written characters who are treated as people and not just concepts, actors, writers, and showrunners can get away with some minor inaccuracies. Lucille Soong, who plays Grandma Huang, has Beijing-accented Mandarin, even though the Huang family is explicitly Taiwanese. But the geography matters less, because it’s a quirk of the actor, not an overtly ignorant mistake made by the showrunners. Similarly, when Korean-American actor Randall Park struggles with his few Mandarin lines in “Ride the Tiger,” even though his character is supposed to be fluent, that actually adds to the charm of the production.

While the Cloverfield Paradox production crew may have been trying to be progressive (and to appeal to Chinese audiences) with Tam, the simple lack of character development and lack of consideration for context ends up undermining those intentions. Tam’s portrayal isn’t offensive, but it’s frustrating to watch, knowing how much better it can be.