My name is Christine Lee, I am Korean-American, and I watched Fresh Off the Boat — the new ABC sitcom about an Asian-American family that moves to Orlando in 1995, inspired by chef Eddie Huang’s memoir — with my white boyfriend, Orion.

Orion had never watched an Asian-American sitcom. Because there has, in the last 20 years, only been one Asian-American sitcom on television — Margaret Cho’s All American Girl in 1994 — and he missed that one. Meanwhile, I remember watching All American Girl when I was in college, and feeling so sad when it wasn’t funny.

I watched the first 10 minutes of the Fresh Off the Boat pilot by myself, just in case it sucked, like putting on lingerie before showing it off. If it wasn’t good, I was just going to stuff it way back in the closet.

No go. Orion found me giggling on the sofa watching the pilot, mid-try-on.

“What is going on?”

“You—" I gasped, “have to watch this.” Thank goodness Fresh Off the Boat was funny. But now I wondered if it would be funny to white people. I wondered what it would be like to share this moment together with Orion. What would our reactions be? Would we share any understanding? Would there be any point at which we laughed together?

Orion sat beside me as I started it over, for him.

There is a scene in the pilot in which Eddie's mother Jessica (Constance Wu) Rollerblades around with the very blonde, spandex-clad women neighbors. One of them is carrying a bag of dog poop — at Jessica’s eye level. Later, when Eddie (Hudson Yang) tells his mom that the kids made fun of his lunch at school, Jessica says through gritted teeth, “We have to make the best of it. Like I am doing with these neighborhood women. You think I like pretending Samantha isn’t carrying a baggie of dog poops in her hand? No! I don’t like this! We all see the poops there — it’s rolling around! But I am trying — you have to try too!”

She’s not the butt of the joke. Woo! She wasn’t being Long Duk Dong. She wasn’t laughed at for her accent. She didn’t have a funny bowl haircut. She didn’t smell like mothballs. Jessica was the normal one. She was the one making fun of white people.

I laughed with relief. And because Constance Wu’s comedic timing is brilliant. And because the women were ridiculous.

Also: My boyfriend laughed. Because the women were ridiculous.

But the one off-note for me — and for Orion, who brings it up first — are the accents that the Asian adults speak in. Why do they have accents? It seems like an unnecessary flourish to satisfy the masses. That I can even have this conversation with Orion is something I couldn’t have imagined as a child growing up in 1980s America. So much of what Orion and I can say to each other now are things we Asians had to keep to ourselves 30, 20 years ago. Maybe still a little bit today. But Fresh Off the Boat is representative of the conversations we can now have. And maybe being funny about it first is the way to go.

Even so, the faux accents bother me most about the show. I’m not sure they’re necessary. I don’t understand how it is that all the actors in the movie 300 can speak plain-old English (or British English, because in olden-times Greece, they spoke…British English?) but Asians in America have to always be portrayed speaking Ching-Chong-ese.