In any minority group, the most prominent members are expected to somehow speak for the entire constituency. But, if the burden of being Constance Wu seemed to weigh heavily, it was also evidently not something that she felt she could renounce. The day of the “Simple Man” makeup session, we wandered the scruffy beachfront of Kaiaka Bay, picking our way through cow bush and sugarcane ferns to the water’s edge. A fetid stench wafted on the breeze and flies buzzed at our ankles. On the beach were the rotting remains of a school of fish. “It’s actually a good metaphor for the movie,” Wu said, excitedly. “Of how colonization happens.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but she went on for several minutes about the film’s exploration of ancestry, colonization, and death—“not just the death of the protagonist but also of a way of life,” she said. “Seeing these dead fish is kind of to see the voices of the ancestors.”

I first encountered Wu four years ago, when I tuned in to the début episode of “Fresh Off the Boat.” The show follows a family of Taiwanese immigrants who uproot their life in an urban Chinatown and move to Orlando, Florida, in order to run a Western-themed steakhouse. Wu plays the matriarch and tiger mother par excellence Jessica Huang, a spirited and indefensibly blunt woman whose fierce devotion to her children is matched only by her uncompromising expectations for them. Wu’s presence onscreen—impetuous, possessive, pugilistic, winsome—quickly made her character the axle around which the other family members rotate. Jessica Huang may not always be pleasant, but she is never boring. Shipwrecked on the shoals of assimilation—adjusting to the cultural peculiarities of America less easily than the rest of her clan—she fights harder than anyone else to keep the family afloat.

When critics hailed Jessica Huang as the most compelling character on the show, it felt momentous: here was an Asian woman charming Americans by playing something other than a victim or a temptress, the two types generally assigned to Asian women since the time of Anna May Wong. (Wong, Hollywood’s first Asian-American star, is perhaps most famous for the role she didn’t land, as the lead in the 1937 adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth,” whose Chinese characters ended up being played by white actors.)

As I watched the show, I realized that the woman onscreen was very much like my mother, who arrived in the U.S. from China in the early nineties. Like her, Jessica wears visors and high-waisted khaki shorts, refuses to turn on the air-conditioning even at the height of summer, and packs her children pungent stir-fry lunches that earn them the scorn of their classmates. Like her, Jessica speaks with an accent—flattened “R”s, tightened “O”s, elided consonants—and has a predilection for dropping articles. But in Jessica the alienated edge of immigrant identity, which my mother and I both strove to hide, is played up and endowed with a kind of sideways charisma. Wu can render a petulant scowl hilarious by allowing it to linger on her face past the point of excess. Humor often comes from the dissonance between the expression in her eyes—panic, grievance, barely concealed resentment—and her belief that she projects an air of supreme control. When she says, “All white people look the same” or “It’s true, I am good at everything,” there is vulnerability to her vainglory because it is so transparently insecure.

On the Internet, the character’s idiosyncrasies are a matter of gleeful celebration. Listicles (“27 Lessons Jessica Huang Has Taught Us”) compile her wisdom on such matters as child rearing (“It’s just like chess, children are the pawns and you are the queen”) and upward mobility (“I’m gonna treat myself to a pedicure done by a white lady. That’s when you know you’ve made it”). On the one hand, it’s remarkable to see a woman like my mother, and her shabby, marginal occupation of a country that she’s never understood, become a subject fit for prime-time TV. On the other, it’s all played for laughs, and the more you watch Jessica the more you see her not as someone fully realized and human but as a marionette with stereotypes for strings, controlled by a legion of writers who know that they can rely on her spunk to give punch to any scene.

When the show débuted, its most ferocious critic was, unexpectedly, Eddie Huang, its producer and also the author of the memoir on which it was based. “This show isn’t about me, nor is it about Asian America,” Huang wrote, in an essay for New York, calling it “a reverse-yellowface show with universal white stories played out by Chinamen.” Huang’s essay provoked predictable obloquy in the entertainment industry, but Wu told me that she felt it was important to stand up for him. “Eddie got to where he is today by not mincing his words, and people loved him for it,” she said.

At the same time, Wu, who, I figured, had fielded her share of questions on stereotyping, maintained that the practice was harmful only if it was taken as defining a group. “If somebody just so happens to fall into stereotypical traits, it doesn’t mean that we should try to take that part of her away and hide it from the light,” she said. “Because that’s a manifestation of shame. If anything, I think that people who have been reduced by pop culture their whole lives deserve to have their stories expanded upon.” Later, she added that she always found it weird when Asian actors refused to play stereotypes. Why, she asked, when there weren’t enough Asian roles, would you turn one down, rather than take the opportunity to invest a stock type with “character and human experience that it’s never fucking gotten?”

To research the role of Jessica, Wu went to Orlando to spend time with Eddie Huang’s mother. “She’s very, very extravagant,” Wu once said, describing the real Jessica’s white minidress, giant platform sandals, and body “dripping in diamonds.” Eddie Huang told me about the encounter from his mother’s side. “The first thing she said was ‘O.K., she’s hot enough to play me,’ ” he recalled. “Constance really captures a lot of my mom, because my mom is very much a diva. They both are.” He laughed. “They’re both just super-alpha, super-diva, super-unstoppable forces. Constance shows up anywhere, and it’s a hurricane.”

A popular episode in the show’s first season centered on Jessica’s belief in traditional Chinese superstitions. The beliefs had been unfamiliar to Wu, who discussed them with other Asian-Americans in preparation for shooting. “Everyone knew about it,” she said. “But, because I grew up in America, I didn’t grow up around Chinese people or relatives. And I didn’t get these superstitions from my parents. So I had to integrate them into Jessica’s origin story.” Jessica’s origin stories—flashbacks to her formative years, in college, say, or meeting her husband—are Wu’s favorite part of the show, and it is easy to see how they have helped her inhabit a Chinese-American experience that is not her own.

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Shopping Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan

Wu was born in Richmond, Virginia, the third of four daughters, to Taiwanese immigrants who had moved to the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies. Her father pursued a doctorate in biology and genetics and later became a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University; her mother was initially a homemaker, then went to the local community college to study computer programming. By the time Wu was born, the family was solidly middle class—“not upper-middle, not lower-middle, but fucking middle-middle.” On the weekends, she went with neighbors to the local Third Presbyterian Church. She took piano lessons and did gymnastics at the Y.M.C.A. English was spoken in the household. “I speak Chinese like a toddler with an American accent,” Wu told me. The family went on vacation to the Blue Ridge Mountains or Disney World, not to their ancestral home.