I think part of why people don’t like Mai is that they don’t like seeing a girl with very ethnically Asian features not being stereotypically asian. We’re always expected to have a career related passion and to basically be married to work until we are actually married to a guy.

We’re also always expected to be people pleasers when Mai is neither of those things. She doesn’t have a great big career or life goal. She doesn’t pretend to like the people she doesn’t.

She’s such an interesting character especially as an Asian because certain things about her are so relatable as well like the fact she’s family oriented and she’s still not fully herself until she’s with her friends.

She’s very realistic, at least for me because many Asian parents expect that if they don’t allow their children to have passions outside of what they want from them (ex. career), they’ll be forced to do what they want but in reality we just end up hiding our real -

- passions until we have someone who were able to share those with. Stereotypically were supposed to pretend to be excited and be forced into what our parents want from us when in reality many of us can’t pretend OR show our interests so it seems like we don’t like anything

And that’s exactly what Mai’s character is, thanks for coming to my TED talk.