'Master of None' writer's Emmy speech demands better Asian representation

At Sunday’s Emmy ceremony, Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari accepted the award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for their work on Netflix’s Master of None, which the two men co-created and in which Ansari stars.

Yang started the speech by thanking his Taiwanese-American family, whom he credited as the inspiration for the Emmy-winning episode “Parents,” which tells the stories of Dev (Ansari) and Brian (Kelvin Yu)’s immigrant parents. Then he segued into a perfect assessment of the state of Asian representation on our screens, big and small:

There’s 17 million Asian-Americans in this country and there’s 17 million Italian-Americans. They have The Godfather, Goodfellas, Rocky, The Sopranos—we got Long Duk Dong. So we got a long way to go. But I know we can get there. I believe in us. It’s just gonna take a lot of hard work.

Asian parents out there, if you can just do me a favor—just a couple of you, get your kids cameras instead of violins, we’ll be all good.

Here’s one easy suggestion for improving Asian representation on TV: Let Aziz speak, too! Ansari was played offstage before he got the chance to express his own gratitude for the win.

Watch Alan Yang’s speech here: