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 com