Ali Wong’s Beef character was originally envisioned as a white man

What we have yet to see is an Amy Lau, a rich Calabasas Asian woman existing in a world of women like Jordan (Maria Bello) — the blonde, inconceivably tan Angelenos who wear Eastern spirituality like an accessory on their kimono sleeves. And yet Amy’s relentless pursuit of Jordan’s approval is uncomfortably familiar to people of colour, especially the upwardly mobile. Her livelihood is dependent on this person she finds simultaneously off-putting and aspirational, stirring an internal conflict that is surprisingly easy to ignore until it’s not. Throw a white guy in the mix, and the story loses this dynamic portrayal of the WOC experience. It loses that extra inch of depth. 

I’d also be remiss not to mention that were “Amy Lau” to become “Adam Lawrence,” we’d lose a forceful performance from Wong. We’ve seen the comedian at her most outrageous (Baby Cobra is basically canon at this point), but in Beef she captures the nuanced layers of Amy’s life — like the code-switching that many Asian Americans, and specifically Asian American women, slip in and out of in predominantly white spaces. The perpetual smile, the soft-spoken voice, the unflinching mask in the face of casual racism. These are the kinds of subtleties we get only when the lead is Asian American.

As a little girl, I used to make fun of my mom’s “work voice,” the calm, articulate manner of speaking I would hear her employ on the phone. You could hear the smile in her voice, even when she was interrupted, cut off mid sentence, even when I could see that the smile was actually more of a grimace. I am 30 years old, and I’ve never seen her angry. Not really angry. Not Amy-Lau-sprinting-after-Danny-Cho-after-he-pissed-on-her-bathroom-floor angry. While watching Beef, it occurred to me that Amy’s daughter, June, has probably never seen her mom angry either. What catharsis to watch an Asian woman simply explode. 

In Hollywood, the white man is the default. But no white man could do what Ali Wong did with Amy Lau. And that’s just a fact.

This story originally appeared on GLAMOUR US.