Scott and his team put an incredible amount of thought and detail work into the production design. For the billboards he specified images of geishas doing unhealthy things like smoking or popping pills. As I recall, for some convoluted canonical reason the pills were supposed to be birth control.
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I forget who did it, but one standup comedian had a throwaway line about “Growing up as an Asian-American girl, I didn’t have many strong Asian female role models – only Lucy Liu, Michelle Yeoh, and Scarlett Johansson …”
Annalee’s piece doesn’t mention the SFF conference a few years ago which proposed a panel on “Spicy Oriental Zeppelins”. I think the idea was to discuss Asian-themed steampunk, which is certainly an interesting topic --but the thoughtless use of “Oriental” triggered a predictable and very understandable backlash. The title alone made it clear that whoever dreamed it up had never discussed their idea with anyone of Asian ancestry.
ETA: I Googled this, and the reality is even worse than my summary above. The person behind “Spicy Oriental Zeppelins” reportedly resisted the criticism of his title, saying that it was “a fannish in-joke”. John Scalzi pointed out that no one else ever seemed to have heard of this supposed in-joke and that, in fact, Google recorded only one case of the phrase ever being used … by the person who had dreamed up the panel.
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Science Fiction can reflect the best of humanity. But the people who write it are human, and prone to the same failings as other humans, and that includes bigotry in all its forms. The Asian erasure talked about in this post is pretty hard to argue with, frankly, and no amount of rationalizing an explanation for it…
…changes the fact that none of the major characters in a lot of the Sci-Fi properties are Asian.
And, again, this isn’t the only form of bias and bigotry that exists in classic science fiction. A few years ago, before I knew that Apple was producing a tv series based on Asimov’s Foundation series, I reread the original trilogy for the first time since I was in high school. The first thing I noticed was the complete lack of women in the first book. This is supposedly an elightened future, our enlightened future, full of amazing technology and interstellar travel…and not one of the political or scientific leaders in this world are women. Even considering the time Asimov wrote that story, it seems like an incredible lack of imagination to create an advanced future where women have no place in the leadership of that world. Or, more likely, Asimov just ignored the existence of women. Of course, a woman did play a major role in the plot in the rest of the trilogy, but women were still conspicuously absent for the most part. Science fiction is not so special that it is immune from human failings.
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Also, the claims that of course there’d be no Asians in LA, because they’re all in Japan ignores the fact that there is a not-insignificant Asian American population on the West coast… 
Very common in that era of sci-fi.
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The Apple TV series is a case where the casting directors improved and expanded the original author’s vision. They cast women and/or PoC as several major characters who were explicitly male and implicitly default-white in the books.* I have no doubt that elicited bitter complaints from the usual “you ruined my childhood” crowd.
[* In the Foundation trilogy Asimov acknowledged a future that was more racially egalitarian but couldn’t quite get to making the major characters explicitly non-white.]
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I watched the first season. It’s very, very different from the books. I think it would be more accurate to say that it’s inspired by Asimov’s Foundation. I thought it was decent, though. Not great, but good…ish.
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Reading the title of this post the first movie that came to my mind was Ex Machina, which (spoiler) features a sexy asian lady robot character that literally has no voice and, for most of the movie, no apparent agency.
Considering how this character came to be, and the personality traits of the movie’s villian, it kinda felt like this may have been meant as an intentional commentary on the trope and the people who perpetuate it.
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Am I misremembering, or in Firefly, was their Mandarin all over on signs and crates? Combined with the intermittent spoken Mandarin, I thought it just showed that with a billion Chinese people in 2010, that even more exist in the future and are in space and are a major faction.
Though now that you mention it, it is weird that we don’t see any. Even if they were more on the core world of the Alliance, we should have seen more officers etc on their ships. Or a crime boss they do a job for. I guess it’s a product of the time where they didn’t think to actually show it. 
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Joss Whedon wrote Simon and River Tam as Chinese (hence the surname Tam) but the studio made him change the characters to Caucasian.
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Makes about as much sense as Tilda Swinton running an ancient order of magicians in the mountains of Tibet Nepal.
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Or Wizard of Earthsea with all white actors…
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Having an actual actor from Tibet is a whole 'nother can of worms Marvel Studios didn’t want to open if they wanted to sell $100 million dollars worth of tickets in China.
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I believe Whedon’s idea was that the United States and China were the two major spacefaring cultures that had managed to send interstellar colony ships to the solar system where Firefly is set, so English and Chinese were the dominant languages. Unsurprising that Fox made him tone down the Chinese representation in lieu of the cowboy western stuff.
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I gotta say, The Expanse did a much better job of envisioning and fleshing out just such a solar system.
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I thought the first season to be mostly inaccessible, boring and uninteresting, so I hadnt much hope, but the second season is waaaaay better. actually…yes, I think the second one not only to be pretty good compared to the first, but to be rather great. Im actually a bit hyped for a third season.
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The underlying premise was similar to Blade Runner, just swap in China for Japan. The two central core planets were “Londonium” and “Xinon.”
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You get both Asian people treated as robots, and then the literal “sexy Asian lady robots” in sci-fi. (I immediately thought of Ex Machina, but the sexy Asian lady robot there becomes an indictment of Nathan, casting him as a creepy incel, so it’s more commentary on the phenomenon than an example.)
Also: John W. Campbell has entered the chat.*
*For those who don’t know, the racist, extremely right-wing loon Campbell dominated American sci-fi as an editor for many decades, not only as a gate-keeper deciding what (white males) would be published, but reshaping published work to better fit his desired messages. He’s still an influence, as witnessed by the awards still named after him and the various pathetic puppies bemoaning the lack of “proper” sci-fi in his style.
It seems like sci-fi should be progressive/inclusive, because historically the future was more progressive/inclusive than the times in which people wrote, and since ostensibly sci-fi is about the future (it really isn’t), it follows that sci-fi would be more progressive/inclusive than the times in which it was written. But it isn’t. And (as with e.g. Campbell) is sometimes the opposite.
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Ironically, the Chinese would fit right in to an accurate deception of The West.
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Unfortunately, it boils down to sexism, racism, fetishization and misogyny; all elements that are way too common in a LOT of sci-fi lore.
The stories we tell ourselves matter.
@danimagoo here’s your coke for being way more eloquent in your commentary:
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That’s what I’m struck by too - that “Blade Runner” got tagged-by-association as the go-to example, when it features a good amount of actually important characters of Asian descent. Yes, there’s the Sushi vendor, who operates as Deckard’s “street-level informant” in this noir; and Dr. Chu is very important, the premiere cyber-eye systems designer for the Nexus replicants. But there is also Deckard’s ‘partner’ cop, Gaff - Asian in the novel, but portrayed for Scott by Edward James Olmos to be half-Asian, half-Latino (befitting L.A.'s large populations thereof).
I wouldn’t call the film ‘enlightened’, particularly through a backwards lens, but it was pretty progressive for its era (Ridley Scott still had yet to make “Black Rain” 
) and is certainly undeserving of this “Asian influence without Asians” rap.
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