No Asian-American moms, but partly produced by Communist Chinese?

Aside from Yuka Takara -- a Broadway pseudo-regular who works as a film/TV extra about once every seven or eight YEARS -- and YouTube "celebrity" Lilly Singh -- a NON-actress brought in for a couple of lines to validate a scene where Christina Applegate's character purposely dissuade other moms from voting for Mila Kunis' character in the PTA election (to which Singh's "character" derisively tsk-tsks "I never even liked her, she looks ... foreign" in an effort to mock "people of colour" who've essentially turned white in order look down their noses at other people of colour), I was hard pressed to find a single Asian-American mom or Asian-American student in the entire film, yet they pretty much exist in every school and neighbourhood you'd care to visit in the USA, especially neighbourhoods like the one depicted in the film.

So a movie -- like far too many these days -- that goes panhandling to communist China for funding can't be bothered to drop even a COUPLE of Asian-Americans into the background for authenticity? They didn't even have to be speaking roles, for christ's sake, but really it wouldn't have killed them to give a line to an Asian-American extra the way they did with so many Caucasian extras (and even an African-American on as I recall) in the various crowd scenes? I'll give them credit for at least acknowledging the existence of black (especially) and Hispanic people in the film, and even for casting Indo-Canuck Singh despite her utter lack of talent and the fact that she's utterly too young to play the mother of middle-schoolers, but considering spotting Takara is like finding a needle in a haystack in this film, that's something of a kick in the slats to Asian-Americans who are always protesting about under-representation in Hollywood movies.

Even the "Tiger Moms" sequence in the deleted scenes was clearly WRITTEN to refer to Asian/Asian-American tiger moms ("I'm getting them to do my taxes this year" = at the very least a reference to that infamous and horrible Oscars "joke" with the Asian kids) but the scene as filmed employs a Caucasian woman and a black woman. Whaa? Sure, tiger moms can NOW be perceived in other cultures, but the whole concept is uniquely Asian in both its origin and its strictest practise, but most non-Asian people weren't even aware of the term until Amy Chua's 2011 book came out. Probably wise that they deleted that scene, then, as it's a head scratcher in its existing form.

I don't know, maybe they wanted to cast an Asian-American actress in a more prominent role, maybe even an extra or two,with spoken lines, but most likely the Communist Chinese producers would've insisted she be played by some doe-eyed starlet from mainland China who could barely speak English, just so they'd have a better shot at wide distribution in that country.

On the plus side, the show was pretty funny, and REALLY nailed the shallow, twee nature of start-up businesses run by entitled, insufferable Millennials.