A BBC children's television program on a Chinese family has been accused of perpetuating "every racial stereotype about the Chinese."
The CBBC series "Living With The Lams" centers on a family running a restaurant in the city of Manchester and is written by a predominantly white team.
People who watched the first two episodes said they were full of racist platitudes.
As none of the scriptwriters are Asian, more than 200 actors and writers have signed a letter to CBBC controller Cheryl Taylor asking the broadcaster to reconsider the contents and use Chinese writers instead, the South China Morning Post said.
People who saw the pilot scripts said they were shocked by the racist terms used on "Living With The Lams," such as "chongers." Also, many were offended by the settings for the main characters, including the father playing in a band called Wok and Roll, and the grandmother spitting and eating fortune cookies all day.
But according to the spontaneous tweets at #RealAsianGranny, real Chinese life is far more interesting than a white writer could imagine.
Many actors and writers, including Scottish-Chinese actress Katie Leung, who played Cho Chang in the Harry Potter movie series, and writer Chloe Ewart tweeted what they thought an Asian granny would look like, with mostly positive and human images.
The BBC accountability campaign was organized by British East Asians Working in Theatre and Screen, also known as BEATS, a charity that aims to provide more writing opportunities and roles for British East Asians working on stage and screen.
"There is more humanity in the tweets than in the whole script," a spokesperson for BEATS told the South China Morning Post.
The letter said it is unacceptable that British East Asian writers would not entirely author a television series about the day-to-day lives of a British East Asian family.
It is said that the production company Twenty Twenty hired a "cultural consultant" to work on the other eight scripts for the 10-episode series. As the South China Morning Post said, this made matters worse.
"With the Chinese diaspora worldwide numbering in excess of 1.5 billion, the idea that a solitary ‘consultant' could possibly advise on such a vast and diverse group of humanity only reinforces the racialized pigeonholing at the heart of the show's concept," the letter reads.
It also indicated that they do not accept the use of cultural consultants as replacements for British East Asian writers in a show based on the lives of a British Chinese family.
Crazy Rich Asians actress Gemma Chan also added her voice to the protest.
Although some of writers and actors are boycotting or against the show's form and content, BEATS said it did not want "Living With The Lams" canceled and that they wanted a show about East Asians in Britain to be successful, but not at the expense of continuing orientalism and another form of racism.
The controversy over Living With The Lams is particularly embarrassing for The BBC as it seeks production deals in China, the South China Morning Post said.
